I wanted to make some improvements to my Mexican Strat, and I had read that locking tuners help with tuning stability, and would allow for much quicker string changes. I can confirm that both of these are 100% true. The locking tuner works by using a set screw to hold your string in the tuner instead of relying on a few winds of string over the tuner. This lets you pull the strings tight by hand, and tighten the screws down, then tuning the instrument might take a few turns of the tuner. Not having the small coil of string around the tuner means there's less string to be prone to de-tuning.These tuners also have a higher gear ratio: 1:18, which means tuning itself is a little more precise, and a little easier to do. I believe stock Mexican machine heads have a ratio of 14:1. Overall, these are a significant improvement over the stock tuners.