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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Very lightweight body, some chinese tone wood, lovely finish, body looks 1 piece or extremely well matched
Head stock finish joint is a bit iffy on 1 side
Great neck shape, fairly wide and reasonably chunky d. Nut width 43 mm. Feels a bit rough though, will need some sanding. I can fell the fingerboard joint. The fretboard needs polishing and oiling.
Barely any finish on it which I like.
Frets are a good size and pretty well installed, but sharp fret ends.
Switch selector is the nastiest I’ve ever felt, but all the electronics are going.
The nut is disgusting, the action is high and the sustain not great.
I didn't bother plugging it in as I knew the ceramic pickups would be dreadful.
I bought a set of Tonerider hot classic pickups for about £50.
Took the strings off... errr I don't think that's how ferrules are supposed to work.
A bit of superglue should do the trick though
It's so little that even a veneer shim either side would be too much.
I could shim the sides and then sand them but I'm worried it would be difficult to take off equal amounts on either side and it would end up off center.
Suggestions ?
Just WTF these frets are all over the place, the one on the left of the marker obviously much wider than the previous one, and the last 3 look iffy too...
I had checked various things when I got the guitar but thought surely frets should be in the right place
So options are :
- I fix it... To be honest a refret is a bit more work than I was intending to do on this guitar, and it will look like crap with obvious marks, not to mention the faf of remeasuring all the frets
- I get a new neck and keep this one to practice fret dressing.
I think I will go with number two. Now to find a neck with the right dimensions....
I guess I should also measure the distance of the bridge to neck now !!!!
I'll try getting a partial refund from g4m, I've bought ££££k worth of kit from them ( I'm also into synths, sigh ) so they should be able to make a gesture.
- Sanding a filled fret slot while having other frets next to it, and attempting not to leave marks and to preserve the radius is hard.
- Cutting a straight and accurate brand new fret slots into a fretboard that's already radiused and fretted is hard
The first two frets went ok, though I did inadvertently score / scallop the fretboard a bit while tidying up the slots that were plugged with rosewood veneer and superglue.
Then I did a third fret and rushed it and ended up with a fret that was not only badly positioned but also not straight ( because my slot had a belly in the middle ).
So I took it out, and ripped large chunks of fingerboard next to it. I've resurfaced it with superglue and dust, this time the surface is pretty good ( starting to get the technique down ) though the color match isn't great, you can clearly see what's wood and what's superglue if looking for it.
If I had to do it again, I think it would have been easier and cleaner to just do a full refret so that I could have used a radius block to tidy up the fret board after filling the slots.
Other than that I've also stripped the finish and recut the headstock to something less offensive. Will post pics later
It's by no means perfect but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
First the fretboard and frets : the repairs are not invisible but look ok, the intonation is good and I did a pretty decent job with the fretwork, in fact the action is one of the lowest of my guitars.
I refinished the neck with Tru Oil ( or rather Crimson's oil which is the same thing but thinner as far as I can tell ) and wax.
Compare the headstock with the nasty paddle there was before
Electronics were entirely replaced and I installed ToneRider pickups.
Looking at the neck heel it didn't take long to figure out why - theres about 0.6 mm missing on one side, pretty shocking workmanship from the factory
Since I had already refinished the neck and because it was safer I decided to make a shim rather than attempt to plane it.
Didn't take very long with a number 4 plane and the super glue and masking tape trick to hold a bit of pine.
I know ideally it would have been maple but I honestly don't think anyone would notice, and I had some thin scraps of pine around.
Getting the angle and thickness right was mostly trial and error, checking with some callipers that neck plus shim were the same thickness on both sides.
The main difficulty was making sure it wasn't sloping towards the back or front of the neck pocket.
In the end it turned out ok and fixed the issue nicely.
While no one will mistake it for a high end guitar, it actually plays and sounds as well as any american fender I've had my hands on, and has its place amongst my other past and present guitars, some of which were pretty expensive.
Not bad for something that cost under £200 including upgrades, and was absolute garbage out of the factory.
I did put quite a few hours into it but it was a good learning experience.
...and I preferred the encore's sound and play-ability by some margin.
Part of it is the slightly wider neck which I prefer, and the strings being slightly higher on the body ( though both have similar actions ) on the Encore, which I find more comfortable for hybrid picking.
But the sound thing really took me by surprise. They both have similar sustain but the encore is more balanced and defined,
the Warmoth has slightly muddy lows in comparison and sounds a bit harsher.
The bottom line for me is that electric guitars can be strange things sometimes.