DIY Electric Guitar Kits, okoume Body maple neck & composite ebony fingerboard

First, shipment: very fast, packed well with details of instructions. The box came in with everything and the detailed instructions for assembly in a booklet. I have built acoustic and classical guitars from begin to finished so putting this DIY guitar was almost a snap, however, I have no experience in working with pickups, electronics so the user guide for assembly was very helpful. . Second, the quality of the body and neck (with all the detailed, fret works is excellent. There is no sharp fret ends as I usually found on low-end imported guitars. Neck is straight . The body was smoothly sanded. All I needed to do was to really fine and lightly sand to prepare for a light French polish. As for the first instrument I do not plan to spend lots of work on detailed polishing. Don't want any colors on it yet. All the predrilled holes were done precisely. I showed my finished guitar to a few friends and they have their immediate interest with their order. Overall, I would give a 5 considering price, quality, workmanship with everything to make a guitar ready to play. I think a bargain and fun work.

I ordered this to build with my 12 year old son so he could learn how a guitar works. It was not too difficult to build. It turned out awesome. We are very happy with the end result. I was concerned how to finish the wood. 1 can of clear spray laquer was all it took. I put 3 coats while lightly sanding with a scotch bright pad between coats.

The quality of the kit, from a purely mechanical standpoint, is quite good; the neck is straight, the body is nice and heavy, and the hardware is above average. The neck-to-body fit was nearly perfect, however, the neck screw holes were slightly off, such that I had to fill them with dowels and redrill them. The screw holes for the pickguard were also off by just a smidge, but those were easy to modify to fit. Overall, I wound up with a guitar that I would feel very comfortable spending $400-$500 on. I am a fair to moderate DIYer, but I would recommend this kit to everyone regardless of your mechanical skill level. I did do some intonation adjustments and also replaced the nut with a bone nut, but that was my choice. There are some great video's on Youtube if you're not familiar with doing intonation adjustments. I would have given it five stars were it not for the neck screw holes being misaligned. A great kit, definitely worth the money.

This guitar was such a fun build. I hit the body with 120 grit before staining with Rubio Monocoat and it came out beautifully. You don’t need to solder any electronics but I ended up using a little on the ground connection. It took around 5 days total but it is well worth it. The strings that come with are obviously going to be cheap and they were as I was expecting. I would buy light Elixirs as that is what I have on mine now and they work perfectly with no buzzing. I was also worried about the pickups but they weren’t half bad, I may change them later on down the line but for having no soldering needed this kit really is a steal. I only have good things to say!

This is a $58 guitar kit. I wasn't expecting much. It arrived yesterday and my 13-year-old son and I assembled it in about 30 minutes. We only needed a small screwdriver, a large (power) screwdriver, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers. That plus an amp and we were able to test out the kit immediately. The only issue was the instructions weren't 100% clear about some order-of-operations involving the rigging of the ground wire and the resonator. If you are going to assemble yourself, read the instructions involving the resonator and ground wire all the way through at least once before you do anything and you'll save yourself from having to withdraw screws and re-do it. It only wasted maybe 5 minutes of head-scratching. The electronics are surely not world-class. I'm a beginner and this is my first electric, but I have some years of acoustic experience. If you want better pick-ups, connectors, wires, shielding, knobs, etc. I'm sure you can replace them individually at any point. But there no hissing, buzzing, crackles, etc. other than those expected from single-coil pickups (all strats hum; that's just the deal). The strings are surely not top-quality. Spend $10-$20 and get yourself some nicer strings if you think you need them. I assembled and played on day-1 because I wanted to know if (a) I had everything I needed and (b) the thing actually worked. The next step is to disassemble it, add finish the body, then re-assemble. But so far, I'm impressed by a $58 kit. The body is solid and not particularly heavy. All routed cavities look well-cut and nothing feels flimsy. The neck is straight as an arrow. The frets are smooth and required no sanding or filing. The action is adjustable to your liking in several ways. If you like really low action, you will want to sand-down the nut, but if you know you want lower action, you already knew that. The parts fit together snugly. The pickup-selector switch is firm and stays in place. The volume and tone knobs feel like they have thick grease in them, but they stay in place as expected. The pick guard is strong enough to hold the electronics, but not any stronger than that. It's also very soft. I put a big scratch in it with my fingernail while removing the plastic that protects it during shipping. The pickups are sitting at odd angles and aren't perfectly flat. I suspect with a little adjustment under the pick-guard, I can get them "perfectly flat" but I'm not sure it really matters that much to me. If you are a beginner, please remember a few things: 1. Installing strings is easy but requires some attention to detail. Watch an online video for how to do it to make sure you do it right the first (or second, or third) time without bending your strings out of shape nd getting frustrated. You do not need any special tools: just insert the string and do a bunch of twisting. 2. New strings always go out of tune pretty much immediately. This is not the guitar's fault, it's just physics. Install the strings. Tune-up the guitar. Play it for 3 minutes. It will be out of tune. Tune it up again. You will repeat this process probably 5-10 times before the strings relax into their long-term state where you won't have to re-tune every few minutes. You can do yourself a favor by tuning it, then grabbing each string and pulling it sideways (towards and away from the other strings) gently back and forth a little. This will de-tune it, but it will accelerate the process of stretching the string so you only have to re-tune maybe 5 times instead of 10. I focus on the strings, here, because I thought my first guitar was junk because it "kept going out of tune". I thought there was something wrong with the machine heads or whatever but it was just the strings stretching out a bit when they were new. If I'm ever in the market for another guitar style (e.g. Les Paul) , I'd definitely consider another kit from the same vendor. I don't have particularly expensive tastes... yet.

