Before adjusting anything, the guitar played well out of the box, but wasn't keeping tune very well. My first guess was new, cheap strings. My second guess was a binding nut. My third guess was the trem maybe fitting loosely or needing a fulcrum screw adjustment. Finally, I found it... The tuners were not tightened down. That was easy to fix. I don't remember that happening with a new guitar, but voila - tuning stability.
I played some more and decided to lower the action, and that worked out well. No high frets (on a $135 guitar!). It doesn't even need the fret ends filed. After that, the neck felt just like my favorite Squier Classic Vibe 50's tele, which cost 3 times as much. The radius is flatter though. I lowered the pickups for better tone and they sound surprisingly good, and when not playing they're dead quiet. Good for blues rock. But if you gig, you'll hate these microphonic pickups. I like em for the interplay.
Ok, it's a keeper, so I took the plastic covers off, and adjusted the trem to a compromise between what I wanted and how well it could return in tune. It's tighter than I'd like, but works alright. I spent hours playing and tweaking. There is something wrong in the neck position, it sounded intermittently like it's shorting out, but not in the bridge. Just a tinge of lowering volume and crackle, definitely a short.
The morning after, I find the neck position is a completely dead circuit now. The bridge is fine, but the neck position issue needs a tear-down diagnosis and the pickups seem to be mounted to the pick guard. I'm guessing there's a cold solder joint in there somewhere that was happy for a few hours after coming off a hot UPS truck, but shrunk in the air conditioned house over night. So I need to consider what else I might want to do while I have it apart. It's not getting returned because it plays great. The rest can be fixed.
So it plays great, looks nice, and has great potential. It weighs only 6 lbs, 13 oz. I wouldn't mind finding it a better trem. I checked GFS, but the only lefty import trem that would have fit is out of stock. Despite the issues, I like this guitar a lot more than I expected to, and I am blown away by the value, so it will be worth an electronics upgrade.
I will have to stop playing it long enough to open it up and see what's going on in there. But if I swap pots, mine will probably also get witch hat knobs.
), totally kidding.