well, that worked out well.

initially, i was faced with a wall of $50 grovers. no thanks.

the guy pulled out a $30 pair of precision tuners, but they would have required drilling new holes, and i wasn't going to do that.

the tech eventually walked by, and he went and got a single stock epiphone head for me. $5. hurray...

i am going to want to swap these out eventually, but i don't want to drill holes so it's going to be a research project to find some heads that will allow me to swap them out in the holes that are already there.

also, i just realized that the initial post could be rather badly misinterpreted.

just to update on it: i couldn't get the head to stay still, and it sort of clicked that it was physically broken. so, i unscrewed the knob to see if i could tighten something and it just completely fell apart.

cheap heads break. that one lasted fifteen years. that's actually pretty good.

and it may have had to do with the way it was tuned. i may have bent it by stringing it with a wound g. i've gone back to unwound strings on that guitar.