Tuners for the golden age of the American guitar.

Kluson began as a machine shop in Chicago in 1925. Its founder was John Kluson — John Edward Kluson, in the company’s own telling — and the shop soon found its place making metal parts for stringed instruments: tuning machines above all, then tailpieces, brackets and bushings. Dave Lewis, head of sales and product development at the brand’s present owner, told Musical Merchandise Review in January 2015 that it was “originally a machine shop” that “found a niche with the musical instrument market.”

The timing suited it. As American guitar making grew, Kluson became a regular original-equipment supplier. The Music & Sound Retailer wrote in 2014 that it had been the “go to” supplier for Gibson, Fender, Martin and Rickenbacker; Lewis added Mosrite and Epiphone. Kluson tuners, the Retailer noted, were fitted to instruments before and right through the dawn of rock ’n’ roll and the arrival of the solid-body electric guitar. English Wikipedia’s articles on the Gibson Les Paul and on the first Fender Stratocaster both name Kluson as the tuner maker, and an old catalogue page from the brand’s current owner lists Telecasters, Stratocasters and Jazzmasters among the Fender models that used its six-in-line tuners from the late 1950s to 1964.

The classic Kluson tuner enclosed each gear in a small stamped-steel shell with a dust cover. Lewis described how its marking changed over time: early parts often carried no name at all; the cover first bore a plain vertical line, then a single line reading “Kluson Deluxe” from about 1956, and then a bolder two-line stamp in the mid-1960s. Those small variations matter to restorers, and the brand’s owner says it keeps records of historic usage so that collectors can match the right part to the right guitar.

A dormant name, rebuilt in Florida.

The original company did not outlast the 1970s. The Music & Sound Retailer reported that Kluson “declined in the 1970s” and that from 1981 to 1994 “the brand was actually defunct”; the brand’s own history says only that the company “closed its doors sometime in the early 1980’s.”

The revival came from Florida. Larry Davis of WD Music Products, a guitar-parts supplier, acquired the Kluson mark — in 1993, according to the Kluson website, or in 1994, according to Lewis’s interviews in 2014 and 2015 and English Wikipedia. There was little to start from. “The Kluson workers were gone, the tooling was gone and the history was scattered,” Lewis told the Retailer; the company says it had “very little historic information, other than a few old catalogs” to work from.

WD chose to reproduce the look but not every weakness. The originals had a low 12:1 gear ratio and thin button shafts, the Retailer wrote; WD raised the stamped-steel tuners to 15:1 in 1994, Lewis said, and went on to re-engineer the #9 tailpiece and the Waffleback tuners. For a time the name was also licensed to TonePros for die-cast versions. And Kluson parts went back to the custom shops: in 2014 the Retailer reported that the Gibson Custom Shop offered them on select models and that they could be requested through the Fender Custom Shop.

New designs followed. A Contemporary Series of drop-in upgrades arrived in 2012, then the Supreme, a higher-ratio take on the stamped-steel tuner, and the die-cast Revolution series, both shown at the January 2015 NAMM show in Anaheim; the company says the Revolution won Guitar World’s Best in Show there. Lewis said the slow order was deliberate: rebuilding the old catalogue for collectors and restorers took “the better part of two decades” before new production designs were considered, and Davis’s aim had always been to put Kluson back in competition for original-equipment orders from guitar makers.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands here make the hardware that keeps a guitar in tune: tuning machines, bridges and nuts. Three are tuner names with long histories. Grover’s machine heads come from a Cleveland company that took the name in 1952, when the Grossman family’s firm bought A. D. Grover & Son; English Wikipedia says it designs and imports its tuners. Kluson, founded as John Kluson’s Chicago machine shop in 1925, folded in 1981; WD Music Products of Florida revived the brand in 1994, and English Wikipedia says its tuners are now made in Korea. Schaller, founded by Helmut Schaller in 1945 and based at Postbauer-Heng near Nuremberg, has been owned by Lars Bünning since 2009 and says its hardware is “Made in Germany.”

Two American makers stress their factories. Sperzel says it has made tuning keys since 1977, from parts made in its own Cleveland factory. Hipshot says Dave Borisoff founded it in California in 1982 with a B-string bender worked from the hip; now based in Interlaken, New York, it makes tuners, bridges and detuners.

Floyd Rose is a bridge and a company. Floyd D. Rose began work on his locking tremolo in 1976 and patented it in 1979; English Wikipedia says Schaller made the Original in Germany from 1983 to 2024. The company says it is a division of AP International Music Supply and that its 1000 Series is made in Korea.

Graph Tech began with the nut. Founded in Vancouver in 1983 by Dave Dunwoodie around a self-lubricating nut, it makes TUSQ nuts and saddles and, since 2013, Ratio tuners, and says it ships from its own factory in Vancouver.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A stamp, a button and a pinstripe.

Today Kluson belongs to WD Music Products, Inc. The Kluson website lists the Kluson name, the Kluson logo, the “Kluson pinstripes” and a stylized K among WD’s registered trademarks. In 2015 Lewis told MMR that Kluson shared a roof with WD in North Fort Myers, Florida, in a building of about 20,000 square feet, “with manufacturing in both the USA and Korea.” English Wikipedia says the tuners are now produced in Korea, while the company describes its bridges, tailpieces, bushings and brackets as “made in the USA hardware.” We give those as the sources put them; none of the sources we checked breaks production down product by product.

The design language is small and specific: a stamped-steel housing, an oval metal button that the company calls “a Kluson signature since the 1920s,” the pinstriped housings of the newer die-cast models, and the “Deluxe” stamp. The range now spans the vintage stamped-steel tuners and locking versions of them, the Supreme, the Revolution mounts — listed on the website at 20:1 and, for the mini version, 18:1 — Firebird-style tuners, and bridges and tailpieces for Telecaster, Tune-o-matic and bass guitars.

For a design guide, Kluson shows how a parts maker’s stamp can become both a dating tool and a brand worth reviving. Compare Gibson and Fender, two of its original customers. For this guide we use nickel, cream, brass and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kluson’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.