Electric Guitar Kit Single Cut : great guitar, fun to build

as a birthday gift for the two kids of my fiancée, i bought two LP style guitar kits. the way i finished and built the guitars would probably require as little as a few days to up to a week for one guitar, but i stretched out that period over about a year.

these kits are a great opportunity to own a personalized guitar for the lowest price possible. it is great fun to play your own build, made to your own preference. you just need some time, some inspiration and a bit of dedication. if you don’t want to customize the guitar you could even leave the guitar unfinished or just clear coat it so you could be done in a few hours. i kept the hardware stock on these guitars and used water based stain to color the guitars and finished them with gunstock oil. the only thing i recommend to upgrade are the tuners (and the strings). but the two guitars definitely turned out to our liking.

we live downtown and do not have much space to work on such projects, such as a balcony or extra room to spray paint the guitars or to keep the parts laying around. but as i made myself a Harley Benton ST style guitar a few years before and used staining and oiling as method for coloring and finishing that guitar, i knew how it could work if i could use the same technique on these two.

after sanding down the bodies and necks (they are prepared to be lacquered so needed to be stripped of that before using a different finish) i colored and oiled the wood. i used our kitchen table as workplace. the sanding is a bit of work and gives a lot of dust, but the result is great. one of the guitars is stained purely black, the second one fades from blue to yellow, which gives quite a great vintage effect. i didn’t sand down the second body and neck thoroughly enough the first time, so i had to redo that partly as the stain did not cover the wood well on all parts. that was a bit discouraging, but in the end it wasn’t that bad and actually this guitar turned out even better than i could imagine, even though it didn’t came out exactly as i planned. the hardest thing was to keep the binding on the body white. and even though i put some protective tape on it, after i removed it, i still had to scratch some stain of that got to the binding anyway.

assembling the guitars was quite easy and foolproof, even though sometimes you wonder if you should connect something to this or to that, it can not really go wrong and is quite interesting if you never knew how a guitar actually works.

remarkable fact is that the sound of the two guitars is quite different. they both have a clear lp style sound, but the one has a clearer and cleaner sound and the second has a warmer sound, a bit raw, like if the guitar has been drinking and smoking and living a rock and roll lifestyle for a few decades. it is an amazing sound, that makes me want to build a third one for myself, hoping that it will have the same voice. not sure if it are the pickups that are slightly different or the uniqueness of the wooden parts in the bodies and necks, but they really have quite a different sound.

the guitars were bought a few months apart and the second guitar came from a new batch, as they were sold out for a while in between. i guess you can not really predict how your guitar is going to sound exactly, but they both sound very well, especially if you consider the price.

pro’s

- good looking, classic lp style guitar

- cheap

- totally customizable in appearance

- interesting to build

- easy to assemble

- good sound

- scratchplate, etc also available in black (sold separately)

- complete

cons

- tuners work but are a bit wobbly

all together: these two guitar kits made me and their young owners filled with pride. finishing the guitar can be made as easy and fast or complicated and time consuming as you want, but should be quite manageable. it is not hard to assemble the guitar, and the results look and sound solid and good. recommended for anyone who dares to paint, lacquer or stain a bit of wood and knows how to handle a screwdriver. and of course for anyone who dreams about a personalized guitar and does not want to spend a fortune on it.