My 8 year old daughter Kyra's first guitar. At $99, free shipping, and free gig bag, you can't expect too much. But the neck is fabulous, everything else can be tweaked.

I put a set of Elixer 10s on and adjusted the truss rod slightly to compensate for these heavier strings. New Gotoh mini tuners, body cavity shielding, and a minor fret levelling and it's getting pretty good. Although the neck-body joint was fine, and was even smoothed out before joining unlike other Fender products I've seen, I kicked the neck back a little bit so I could raise the saddles to get more pressure on the saddles. The bridge is designed so the strings are putting pressure upwards on the saddle, which actually was preventing some of them from sitting solidly on the plate. I was thinking about doing string through body but I just can't believe it would make a difference worth bothering.

The intonation was very close. The bridge is not quite centered, it is a couple mm too close to the bass side. The pickups look exactly like the stock pickups from my MIM strat, except that the pole pieces are staggered more accurately. The mim strat has the bell-curve staggering instead of the "correct" staggering where the high E polepiece is higher than the B.

All in all it's quite a fun little guitar! I have utterly no qualms about presenting it to my daughter and expecting her to be serious about learning music on it - it's a real instrument! And I'm picky!