Wesley Eclipse

It's a Wesley so most will know the score. An exepnsive looking guitar but does it sound good? Well, to find a 24 fret guitar with a set neck for ninety pounds is rare in itself. Good machine head (with individual screws in each), 2 humbuckers and nice controls. It's basically a PRS copy. I have a Vintage VRS100 to compare it with and this is lighter with a slightly smaller neck.

Good sustain for the price from the pickups. The sound has been my complaint about Wesley as the strat and tele copy were feeble and hummed but not this. It feels like a three hundred pound guitar. Each selection was clear without being muddy.

I felt the nut had slits that were just a little too high. I might one day take a hacksaw to lower them. I gave the neck some coats of furniture polish to increase a smooth feel . I shouldn't moan but the strings were of poor quality but if that's the worst I can say about Wesley then they must be doing a lot right.

I have used it in a band practice and it was great. In my next gig I will use this along with the Wesley semi.

I've used Wesley before and there customer service was greta when my semi did not work someone collected it and soon after I received a new one.

In this age of credit crunches most companies are raising their prices. For ninety pounds this ticks many boxes of serious guitarists: 24 frets, set neck, non-locking trem, dual humbuckers, contoured body, tiger red finish all in a PRS style guitar. If you haven't looked at Wesley before as you expected cheap shoddy manufacturing I would advise you look out for this one. Come to think of it, you rarely see this one on ebay. I suppose people want to keep them.

Fine transparent red, with a flamed mapple top. Not the best one finish I have seen, but good enough! the binding is not a real one but an imitation du to a lack of color => It is the only ugly thing I notice about this guitar. Unfortunately mine has a little gluing problem at the neck extremity causing a crack in the finish with no consequence for the playability => Considering the price of the guitar, it is not convenient to pay the shipping for this little thing. Body look like a PRS one with a difference on the edge that make it less comfortable to play on the knees.
Good quality noname bridge. tuner OK. Neck is like a Les Paul one, that means a little fat, 24 jumbo frets, rosewood fretboard, Seams to be made from mapple, with a glued headstock. Surely made in China? The top is laminated with mapple, and the body is made from solid exotic wood. 2 passive ceramic Humbuckers, 1 volume, 1 tone and a toggle switch with 3 positions.

The sound is surprising mellow for the neck and definite for the saddle pick-up. Thats Ok for a lot of music style from jazz to metal. the middle position of the toggle switch give a very flat response that I never use. A very versatile guitar with a long sustain !

The set-up from the factory was surprisingly OK for the price, and the playability of the guitar was OK. Nevertheless it is convenient to adjust the nut (plastic piece of crap), to tune properly the saddle. The thrusroad was perfectly set.
Except the gluing problem mentionned before, and the ugly false biding (it would be better to avoid this kind of thing), the finish was OK.

I don't perform live playing on stage, but with friends spending the night in singing, so no problems. The strap buttons are basic and should be changed to live playing.

Never contact them!

Very good guitar with a real playability, the neck is long and easy to play. I like to have the strings very close from the fretboard and it is the case so I'm happy.
Overall it is a low cost guitar, but the elements are of good quality, even the strings are OK, and the guitar stay very well in tune.
I don't know if the guitar will keep these qualities in time?
If it were stolen or lost, I will surely buy it again, or may be a SG copy from Wesley?

PRS-like body, with a 25" scale set neck with 24 frets. Made in China, presumably in 2005.

The body and neck are claimed to be mahogany, but must be in fact sapele, a similar and cheaper wood readily availiable in Asia. A lot of asian manufacturers are using sapele for their instruments and calling it mahogany. Not that sapele is a bad quality wood, but no comment about the ethics of this. The fingerboard is rosewood.

The body has a pretty bookmatched flamed maple veneer on top. The online brochure for this guitar states that the guitar has a flamed maple cap, which is untrue. A maple cap is at least 1/4" thick, in the case of a carved top guitar like this one it would be 1" thick at least. This is less than 1/40" thick, and the name for this is a veneer.

