ZEFF DIY Electric Guitar Kit with Basswood Body,6 Strings Electric Guitar Kits W/Maple Neck, Rosewood Fretboard, H-H Pickups, All Accessories Included, Adjustable Bridge System

I've always wanted to build my own guitar. I wanted to see just how good I could make a cheap kit guitar sound with the components that come in the kit, and not changing too much unless absolutely necessary. The bass wood body does not take stain very well and will look atrocious. I used a very very light pecan stain and finished with several layers of cleay lacquer, buffing with 0000 steel wool in between coats, and got a soft shine finish. I finished the neck with Birchwood Casey gun stock finish. The tuners were better than I expected and were very smooth. The neck was straight but i did have to get a set of neck shims to get the neck angle correct. Two frets near the base of the neck were a little high and a few light taps with a small hammer and a wooden dowel rod fixed that. The pickups sound good for a kit guitar, but i played it next to my Fender Telecaster, it sounded very trebely and tinny in comparison. But it did indeed have that Telecaster "twang". Adjusting the tone knob mellows it out a bit. I also changed the bridge saddles to compensated brass saddles which were slightly wider, and had to be filed down on both ends of the middle saddle, and the inner end of the outer saddles to keep the geomety correct and keep the strings in line with the string holes of the bridge. The brass saddles helped mellow the sound a tiny bit and got rid of the buzzing in the bridge. The control switch pots are smooth but are smaller than standard 250 Fender pots. The nut height was too high and the string spacing too close by about .010 inches. I carefully removed the nut a replaced it with a genuine Fender Telecaster nut. Now it almost feels like my Fender Tele when I play it. I also changed the 1-ply pickguard for a 3-ply tortoise pick guard. The shape was good but most of the screw holes did not match. I just put the screws in and didn't worry since the original holes are covered by the pick guard. I did not use the strings that came with it, but used Fender pure nickel 150 instead.It did not come with any instructions at all and I had to find instructions online for a similar Tele-clone kit that had the same type of selector switch to get all the soldered wire connections correct.Here's my final thoughts on this kit Telecaster:Does it sound as good as a Fender Telecaster? Not a chanceDoes it sound good? Yes it doesDoes it play as smooth as a Fender Telecaster? Almost, its very close, after changing the nut and adjusting the neck angle.Is it fun and enjoyable to play?Absolutely. It's one of my favorite guitars.Would I do it again?Absolutely. It was very fun to build and it was well worth the money despite the things I had to do or change to improve the playability. It can be a really nice sounding and playing guitar if you have the setup knowledge and are willing to put in the effort to get it right. You need to be comfortable setting the neck relief, string action height, bridge setup (matching angle of saddles to the fret board radius), and setting the intonation. The tools to do this with are available here on Amazon and are cheap to buy.My online name is Freddy_Bueger, so I affectionately named this guitar the "Freddycaster". It is Freddy approved.

Kit arrived well packed and in good shape. The machining of the body was actually pretty good and required very little clean up, same with the neck. For the finish I ended up with, it took 2 passes of polyurethane with some fine grit sandpaper to seal the body. Then the rest was rattle can spray paint for the color and clear coat; doing passes with 1200 grit in between. Only difficult part was reshaping the headstock to match the traditional strat look, but otherwise everything else was pretty much ready to go out of the box.One nice detail is all the pre-drilled holed for pretty much ever screw across the body, but unfortunately, the pick guard holes didn't line up too well, so I had to plug maybe half of them and redrill the pilot hole for it to fit correctly. The pick guard plate comes pre-wired with all the hardware, but the hardware looked pretty poor. I ended up replacing it with better quality stuff, which thankfully still fit in the rather tight body cavity. I ended up replacing the pots, wiring, switch, pickups and the tuning pegs, because the ones that came with this kit wouldn't thread properly.Kit sadly comes with no assembly instructions whatsoever, but thankfully there's a ton of videos on pretty much any detail about strats online, which helped tremendously to this first-time guitar builder. If you are a novice, like me, guitar will definitely need a tuning pass from a luthier to get the tremolo set properly and the action tuned, but out of the box, it's actually not too bad for the price. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and will definitely be making more in the future.

I had a good time putting this guitar together. The wood was great. No flaws. It took a oil finish that brought out the natural wood grain colors. I had to adjust the height of the strings. But other than that it was fun. Great sound.I bought this on a whim? It was worth it. At 80 a guy needs new things to do.