After waiting for 2 weeks for the delivery I finally got this guitar today and I've been playing it for a few hours + did detailed setup (which took another few hours).
There are a lot of quality control issues with this guitar but let's start with the good parts:
- The hardware is great. Obviously it has Evertune, but other than that, tuning pegs (Grover), pots and 3-way switch are all quality.
- Frets are almost perfectly level, so with a little bit of neck adjustment you can have a very low action. This guitar currently has the lowest action I've ever had with my other guitars (Ltd EC-401, Jackson Pro Soloist, Ibanez RGT6EXFX).
- Fret ends are great, no sharp ends (though full of tool marks, see below).
- The nut is cut nicely, the height is perfect.
- The finish is absolutely beautiful. The pictures in the product page do not do it justice. If you're interested in this guitar I suggest you check out some of the video reviews and owner-shot pictures in other used gear sites.
- Pickups are alright.
Now, the bad parts. I don't know if these are expected from an Indonesia-made guitar, but I have another one that I bought more than a year ago (a Jackson Pro Soloist) that is also from Indonesia, and it doesn't have any of these issues. I have photos of all of these but unfortunately Thomann doesn't allow adding photos to reviews.
- The binding is not exactly white. A little bit yellow-ish. It would look much better in white, and I was expecting white from the pictures in the product page. I found the color ugly.
- The binding is even more yellow than the rest around the fingerboard, and has lots of tooling marks. On the bottom side of the fret board it also has glue/paint residue.
- Binding around the headstock has a small dent.
- Under the truss rod cover there's a huge peeled part around the screw hole.
- There are a few white dots under the veneer below the neck pickup frame. I guess it's dust and they put the veneer on top of dust (just a guess).
- There are lots of tooling marks on the fretboard and bindings. On one of the frets there's a mark across the entire fretboard. It doesn't look like glue residue, I think it's a tooling mark. I tried to remove it but no luck.
- There are 4-5 frets with glue residues.
- The frets were a little bit dirty and not shiny enough for comfortable playing. Nothing 0000 steel wool couldn't solve, but something I didn't expect from a 1000EUR guitar.
I don't know how much Evertune bridge itself costs, but I wasn't expecting so much QA issues on a 1000 EUR guitar, so that's a bit disappointing to me. Still, the guitar plays great, and looks great from a distance. Make sure to not look too close under a bright light :-)
