ShortScale.org

Played this on saturday-- an Eko pahntom copy. Chinese made. Wine red. at first glance seemed super awesome & I was excited to see it. the trem felt pretty good, but the finish was iffy-- clear coat was cloudy in like three big blotches, and while the frets were OK, the back of the neck was pretty rough. not pleasant. lots of QC issues I'd guess.

not sure if you can see from the shaky photo, but it has three shitty hot rails in it and sounded boring when I played it

$425

in short, not worth the money



http://www.ekoguitars.it/viewdoc.asp?co_id=79843&pid=72045

Spotted them on eBay a fair bit ago. They look servicable and occasionally pop up for low-ish prices, but they do look a bit cheap. One of the earlier models had a stock photo in which the bigsby-style trem was actually mounted at a slight but noticable angle which I thought was rather amateur.

Whacky shapes are great, but the Alden and Hutchins stuff seem better value to be completely honest.

yeah-- it would be a good basis for customization, but the cloudy clearcoat was unforgivable. also one of the knobs was wonky. really disappointing.

You'd be better off tracking one of these down and modifying it to be a real guitar, probably: http://www.thomann.de/gb/vox_apache_ii_bk.htm

Yikes . That's kinda disappointing . A while back I was actually looking at one and almost pulled the trigger . Then I read somewhere that there were actually a bit overpriced and a poorly made Chinese copy .. I thought they were made in Czech ( which Eko tends to boast with some of their guitars ) . In fact I almost bought a Manta as well. THen I saw the prices on them mysteriously dropped by like 1/3 and any info on any of the Ekos tended to contradict each other . Bad signs .. So I waited .
I guess is you want a decent Teardrop or Phantom and don't want to pay $3k the only option the Phantom .