If you're thinking of replacing the tuners you might want to consider Rickard tuners. They use a unique mechanism. No slack, no need to tune flat and then tweak it up to to pitch. I've used virtually every major brand of tuners over the last forty years of playing, and Rickards are the best I've ever used. They truly set a new standard for tuners.

Toss them and use ebony or rosewood friction violin pegs.

Those pegheads have no place on a banjo. For wire strings use regular gears like Gotoh, for nylon (or polyester, aka nylgut) use violin pegs or Grover Champion.

Backlash in mechanisms is common and necessary, but if it's excessive in a new product, that means there's a quality problem. If I were you, I would contact the supplier and demand a refund or replacement.

Thanks, everyone. The seller suggested switching the directionality, so I’m going to sit with that for a few days. I’ve used the violin pegs in the past and they’re fine, but I prefer geared on a banjo. I had high hopes. And yes, the plan would be to swap Rickards on my main player, then steal those Gotohs for this one. I’ve been tempted to try those out for a while.

I really hate out of tune instruments and probably should have steered clear from the banjo as a result! No one warned me! But this is build #25 and I’m still enjoying the experiments.

Having banjos with Gotoh and Rickard tuners I find that both are fine tuners. You will notice much more turning of the tuners with the Rickard due to the higher ratio and a bit more accuracy. But after playing banjo for many years I guess I have adapted to the quirks of banjo tuners. Friction pegs are good for gut and nylon strings but steel strings need geared tuners imho.

In case anyone is interested, I made a quick demo of the new banjo. Flipping the strings around (so they come off the other side) seems to have worked. So on the next string change, I'll swap the sides so that the strings come back through the middle again. Dumb mistake, but I'll leave it here in case anyone comes across this with similar problems in the future.

youtube.com/watch?v=2WLwPZPdsIQ