Lotus L686

my lotus electric guitar was made in 1989 in the u.s.a.,It has 22 frets on it,it has a solid top and its a little heavy for an guitar,
its a pretty decent weight,it also has 4 controls--volume,tone 1,
tone 2,its neck is maple coloured,its finish is a flame top,it is a
stratocaster,its bridge piece is tele-style,and it also has a kind of
fat neck,it included a practice amp that costed $99.00,overall the
guitar costed $399.00.

I play blues and its really good for playing that kinds of music,
its also good for playing slow solo(s)&chords,I mostly use a gorrila,
a fender,and an optimus amp,I also use a digitech pedal,it has alot of
bass but littler bass than usual does by itself,and it has a rich,
warm,delicate sound.

It is good with live playing and it has very good harware on it
Ive been playing it for over 6 years and it does not seem easy to
whear out,the stap buttons are solid,I can depend on it and I would
use it for a gig anytime

I have the '97 version. This has your basic controls. 1 volume, 2 tone. It came with three single-coil pickups. It has a rosewood fretboard. The neck is unusually thick for a strat.

I am a metal guitarist. This guitar is great for slower rhythms, but that is about it. The neck is too damn thick to do a lot of the faster Yngwie stuff. The tones can sometimes be too wimpy to hold up in a band situation.

This is what is great. It has a grey-black fading finish. The pick-guard is mother-of-pearl. It came well set up, and the finish is still shining.

This is the guitar equivalent of a tank. I have literally beaten this thing like a red-headed step son, and it still sounds great. The paint has chipped only once, which is an accomplishment with how I treat the thing.

Never dealt with them.

I love it. No matter what anybody says, a lotus is NOT a little piece of refried diaper. It would suit most blues-based music types: rock, country(why?), metal, ect...

The Lotus L686 I have is a mid-80's issue, bought off a friend who used it as a practice guitar back in junior high school or some such thing. It sat his closet for a number of years since he quit taking lessons, until I bought it in 1995. It is of better quality than the newer Lotus models I've seen, but it also cost between $400-600 new as opposed to the sub-$200 guitars they make now. The body, neck and headstock are all gun-metal grey metallic flake finish, with a rosewood fingerboard. It has 22 frets, one each volume and tone knobs, and a black fulcrum 6-point tremolo (as opposed to the more common 2-point floating bridge). This is one of the few guitars I've seen with stringlocks combined with a non-Rose/Wilkinson bridge. They use a single flathead screw to loosen the locks rather than hex-style. The pickups are in S/S/H layout, and it uses metal toggle switches rather than a sliding switch like most guitars have. The stringlocks and toggle switches were nice touches, as was the very attractive finish (even if it was wasted on a cheap, low-grade body).

The pickups on the L686 are run-of-the-mill and lacking on tone, but I've been able to get suitable distortion on every amp I tried it through. Noise was barely audible with a couple of pedals and a tuner in front of the amp. The range of sounds isn't mind-numbing, but it is a heavy guitar and seems to have a lot of bass, even on a low-power practice amp.

I get the impression that this was one of the nicer Lotus models made, and it had a few touches (see above features) that added to the feel. The neck was wider than I care for, but it had the same metallic flake finish as the body and headstock, and was fairly smooth. The stringlocks probably should've been oiled or something more than they were by the previous owner, because the top two strings were almost impossible to work with when tuning and restringing. The finish seemed decent, with the only flaws being from wear and tear.

After playing this guitar on and off for two years as a backup, I planned to sell it when I discovered that the neck had bowed to the point where it wouldn't stay in tune and the strings touched the fingerboard near the headstock, even when they were set as high as possible. Since it was in storage for several years before I bought it, I would have thought that any warping would've happened then, not during two years of moderate use. At one point a strap button came off...the guitar fell right off of me, landing on the cord jack and smashing in the plastic jack and breaking two solder points inside. I replaced the jack with a metal one and simply super-glued the strap buttons on. With both the warped neck and the strap button/jack incident, it was mostly due to the age of the guitar. Still, the neck went from OK to worthless almost overnight, or so it seemed. It was never used as my primary guitar, but I would've used something lighter for playing live.

Any work I needed was done at a local shop, but there are very few Lotus dealers, at least in my area. They don't have a website, nor did many dealers show up online.

At the time I bought this guitar, I was a bassist looking to buy a cheap guitar for writing rhythm parts. I had owned other cheap guitars and jumped at the chance to buy this from a friend for $100 with a hard case and practice amp. It was bargain, and got a lot of use from me (even if he had quit playing and packed it away for years). I've sinced switched from playing bass and dabbling in guitar to taking on bass and lead guitar, so my main axes are Jacksons -- the Lotus would not have been suitable for lead use due to the lacking tone, prohibitive weight and thick neck. It was a good practice guitar, but unless I can get a cheap replacement neck, it'll sit in my closet for many years too.