Floyd restringing

[ElectroDan]

I used a Floyd Rose equipped Charvel for years and learned a lot of the techniques mentioned above by trial and (lots of) error.
Now i use a Blade RH2 with a standard Strat style trem and locking tuners and it never goes far out of tune. It also avoids the Allen key search, and if a string change is needed, it can be done easily between songs.
If like me you only use your bar to add vibrato to chords, and the occasional dive bomb. You'll probably find it's much less fuss to use a normal bridge. We got Polytune now anyway!

[Viz]

I've seen pictures of guitars for sale a few times (with floyds), where they have been strung with the ball end at the machine head. Anyone know if there are pros and cons of doing this as it just looks odd to me. Maybe they didn't have anything to cut the ball off at hand.

Steve Vai does that. So therefore, so do I. :-)

[guitarfishbay]

I've seen pictures of guitars for sale a few times (with floyds), where they have been strung with the ball end at the machine head. Anyone know if there are pros and cons of doing this as it just looks odd to me. Maybe they didn't have anything to cut the ball off at hand.

Steve Vai does that. So therefore, so do I. :-)

I do it too.

The reason I do it is if I break a string at the bridge I have excess string wound around the tuner, which can be unwound and re used in to the locking part at the bridge.

The way I do it is so that the string winds all the way around the tuning peg, but doesn't over-lap at any point, then I trim the ends of any that stick out too far. On my Ibanez 6 a side headstock I leave the ball ends on E and B, and G D A E get the excess cut off, but there is still enough string around the tuner to unwind and re-use in case of breakage. I found leaving dangly bits sometimes caused extra noise with movement which got picked up under high gain in a recording environment, plus also I don't like the way it looks

Bear in mind if you are snapping strings due to a burr at the bridge that will need filing