I sure am good at accidentally bending guitar parts.

Guess I need to bring my more beat up basses to band practice. I brought a Rail bass to since we have extremely limited space, set it on a chair, and it somehow managed to slip off and fall to the floor (slightly cushioned by the gig bag). At first I thought it was fine, til I strummed it and noticed the low E was so sharp it was nearly as high as the D string. Turns out it landed on the E string tuner and bent it over til the A tuner stopped it. I carefully bent it back (dropping the string down to between F# and G), tuned it back to E, and tested it out. Not only is everything still functional (no bent rails, phew), but the other three strings all stayed in perfect pitch! Uncle Mat sure did build em tough.

Anyway, what makes this a technical post is I was wondering if anyone might have a low risk idea of how to bend this tuner straight again. I don't want to replace it, since it's original and functional, but I don't know how to go about trying to straighten it either. If no one has any ideas, then well... I guess a functional but bent tuner gives it some personal mojo, eh?

Apply heat judiciously when it's off the guitar and gently bend it back into position. If you try to bend without heat, you will weaken the steel.. if it is steel?? Show us the offending bit, Warren...

And don't let's lean our gear on anything, eh?!

I'd be happy to show you if my camera was working! And it wasn't leaning, it was laying on the chair and had been for a few minutes. I had thought it was safe.

IIRC the tuners for the rail is the same as for my X910.

In that case it´s rather easy,and my take is that you should NOT use heat as the tuning pegs by my knowledge are made from mild steel.

What you however do need to is to take the entire bridge apart,which by all means is rather easy.
Just let go of stringpressure and then use a philips to bolt it apart.
As you do you´ll notice how each tuner is bolted into sort of a sleigh that runs on a ramp.
The tuning pegs are merely screwed in there so gettting them out SHOULD just be a matter of backing the offending peg out of there.

Point here being that the "working" part of the tuner is just a piece of like 5mm mild steel with metric windings to it.
In short my take is that you can straighten it in a regular vice of some sorts and then bolt the whole thing back together.

I recall when servicing the bridge and tuning mechanism on my 910 i applied a drop of full hardening loctite to each peg vs sleigh and that sure seems to hav doen the trick cause the entire bridge/tuning mechinism is rock solid these days.

Thanks Racing, they are the same to my knowledge and that sounds much easier than using heat!

Sorry to hear that Warrn.
It's very easy to wag a finger and say, "You shouldn't have done that!", but the truth is we human beings are lazy, myself included. The left brain tells you to be responsible and do the right thing, but the right side always wants to take the easy way out and says, "Oh c'mon, it's gonna be OK like that! It's just for a minute."

I do silly stuff like that every time I rotate my guitars in the music room. I have to remind myself to put the damn guitar in a stand and not lay it on the top of a stool or lean it against the wall as I open/close a case.

Nah Barry....i think we should strive more for the attitude along the lines of blowing poop up.
Kind a like Oppenheimer style.