Just to add a little more detail, maybe 25 years ago I bought a Zuckermann Flemish kit instrument (owner had abandoned the project unfinished) to use as a rental instrument. I completed it, and found that the some of the pins didn't want to hold. I would tap them down, and they were still very unpredictable, would simply give way entirely while I was tuning (which isn't fun when you have becketless pins, and now you have to fuss with that as well). I was also perturbed by the difficulty in removing pins to replace a string: they were not overly tight, but getting them all the way out of the hole was a real chore. It didn't make sense, since the pins were supposed to be tapered. But they weren't, as I found out when I checked. They were cylindrical with about 3/4" of tapering at the very bottom, and were very slick surfaced as well.
My response was to drill out the holes and replace all the pins with zither pins, which has worked well for all the ensuing years.
But the bad taste left in my mouth is still there, compounded by some other Zuckermann quirks of the time. This is around the time Wally Zuckermann sold the business to David Way, who later called himself D. Jacques Way. There was a lot of rhetoric coming from the company, all about its wonderful "authenticity." But the authentic stuff seemed to be mostly things that really didn't matter and were just annoying and troublesome, like becketless pins (that were pseudo-tapered), registers without levers to shift them, and jacks without screws. On the other hand, things that actually mattered, like the tongue design, were a quirky modernistic abomination. A standard, historical tongue has a hinge pin of some sort and a spring (boar bristle). The Zuckermann tongue "cleverly" combines pivoting and springing, so that the pivot IS the spring. In its original incarnation, it meant the spring would give before or while the plectrum bent, giving a spongy, inexact feel to the pluck, and requiring more key dip. They later added a couple strips of plastic to the molding of the jack body, limiting that springy action of the tongue, so it is better now, but I have to ask why in the world a company that had "seen the light" of historical authenticity would find the need to do that kind of reinvention.
End of rant. Bottom line, though, I suggest you might consider following my example by converting to zither pins. It might be the simplest solution in the long run.
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Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm@unm.edu "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination." - Einstein
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