Factory Visit

Hey all,

Next week I'm heading to China and I will be visiting the Factory where our kits (and Guitars) are manufactured.

I'm hoping to have a meeting with the Factory manager and raise a few issues that regularly pop up with our kits.

I'm going to ask them about:

• Misaligned tuner and string through body holes.
• The thickness of the veneers; ie, can we pay more for a thicker veneer?
• Glue spots
• Wonky headstock shaping on some of the 3 a side headstocks.
• Turnaround on custom orders, which seems to vary between 4 and 12 weeks. Hoping to come up with some guidelines so we can give a more accurate ETD for custom orders.

If you have any recurring issues to add, please post in this thread.

The neck twist issue has been resolved. That is, they are aware of it and are going to replace the necks of the 23 kits we have collected here with twisted necks.

If it's just "Can they make XYZ?", please email this to me and I can email my contact.

Hi Adam,

The jack hole in the SGD-612 probably needs to be moved from the factory settings.

Attachment 13453

As you can see from the position, the jack, when inserted, shorts out on the back of the pot.

I plugged my hole, and drilled another one on the top of the body. Its heaps better there.

Attachment 13456Attachment 13457

(thank god you guys know i'm talking about guitars......:o)

Hey Ads, sounds good, hope there are no language barriers between yourself and the factory manager.
The tele kits the bridge pup cavity should be moved about 5mm toward the neck. Also the tele neck pup cavities are too big. We had a discussion a while ago and most forumites wanted a single neck pup route. Currently the neck pup route is too big for a standard humbucker surround.
Good luck with the visit !

That's cool, so when does Adam get back from visiting the factory in China?, I need to email him about that 51 Tele kit that I want to order soon.


@ Adam Wishing you a happy and safe flight to China and hope all those issues with the kits can be all sorted out, cheers mate.

Pot holes on the FB-1M are too close to the raised section to get knobs on I believe.

Neck PUP Rout on J Bass is too large in case anybody wanted to go sans pick guard.

I'm still here DrNomis, leave early Friday morning, hopefully. I only thought on Saturday, "hmmm, I wonder if I need a Visa?". Of course I do. The good people at the Perth Chinese Visa Office kindly sympathised with me being a complete fricken idiot and have arranged the Visa for pick up Thursday (day before I leave).

Keep the comments coming, it's good stuff I didn't know about.

Wokka, I thought we had decided on a clean, single coil size rout in the TL bridge. Not that they got that right, as they've gone the humbucker size again. I think the single coil size would be best then you can rout (file?) out if you want something bigger in there.

Hey Ads, yes if the builder wants a humbucker neck pup the single cavity can easily be routed to a humbucker size. Sounds good.
Glad you got your Visa sorted in time !

If I had to be really picky......the kick ramp (ie where the headstock meets the fret board) on the ST and TL kits is on a bit of an angle to the nut slot, here is a photo of my ST kit and the community ST



Attachment 13503Attachment 13504

Have number one golden good time Mr Adam.
Oh I suppose you know about "happy money?" the money you need to leave the foreman or manager to ensure every one is happy? A friend in the clothing industry is always complaining about happy money. His trick was he sent a woman to the factory saying she was a quality control inspector for his company, they paid HER happy money to say all was good ;D