The design is amazing visually and functionally, but the quality control on this guitar is a disaster.
The guitar comes with a QC card, the "final inspection" field is empty, they didn't even bother to inspect it at the factory...
The frets are uneven, I checked with a good fret rocker, setting up the action height, and discovering dead notes on higher frets only confirmed it.
The neck is misaligned with the strings near the body joint, the high E string is right on the edge of the neck there and falls off. It can be also seen looking at the pickup poles that strings are off-center.
There are finish issues as well, there's a crack at the back of the body, at the neck and body joint, and the tremolo arm has stripped paint.
I'm disappointed with this guitar, for over 1000€ this is unacceptable. But the design of the guitar is great so I'll be trying to get a replacement.
Update:
I got a replacement, good customer service from thomann. The replacement has good frets and the neck is aligned properly. But it's now seated too low and needs a shim to set the action properly, at the same time the guitar has a shim under the locking nut which was completely unnecessary bringing the 1st fret action too high. I wonder if someone at the factory said "Hey this one needs a shim" but didn't specify where. The factory spec that lists the action measurements was nonsense, the guitar had something like 3mm+ action out of the box while the card specified half that.
Fortunately, this was easy to fix, I removed the nut shim, put in one in the neck pocket, set up the relief and action height, and now the guitar plays amazing.
Just be aware the QC is a joke and it's a bit of a lottery. The factory QC final inspection card for the replacement wasn't signed either... Not a great first impression of Charvel.
