Customer Reviews

Saga ST-10 S Style Electric Guitar Kit

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought the Tele version from Saga. The G- and B-string tuner holes in the headstock were drilled too close together, making it impossible to fit the G tuner to the headstock and making it impossible to tune the G string accurately. Also, one wire was too short, so I had to supply my own. The distributor wouldn't correct the problem, told me to contact Saga. Saga never responded. The guitar is useless (wasting not only the money for the purchase but the cost of the paint, hours invested, etc). You don't want this product!

I decided after reading about these guitars on the net, to try and build my own. (go to guitarattack for examples) Not the highest quality guitar but more than suitable as a starter build. The neck is in great shape, the frets are smooth and well seated. The body does have the worlds strongest sanding sealer on it. I sanded the sealer down so that it wasn't that thick. There were a few bubbles under the sealer that I had to fill after sanding it down. The body itself was three pieces of basswood glued together. I've read others claim 5 or 6 pieces on theirs but mine had 3. by the way don't be afraid of basswood, alot of $500 and $600 guitars use this wood. At the time of writing this I haven't fully built the guitar so I can't comment of sound and the electronics. I did a dry fit and all the holes lined up and the neck fit the pocket fine. You can find these cheaper elsewhere but I trust amazon and their partners more than ebay anyday. It did ship in a flimsy box but didn't have any damage.

I purchased one of these kits from an on-line seller several months ago and put it together. My review will strike a middle ground between the others that have already been written on Amazon.com. Compared with the Saga Telecaster copy kit (which I've also reviewed), this one actually is a bit easier to assemble. Most notably, feeding the wires through the pre-cut holes is considerably easier. The kit I received was wired correctly; however, I've read more than one review on the Internet from purchasers who have received badly wired kits, so maybe I was lucky. The body on my guitar was pretty nice looking, so I went with no paint, no stain, just lacquer clear coat. Clearly, the body consists of several pieces of wood put together, but it finished very nicely. Given my previous experience trying to stain a Saga P-bass kit and painting a Saga Tele kit, the natural look is the way to go. OK, so it might look a little like a cutting board -- just keep it out of the kitchen... The strings I received were far worse than those with the other two Saga kits (Tele copy and P-bass) I've built. The problem was that two of them were terribly kinked. Because I've assembled the kit as a gift and will be replacing the strings with some nice GHS Boomers before Christmas 2009 anyway, it's not a problem that the G and D strings don't fret properly at about the 9th and 10th frets: the new strings will fix it. The fingerboard is fine (actually looks quite nice after a little fretboard oil treatment), the frets are fine, and the electronic are fine. The "whammy bar" works OK, but I'm not a big fan of them. My suggestion to the recipient of the Christmas present will probably be to avoid it and practice on the fundamentals. Truthfully, I like the Tele kit better, despite the overly small pre-cut wiring holes. Perhaps more importantly than anything else, the "T" kit sounds more like its Fender inspiration than the "S" kit sounds like its Fender inspiration. Still, it was a fairly easy, fun project and looks very cool.

Excellent value for the money.

However, the one I received was missing a small but essential part. I was able to obtain a replacement for about $3 from Stewart-McDonald, but all efforts to contact the Saga people failed (they are totally wholesale-oriented) and the only option through Amazon was to exchange the entire kit.

I got this kit off Ebay. Everything is included and all the holes are predrilled so the kit can really be fully assembled in under 2 hours. The instructions are pretty poor so you should really have some basic understanding of the parts of an electric guitar and how they fit together. The entire pickguard and pickups were pre-wired in my kit and no soldering is needed. Now the real secret of this kit is that if you want a guitar that you can actually play and enjoy it - you will have to upgrade a few things.

The tuners are not very good in this kit and the mounting screws were hard to install(very small screws that wanted to strip the heads very easily). I upgraded to a set of Sperzel locking tuners I got used off Ebay and it was like night and day compared to the originals. I had to open the predrilled tuner holes up some to fit the new tuners. Also, be absolutely sure the body/neck joint is tight. I had about a small gap (probably around .010 to .012 inch) when I put mine together and it wouldn't stay in tune. I even stripped the head of one of the neck joint screws trying to tighten it to get rid of the gap. I got a chisel and sandpaper and leveled the body joint a bit and now I have a tight fit (after finging a replacement screw) and the guitar plays well. You will learn a lot about guitar setup from putting this kit together. Everything will have to be adjusted - truss rod, saddle height, intonation and I have even had to do a little fret filing to eliminate high E string buzz. I also got some cheap roller string trees and they seem to help. The nut had to have a lot of filing done on it. It is a cheap plastic nut and was really grabbing and binding the strings. The depth of the slots was ok but the channels were way too narrow. I also blocked off the bridge because I want to keep the tuning stable and I'm not really expecting it to be stable with the trem floating - even expensinve guitars with trems are hard to keep in tune. The wood on this guitar isn't really suitable for a clear finish. I spent as much on paint and laquer as I did the kit itself and chose a nice metallic copper finish.

