Multiscale Headless 6-String Guitar Kit

The great:

- Friendly and responsive customer support

- Nice quality wood in the body, neck, and fingerboard. The maple veneer is thin but that's to be expected

- Neck/body joint was a perfect fit

- Neck and fingerboard feel solid, and the frets barely needed any work

The not so great:

- The nut required a ton of work in order to use the zero fret. I get that a kit guitar nut will require adjustment, but I feel like I should have needed to remove almost all the nut material to get the guitar set up

- The string retainers at the "headstock" are the major weak point of the kit, from my experience. They are flawed in several ways. Cosmetically, they had many paint chips upon arrival. I found it challenging to thread the strings through them. Worst of all, they are each secured with a single screw to a part of the fretboard where the wood is very thin, with a cavity for the truss rod bolt underneath, making it tough/impossible to re-fill the hole properly. So, one of them already stripped the wood and came loose while I was setting the completed guitar up. I made a rough fix with some glue and wood scraps, but I fear that more of them will come loose over time, and I can't think of an elegant fix if they do.

I didn't use the pickups or electronics that came with the kit, so no input there.

Overall pretty happy, the guitar plays great, but those string retainers need to be redesigned in order for this to be an amazing kit.

This was my first electric guitar and first kit build, so I was not sure exactly what to expect. I was hoping for a project and a challenge to help me understand electric guitars better, and it has worked out great for that. I experienced some of the challenges that other commenters have mentioned, and would echo the sentiment that if you are willing to put work into it, you'll get an amazing guitar at the end.

* The starting finish is good. I needed to sand a lot to get the smoothness I wanted, but did not have to sand out defects.

* The parts fit well, and in particular the neck joint was nice and snug.

* There were frets that were slightly high, but probably would have been fine, but I wanted perfection. A bit of tapping with a mallet fixed most, and I filed a couple more just a touch.

* Once I chose to sand the nut down to use the zero fret, the neck angle needed an adjustment to get decent action in the middle of the strings. A little shim and some experimentation got me there.

* If you haven't used the exact finish technique you are planning to use, practice on similar wood first. Unlike a 2.5" (63 mm) thick slab coffee table I refinished a few years ago, the maple veneer wasn't going to give me the opportunity to sand off the finish and try again.

* And as others have said, Connors was very helpful when I had questions, and that made a huge difference.

Now that it is finished I have a great-playing instrument that I understand inside and out.

This was my first build and it was not an easy venture. The finishing part alone took the majority of the time and I highly recommend getting that sorted out before you proceed.

A few of the problems I ran into along the way:

1. As mentioned below, the nut needs to be sanded to use the zero fret. Be careful because I had to backtrack and rebuild the nut with CA glue and cotton after sanding slightly too much off the high side and cut a new slot.

2. The output jack supplied seems is not covered in the instructions properly. Get a multimeter.

3. The neck was in great shape, but I had to spot level a few frets and hammer a few back in. Be prepared to do this kind of work if you want to turn your cheap kit into an amazing guitar.

4. Do not attempt to remove the string locks at the “head” of the guitar. I had two screw snap on me and was in for a world of tedious word to get everything back together.

5. The bridge hardware is complicated and the guitar requires many different allen keys to made adjustments. The guide does not explain in high enough detail how these function.

After it was said and done, this guitar turned out absolutely amazing and plays action so low it almost defies the laws of physics. Easily holds it own with my strandberg and kiesel.

The customer support and guidance from Conners was absolutely amazing, better than any company I’ve ever dealt with. If you get stuck absolutely reach out and he will help! He is an invaluable resource.

This kit is really nice and a great headless multi-scale option. During the building process I had a few problems. Some design flaws and others are problems I would expect for a low-priced guitar. Saying that, I have been playing for over 30 years and have some background working in a guitar store and pretty good guitar tech skills. The out of the box build is good, but if you can put some extra time into it the guitar becomes quite awesome.

What I had to overcome:

1. Neck had a back bow (Connors actually had some suggestions to fix this that worked great.

2. Fret work is what I would have expected for the price, but I spent a good 4 hours leveling and polishing them.

3. Barrel Jack is just a poor design. I drilled out a larger jack hole and used an electrostatic plate with a standard jack.

4. The nut needed to be filed down. Being this guitar is equipped with a zero fret, that zero fret really becomes the nut and the actual nut is nothing more than a string guid. The stock nut was cut really high and made the zero fret pretty much useless in this scenario. Once I filed the nut accordingly I was able to achieve some of the lowest action I own.

So, why give it five stars with these issues? I never expected perfection at the price it was sold for and the work I did is pretty easy work that anyone could do with some time on youtube and a few custom luthier tools.

Finally, I own 2 strandbergs and this thing is about 95% of my bergs at literally 20% the cost