BexGearsElectric Guitar Kits Okoume wood Body maple neck & composite ebony fingerboard

I bought the BexGears TL style kit to make a starter guitar for my granddaughters. The price was intriguing, and the quality was secondary. When I opened the box to inspect the components, everything was there. The appropriate screws were in plastic bags attached to their respective accessory. Everything fit properly. The instructions were included and easy to follow. I mocked it up to be sure it all worked before disassembling it to apply clear coat. A simple caution is to be sure that the neck is fastened as snugly as possible. At first I could not adjust the string height properly because the neck was not screwed down as tight as possible. That was my only issue.I lightly sanded the back and sides and put many coats of clear enamel on it to get a good smooth finish.The set up was fairly easy. I added D’Addario 10-46 strings, and after the usual stretching to get them to stay in tune, I think I found a pretty nice little guitar for the grandkids. The pickups are just fine for our purposes. The neck seems particularly good. The tone and volume controls work well. No intonation issues.I never expected to say this, but I would do this again. It is a cheap and simple way to get a fun guitar.

This is a surprisingly nice kit for the price. I ordered the variation with the white pickguard even though I thought the black pickguard looked better because the illustration for the black pickguard kit showed a standard three saddle tele bridge. The white pickguard showed a 6 saddle bridge. So I waited to see which would be in the box when it came but it was exactly as illustrated. I had already planned to spend a few more bucks on an upgrade bridge but now I don't have to. I haven't assembled the kit yet but it looks like everything lines up very nicely. The neck fits snug but not too snug in the pocket. Even the holes for the pick guards seem to be lined up correctly on a casual observation. I've had more than one kit experience where that wasn't the case. The synthetic ebony fingerboard is glossy and hard. I think I'm going to find it to be an enjoyable surface to play on. The only reason I went four stars instead of five is because the body was surprisingly heavy to me. Okoume it's supposed to be a fairly light wood, so the fact that it feels heavy and dense gives me at least a little bit of concern that it might not be fully dry. Of course if there's any shrinking or cracking I won't know that for at least a year so I didn't want to hold up the review for that.Edit: as you can see from the picture I added this is now finished. I am even more impressed now than I was initially and increased my review from 4 to 5 stars. The okoume wood is quite beautiful, and this kit had none of the nightmare stories I hear about from other kits. All of the holes were properly aligned. All of the screws survived their initial tightening just fine. The hardware, while obviously generic as you would expect on such an inexpensive kit, is actually not bad. The guitar sounds good. Better than I expected to be perfectly honest. After I live with it for a while I may decide to upgrade things but honestly I can live with this just as it is. I expected to pick ups to be thin and ratty but they're not. My only complaint in the whole thing is that the bridge does not have enough range of adjustment for the intonation. It would be nice if they added a second shorter set of saddle screws but I was able to just get it intonated. If I hadn't been able to I could have just got out the table vice and the hacksaw and cut a centimeter off the screw. I also needed to dress the ends of the frets, but I've never bought a sub $200 guitar that was already assembled that didn't need the answer of the frets dressed, so again that to me is perfectly par for the price point. Very very happy with the purchase and very pleased with the way it turned out.

I'll go into all the details so you know what you are getting into:Everything came god, all the pieces in different little bags with their correspondent screws, making it super easy to organize. The instructions are vague, but the YT content for DIY kits is infinite so nothing bad about that.The body was good, needs sanding and don't skip on this. The edges on the top arround the area where the body makes contact with the neck where rough, like they where cut with a saw, but took 1 minute with some 120 to get it smooth and then rounded it with finer sandpaper. Also on the top section I had to sand the borders a bit to get them smooth rounded like the rest of the body. I went with a reliq type finish with some stain and polyurethane finish.The neck was incredibly good, smooth and shiny from the get go and no fret edges, if you really want a high end instrument you'll need to do a fret leveling, but out of the box is usable.The included strings, and tuners are absolute trash would not even recommend installing them and just buy some strings and cheap locking tuners (I got a set for $20 on Aliexpress), I was expecting this of course so it wasn't a problem for me.I never tried the included pickups and knobs cause I installed other ones, that means I was prepared to do some soldering, but if you are not, I advice you to, my factory electronics where messed up, the volume and tone pots where reversed. I know some people like Audio/Taper pots on tone, but linear pots on volume will mess up your control of it. I'll asume this was a mess up in QC, but so much for "solderless" if that's the case.It's not adviced, but the string tree's holes are not donne, you'll have to make them yourself. Didn't see this in the description.I had fun making it, even took the liberty to use some shotgun shell as the knobs.The reason I'm taking one star out of it...the nut is total garbage, I know in all the factory guitars can use a better nut and everything, but in this case the holes are done so poorly that the high strings sound muffled. Seems from the reviews that I was unlucky on this but well, some work to do, some fun to have.