The pickups are OK but the bridge is a little to high pitched for my liking and I am upgrading it to a little nicer pickup. Oddly enough, the bridge pickup was not hooked to a tone knob so I had to figure out how to wire that in. Overall, I really learned a lot through putting this kit together. I am planning on building an electric guitar from scratch and this kit was a good learning experience for me. You can assemble the basic kit with small and large head phillips screwdrivers and the included allen wrenches. You may need a couple of other tools - especially a jigsaw or coping saw to cut out the headstock shape of your choice and a small, thin file for the nut slots. With some patience and a few upgrades and modifications you can have a pretty good guitar. If you are just wanting an cheap guitar to play - you're better off buying a squire strat online for the same price.

I have built two of the Saga ST10 kits and they are extemely simple to build. The only materials not furnished in the kit are paint, sandpaper, sanding blocks and a scroll saw.
The guitars have nice balance and are very similar to my Fender strats in weight. The neck pocket is very tight and it helps to sand the sides of the the neck base to get a good fit.
I would prefer solder connections to the push pin socket type, but there has been no problem with the connections so far. I painted mine with 1969 Corvette touchup paint and it looks like a strat from that era. The neck is actually nicer than some of my factory guitars.

Getting this guitar kit was exciting, but very difficult to put together. It wasn't the lack of detailed instructions, missing or correct parts, it was the fact that all of the pre-drilled holes weren't the right size and weren't drilled in the straight line.

This is a fun educational thing if you wanna learn the inside workings of a electic guitar. Instructions are pretty easy follow. Once built though I wouldnt play this on stage in my main rig. Right now its just a decoration. The parts are very low quality. A guitar bought from walmart or target is almost even bettter.

I've been a longtime guitar player (mainly pop-punk rock) and somewhat of a guitar luthier, so in true do-it-yourself spirit, I decided to go ahead and take a crack at this kit. I must say that for the money, it turned out to be a smashingly good guitar. All the parts fit well, and the wood of the guitar body and neck were smooth, well-finished, and of surprisingly high quality. The wood grain pattern of the body and headstock was so pretty that I decided to just go with a natural wood stain finish. The only part of assembly that seemed to be a bother was that the pre-drilled holes for the screws that mount the tuners weren't quite properly lined up, and so I had to re-drill them to get proper alignment. But all in all, this build came off surprisingly well, and I now have what amounts to a great-sounding and great-playing guitar. The pickups sound quite nice, although I replaced the bridge pickup with a DiMarzio Injector pickup I had lying around (the signature pickup of Paul Gilbert). The electronics come with metal clips that plug into each other, so that you don't have to solder anything. But, if you're like me, then you'll want to solder all your connections. So if you're a penniless British kid attending college in America and playing in a rock band (like me), then this is one budget-friendly investment worth checking out. It's certainly not going to sound or feel like a $3,000 American Strat, but then again I wasn't expecting it to, and for no more than it cost, its a phenomenal instrument. It's going to quickly become one of my go-to guitars for live shows. Next, I'll be getting the Les Paul kit and doing a translucent blue wood stain on it.

I have built two of these guitars so far, the LP and the ST. I modified the guitars by putting better pick ups in them and new potentiometers in them. These guitars are pretty darn good for the money, and with doing modifications to them, you can get a guitar that sounds just as good as a 2000 dollar guitar. Now here is the BUT...I think you must have fairly good knowledge of wood working AND electronics in order to build these guitars. There are some steps that would be very difficult for a novice. Also, problems do arise during construction, that you need to have knowledge on how to correct them AND the tools to do it. For example, I had to route out pick up cavaties, and in one case I had to make a deeper neck slot. The reason I gave this 4 stars is because of that. The guitars aren't perfect out of the box but if you have the knowledge and equipment, and money to buy better pick ups, they are a lot of fun to build and fun to play once done!!