The tremolo arm on our vintage Hofner Colorama II is supposed to be held on with a type of thumb wheel screw, but that’s obviously been lost at some stage and the remaining stud/screw had been hammered down to act like a rivet and hold the tremolo arm on, irreversibly damaging it (the stud) in the process:
The tremolo unit has already been removed from the guitar, but can be disassembled further by removing the big screw holding the arm lever on:
Here's what we're left with:
I've previously drilled into the stud to remove the arm, and the remaining stud has to be unscrewed as it is completely destroyed. That can be forced out with a pair of mole grips (vise-grips), by turning it in an anti-clockwise (counter clockwise) direction:
There's quite a bit of rust on both this part and the tremolo unit itself, so a wire brush is used to remove it:
I'm also rounding the front end of the lever, since it was originally square in shape and was catching on and damaging the tremolo cover.
A look through the parts drawer gives us some components that might be good enough to make a new arm mount. It won’t be completely the same as the original, but it should be close enough:
Here they are put together to check on compatibility and fit:
And here's the whole tremolo unit put back together with its new thumb wheel, allowing us to remove the tremolo arm any time we wish:
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