The finish is high gloss traslucent red, and is really pretty. The bridge is a Fender style tremolo, set against the body, so you can only dive with it. The saddles are solid steel ones, which is nice, and they are kept together by a frame in the bridge plate, which is even nicer and should help reducing tuning problems.

The nut is black plastic, and the tuners are die-cast sealed back ones. Decent.

The neck is round profile, similar to a Les Paul one, quite comfortable. The fingerboard radius is around 12 or 14 inches.

The guitar included allen wrenches for truss rod an tremolo adjustment and a low quality guitar cable.

The electronics are the typical 2 passive humbucker configuration with master tone and master volume and a three way switch. The pickups are generic ones without make.

I play through a Peavey 100 Watt solid state combo with no effects. The output from this guitar is really high. However I find that the sound is quite sterile and too dull and dark for my tastes. This could possibly be the fault of the overly hot pickups. I will definately be changing those in the future. In the meantime I converted the neck humbucker to four conductors to be able to split the coils, and the single coil sound is prettier, though it does hum a little.

The unplugged tone is OK, though I miss a little more brightness.

I mostly play hard rock and blues, and this guitar really doesn't suit these styles well. For metal or punk it could be suitable. I hope that the pickup change will make it suitable for me.

The guitar isn't noisy, even though the cavities are not shielded, but the pickups aren't potted, or at least not well potted, and will feedback at high volume if using heavy distortion. The potentiometers don't crackle or pop when turned.

The setup was poor. At this point I must say that I'm an amateur luthier and have been setting up guitars for some years now, so my standards are quite strict.

The neck was totally straight, with no relief at all, and the action was low, so there were buzzes all around the fretboard. After I adjusted the truss rod for an appropiate relief and the string height for an appropiate action the guitar plays well and easily, though it could (and will) use a fret levelling. The nut is too high and this leads to slight tuning problems and more finger pressure required in the lower frets.

The ends of the frets are a little too bevelled for my tastes, and if you're playing aggresively on stage the first and sixth strings can slip off the edge of the fingerboard.

As in most cheap guitars using the tremolo means going instantly out of tune. I have to admit that I haven't adjusted it yet, but I think that the problem is friction at the nut. The nut will surely be replaced soon.

The finish is good, and the guitar looks gorgeous, but the flamed maple top (which is in fact a very thin veneer) doesn't have that cool 3D effect I've seen on other flamed maple tops.

I've had this guitar for about five months now, and I've played live with it three or four times, though I did have a backup. I never play without a backup anymore. The hardware seems durable, specially the bridge, and the finish seems solid, though it does have a couple of dings already. The strap buttons seem solid, but they'll be replaced with Dunlop straplocks. Nothing against standard buttons, but when you play five days a week standard buttons will fail sooner or later.

Never dealt with them.

I've been playing for 14 years. My main guitar is a Hamer-like neck through body electric I built myself. I have also a Japanese Strat and a Strat clone that I built from pieces. My main amp is an all tube Peavey Triumph 120 which is now in need of repair, so I've been recently playing through a solid state Peavey 100W combo and a Marshall AVT100 stack. I use a Dunlop Crybaby wah from time to time, otherwise I use no effect boxes.

If the guitar was stolen or lost I would get pissed off, but I would get over it. I'd probably buy it again for the money y spent on it.

This guitar has a few good features. It looks beautiful, it's quite light in weight and is comfortable to play. The 25" scale is perfect for me, and makes the guitar a little easier to play. I would surely not take it to the studio or to an important gig. My main guitar is far better than this one, sounds much nicer and much more dependable upon. But it's great for rehearsal and for gigs at clubs. I bought it because I didn't want to risk having my main guitar stolen after a gig.

I wish this guitar had better pickups and a bone or graphite nut. That would improve its tone dramatically. I also wish the flamed maple top *was* a flame maple top and not a thin veneer.

One thing that does worry me about this guitar is that the neck joint is very close to the neck pickup, and it seems to me that the neck tenon is mostly routed away by the neck pickup route. This could possibly cause a weak neck joint. Hopefully not.

Anyway, for the money I payed for it this guitar is OK, and with a little work on it I'm sure it can be a quality guitar for live playing.