PRS S2 Standard 24 Better and Worse than I thought... | Luthier Teardown

welcome to Crimson guitars welcome to Great guitar giveaway and uh welcome to appears S2 standard 24. now this guitar is it's a budget instrument made in America retail 1600 or so pounds and as such it's not really a budget guitar but there are a few issues and that's what we're going to look at here predominantly in the finishing and the final setup I.E the bit where it takes a human time well more time than not to do [Music] I am genuinely disappointed with how this came out of the factory but uh as a guitar it's cool solid mahogany Body Solid mahogany set neck with a scarf joint which actually I think is going to give you more strength although it is frowned upon by uh Builders uh for some reason I don't really know we've got the low mass locking tuners the high quality Hardware that one expects from PRS you've got a pair of their very very cool uh Humber because it's the 50 5815 s humbuckers sounds great rosewood fretboard with a 10 inch radius which is something I particularly love I'm personally going from flatter radiuses to tighter in my own instruments that I'm enjoying playing at the moment but it is the last five percent of what they do as a company that you see first and experience first this guitar is up on the great guitar giveaway uh helping us create and raise money to create an awesome guitar Museum endorse it and as such I can't let this instrument go without doing some work on the nut at the very least the setup is abysmal and if you think that I'm feeling a little bit personally attacked here uh I I am this guitar arrived and I took it home straight away because I was so excited and I wanted to get to know it intimately and yeah I played her for three seconds as well no I can't do that you expect a guitar under a thousand pounds to need a setup and fretwork straight away out of the factory you don't expect a guitar from this Factory at this quality level to need the same so yeah let's have a closer look shall we I am not a fan of these uh of this style of locking tuner it just looks a bit weird to me but I do understand that uh purists need to have their own things I can't believe they've patented this nut material I think it's just a version of carbon fiber or something but if we look at this that is huge let's actually measure that properly in a minute 10 inch radius dots I mean it's it's nice it's all it's all good the Finish is okay there are some issues in the in the corners here where the the pigment hasn't quite been laid on thick enough so that actually looks like a bit of a well it looks like a crack and it's it's purely just pigment with the mahogany underneath showing through basically I would expect the quality control people to be more on that lots of comfort calves I am a fan of this shape I'm a fan I'm a fan and boy of Paul Reed Smith I really really am there's no soft pad behind that strap button and the Lac is chipped it's not ideal I don't see any joint underneath the Finish though normally in the lights you can sort of see where a joint is so well I'm gonna I'm not gonna I don't think that this is a one piece mahogany body would be cool if it was though so we've got the pattern thin neck which we'll measure in a second no padding we all need a little bit of extra padding lots of very loose I wonder what they are switch feels good and we've got a a push pull coil split here I do love the the quality and the look of these control knobs though absolutely they blow me away the fit and finish of the hardware Etc is Sublime at the first fret I've got a one one and a half 1.25 millimeter height uh that is just crazy and it's point point seven five on the high e our action is massive two and a half 2.75 millimeters at the 12th there's a load of relief 2.25 at the High e so I mean the relief is is about right but the action is massively high this came new from the shop I mean it was made it was made on the 17th of the 8th and 21 uh so mid covered but I don't expect somebody at the shop to have been messing around with trust rods Etc this is and certainly nobody's cut this nut down I don't know in the comments if you know what are the standard recommended specs for nut height and action height Etc from the PRS Factory I would love to know that let's save these strings but I do want to see what these Frets are doing I love the PRS headstock before you use the fridge rocker straighten the truss rod out I like that metal uh come look at this me thinks somebody forgot a washer you don't really want your trust Rod adjustment to be straight up against the wood if you can help it I don't know is this standard it doesn't feel right to me let me know in the comments you can see where the trust Rod cover went on when the the lacquer still hadn't fully cured that's not it's not a major issue it's just hey mass production for you my issue here is that recently we had a prsse from I think the Indonesian factories and I was blown away by the quality of the nut work and the basic setup of the instrument straight from the factory this is this is not that well I'm blown away but uh in a much more visceral and uh bloody kind of a way I suppose okay hold on this this is this is not the 60s Gibson that Josh is currently working on over on the other bench with a traditional terrestrial this is a TRS with a dual action truss rod in here uh it doesn't need a washer you knew that um prizes all around everybody you noticed that uh I'm being a fool I'm gonna go get a coffee and uh yeah carry on and Josh is just laughing at me in the background there 25 inch scale length that's actually a very responsive truss rod I'm impressed TRS perfectly flat okay Fred rocker now my opinions on Fritz and fret work are changing the more guitars I play foreign genuinely relieved this seems fine okay there is there is no rocking these Fritz are Level I've heard