SAGA kits on ebay

  • Thread starter Thread starter MatchBookNotes
  • Start date Start date
I've never seen one of their kits, but I've seen some of the electric bodies they sell, and they are only so-so. Not the worst I've seen, not by a long shot, but not very good either.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
i built the tele kit. its fun to do and it a good experience, but i wouldn't recommend it if you want a playable guitar. the neck and fret job is pretty terrible and the body is just *meh* but that really is the tonal quality of basswood i guess. also the hardware on mine was junky, i replaced it with some guitarfetish parts.
 
I put together one of the tele body style electric mandolin kits.

In the end I ended up with a pretty nice instrument but getting there
was a bit of a pain. I had to level all the frets and recrown and touch
up the fret ends.

The wood was so poor looking I had to paint the body a solid color.

The mando plays great and has a decent sound especially with the
Micky Mouse style electronics that come with it. These kits use the
solderless clip connections and cheapest pots you'll ever find.

Despite all this the mandolin is probably the lowest action easiest to
play mandolin I own.

I wouldn't worry about the body being made from bass wood that is
probably the lest of your worries. I don't there is any thing wrong with
bass wood I think is is pretty close in sound to poplar and is fairly light.
I have a home made strat with poplar body and a walnut top it has
more sustain than any of my alder or ash strats. I guess a lot could have
to do with the walnut top and custom shop hard tail on it.
 
I've built 2 of the Tele kits and they play pretty nicely-tho I have replaced the pickups, switches and pots in them. The frets did have a few issues, some were not seated and had to be worked on and although the bass wood has a nice tone, it will ding very easily. Don't carry it in a cheap gig bag unless you are going for a beat-up relic look.:rolleyes:
 
I can't speak about that brand of guitar kit, but I can tell you about the strat knock-off that I built from a kit.

http://s72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/cnix50/?action=view&current=CarvinKit2015.jpg

One of the electric players in our Praise Band got a new Fender Strat signature model, perfect for certain songs. I just loved the sound but did not want to pay what he paid, so I ordered this kit from Carvin at just over $300. As good as it looks, it sounds and plays wonderful. The quality of construction is amazing, everything fit perfect without any flaws. If I were you, I would go with a little extra cash and consider this.

Good luck.

Charlie
 
A bunch of people have success with them. Check out Guitar Attack for some samples. Grizzly also offers reasonably priced kits with more traditional tonewoods. If you expect a kit guitar to be a great player with minimal work I think your fooling yourself. However, with a dedication to learning what makes a guitar good and a fair ammount of patience you can have a great personally customized instrument. I'm going to try and build one for my e-zine http://www.frugalguitarist.com, however the year is pretty much already planned.
 
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