For what I paid for this kit, it is quite impressive. Tuners are pretty good, holes lined up, everything stayed soldered together and worked when assembled. I had two problems of note. The pickguard was wired so that it wouldn't quite fit into the the routing. That caused a slight bump in the pickguard and the pickups were binding and bending making it hard to adjust them and crooked pickups just look bad. I also had a lot of sitar sounding string buzz on the high E and B strings. I might have gotten a bad neck because the nut was too low at the high E. This is not a badly cut nut, the fretboard itself is thinner on the high E side. So, I needed to shim the nut to get it to set up correctly. Problem is, when removing the nut, a small peice of the fretboard behind the nut broke off. So super glue to fix that and shim the nut. Crude but effective fix. I will probably slap a better pickguard with higher end components just cause I have a few, the included one is adequate, if you are okay with the fitment issue. So 3 stars because of these issues. I really should have returned this, but hard to do when the guitar is already painted. I strongly suggest a full dry fit assembly, including strings so you can assess playability. That way you can return it if you find something amiss. I am going to try a few other Bexgear kits. I had fun and learned a lot, never had to fix a fretboard at the headstock. The guitar actually plays nice, and sounds good. The neck does feel good, even if the materials are sub par and QC seems to be lacking. For well under 100 beans this thing is a great project which will end up providing you with a perfectly serviceable guitar. Buy one, have fun. You may get lucky and have no issues, or you may get some free practice on working on your instrument.

Was a lot of fun putting together and looks great. Plays good too! This kit is not perfect, and it's not for beginners. It's a project. You should probably know how to set up a guitar, because it will absolutely need it after being assembled; it will be unplayable until it's properly set up. There are also definitely things I would change. I really wish the pick guard had the plastic protective cover removed before the electronics were installed on it; it was a huge pain to get that off cleanly without taking it apart which kind of defeats the purpose of having it prebuilt like that. I also needed to track down a couple missing pieces of hardware, and I also had to drill a couple holes in the headstock for the string retainers, all of which I ought not have needed to do. That all being said, I loved the process and result so much that I legit ordered a second one with humbuckers and a fancy engraved pattern, gifted a third to a friend (who also loved putting it together) and even bought their smaller kids version of the kit to put one together with them. Absolutely worth the money.

I've been wanting to do a guitar kit for quite some time. I have years of woodworking, model-kit building, including wooden ship models, as well as metal working experience. I have lots of skills that should have made this kit a breeze. And for the most part, it wasn't too difficult, but here were the stumbling blocks: ISSUE 1) I planned on painting mine (I haven't yet because Winter snuck up on me, so I decided to built it and play it until Spring when it warms up outside so I can spray it), BUT, I do love the look of finished wood, and had I wished to go that route, I would have been discouraged because there is a spot on the front of the body that has been filled with filler. If I were to stain this body, that spot would stand out like a sore thumb. See picture. ISSUE 2) One of the neck holes was drilled out of position, and of course, the hole goes all the way into the neck. I fixed this by gluing dowel (don't ask me the size, I just had some scrap from building ship models) into the holes, and when dry, I re-drilled and the problem was solved. See picture. ISSUE 3) I don't have pictures, but when putting on the fingerguard/pickup assembly onto the body, I just couldn't get the wires out of the way enough so that the pickguard would sit down flat onto the body. I had to take a Dremel with a sanding head to open the routing path a bit in the body to make clearance for the wires to travel and the pickguard to sit flat. ISSUE 4) One of the bushings for the tuning machine-heads seemed cross-threaded right off the bat. I could find anything visually wrong, and I tried several times to make sure I wasn't cross-threading it, but it just didn't want to go down onto the threaded shaft more than a rotation or so. I finally decided to put a little oil in the bushing and force it down the threaded shaft. I would go to where I felt it was binding too much, took it back off again, cleaned the threads with a Q-Tip, and went at it again. Finally I was able to get it all the way down and to seat where it should. I'd eventually planned on replacing these anyway, so if I ruined it then it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but I didn't plan on replacing them until I tore the guitar back down to paint in the Spring. ISSUE 5) The fret ends needed to be filed or sanded down as they're a bit rough. I expected this, so it wasn't a surprise. PRO'S 1) Affordable PRO'S 2) The instruction manual is very good (See pictures). Color pictures, the English was good, it didn't come across as a Chinese written manual. I actually worked in an industry translating Chinese-English into English, and this one is well written. PRO'S 2) After setting the guitar up, tuning it and testing it, I can tell you that it has an awesome sound. For $100, you have a great sounding guitar. I recommend searching social media video channels to find tips on setting up a guitar, and you'll have a great sounding, very versatile Strat(ish) guitar. Conclusion I would definitly be interested in buying one of the other kits from BexGears. The problems I had, I feel, were not so bad as to deter me from buying another. It was fun, with a few stumbling blocks, but I have a great guitar that will sound great in my recordings.