uh differing stories about what periods do I've heard that they are so confident in the accuracy of the pressure with which they install the threats they don't need to level and Crown them Etc which isn't necessarily the case they don't necessarily need to Crown them but they do need to do a little bit of leveling well there's an on the factory Floor video where you can well you can hear them say okay this leveling thing that they use it's an acrylic block is designed by Paul Smith to be absolutely flat and dimensionally stable Etc forever and then three seconds later literally he says yeah we take it back to the Machine Shop to flatten it once a week not understanding the irony of that statement the reality is as they do at least take the tops of the fritz down and this is has been perfectly done I'm surprised that they haven't sorted the nut out with the same level of care and attention I can do that quickly now and this is definitely a graphite-based nut there's this this graphite in here it's not a proprietary anything it's just you know there might be a little bit of Teflon mixed up in there or something I suppose I can put these washers back now can't I oh let's get these strings back on so I want to get the the neck at the right relief and get everything set up before I start playing around with the nut [Music] well there we go I don't need to do any adjustment whatsoever holding it down at either end my radius on what was a perfectly flat fretboard is my radius my relief is exactly what I would like just a light touch the only issue is that the height of the nut is so high that my intonation even if I said the intonation perfectly at the 12th my intonation is going to be off well because you're pushing it down there it's knocking everything back just a little bit so if you hold the string down at the third fret you should have just a fraction so it should move but only that much not even oh just tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny I've got too much going on here that being said now that I've adjusted the truss rod it's not as bad not anywhere near as bad as it was when it came in so yeah maybe I'm being too hot on PRS let me know foreign I could go lower but I don't wanna this is the equation that we all have to deal with this guitar could end up being won by somebody who likes a particularly High action and plays with 12s instead of the tens that come as standard on this [Music] constitutions Crimson ten music if I did not have hair protection hearing protection and entertainment to this quality I would go absolutely bat insane the real trick is to make it feel roughly the same all the way up obviously getting slightly higher as you go towards the base strings but I wanted to feel even across the board it's so important that the musician they shouldn't know that we've even been here it should be absolutely effortless to play a guitar unless you're uh Joe Bonamassa who kind of sometimes likes them to fight back uh I'm remembering him saying that interview now so questioning my entire existence damn it [Music] okay so the action of the 12th is still quite high it's sitting at just over two millimeters I'm gonna lower everything down just a fraction I'm going to leave the trim where it is though and use a tiny Allen key and I'm just taking everything down the same amount of turns to keep the radius [Music] foreign [Music] and a little bit lower at the high e [Music] everything is good except me haha [Music] so the intonation was actually okay the nut was high but I suppose okay my big issue genuinely was that the the SE silver sky came out of the box feeling so much better than this did and you know first impressions count for a hell of a lot I genuinely uh was expecting to be tempted to try and figure out a way to keep this guitar and after about two minutes of playing it there was no there was I just wasn't if you if you look back let's let's cut in some footage from the uh from the nut of that AC if possible as I'm taking these strings off I'm noticing for the first time this nut a pet hate for me is these corners of the nut with the soft part of your hand gets eaten Away by sharp corners and sharp edges and this has been rounded over to absolute perfection it is incredibly comfortable you see how the the strings were perfectly partially seated inside the nut you don't want the strings to be embedded halfway into the uh into the nut like you have on this guitar your string is supposed to sit about one third of to two-thirds of the way into the nut whereas every single one of these is way down deep inside and that's how you get that's how you get sticking nuts Etc or sticking strings inside of the nut it's uh it's not ideal it is US made that comes with the premium it does cost a lot more to make a guitar in the states and in the UK I just wish they'd put a little bit more effort into the final fit and for that matter finish spraying white paint is a luthi's idea of hell in fact yeah Dante's Inferno for luthias will be a spray booth with white paint and yeah no filters on the door anyway Josh is going to play you out uh I hope you enjoyed the guitar don't forget it could be yours great guitar giveaway.com and yeah the whole thing is to support the building of an epic guitar Museum that is also going to be available online and yeah the only Museum where they let you play the exhibits click like subscribe see you soon goodbye [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Crimson Custom Guitars

Views: 30,267

Keywords: Crimson Guitars, Ben Crowe, Luthier, Luthiery, Guitar, Custom Guitar, Electric Guitar, Instrument, Woodworking, Woodworking tools, hand tools, workbench, prs guitars, prs, prs s2 standard 24, quality control, guitar nut, teardown, luthier teardown, guitar action, guitar setup, guitar nut problems

Id: 4lC46CKBOos

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023