I tried the neednose pliers and it worked. It was almost like the headlock was glued or jammed because once it broke free it seems to work fine now.

I also want to commend the techs at Sullivan. I talked to them the other day and they were some of the nicest people I've ever talked to. They offered to send me out a free headlock. They also offered to have me send it back to them so their engineers could check it out and see if there was some kind of issue between it and the Saito plug. It turns out I don't need to, but it was nice of them to offer. Makes me feel much better about the product now.