Bacchus Universe series Strat

This is a Bacchus BST-1R Universe series stratocaster style guitar. It's got some interesting features and a vintage vibe to it. Bacchus guitars is a historic guitar company based in Japan that produces guitars in China, Korea and Japan. Universe series guitars are its most affordable models priced around 200-400$ and they are made in China. Nevertheless, these guitars are pretty high quality instruments that could compete against Mexican and US-made strat originals.
http://www.deviser-bacchus.com/english/
Their fretwork is excellent, the finish is flawless and the hardware is durable. The electronics are pretty basic and vintage oriented in terms of tone but they work okay and there are no wiring flaws.The tuners are vintage kluson-style and they work just fine, the tremolo has the old S-style saddles but it's pretty easy to adjust and it stays in tune.
http://www.deviser-bacchus.com/products/universe-series-guitar/

Here's the Greek store where we found this guitar:
http://www.kourbismusic.com/bacchus-universe-bst-350-white-blonde-el.html#.U4OOvd7cxng

Here are the official Bacchus BST-1R specs:

BODY	POPLAR
NECK	MAPLE
FINGER BOARD	ROSEWOOD MAPLE
SCALE	25 1/2 inch (22F)
MACHINE HEADS	ROTOMATIC TYPE
BRIDGE	SYNCHRONIZED TREM
PICK UPS	ORIGINAL SINGLE COIL TYPE
CONTROLS	1vol,2tone,5way p.u selector
FINISH	URETHANE See-through Pink-Cream
with ORIGINAL SOFT CASE

Here are a few minor issues with this guitar:
-Their custom headstock style is distinctive but it's not even close to the original strat headstock shape.
-The guitar has a nice mint-green pickguard but the tremolo backplate was plain black... I replaced the stock backplate with a matching mint green one:


-The truss rod adjustment is more difficult than it should really be these days. That's because the truss rod hex adjustment bolt is located in the neck pocket of the guitar... One has to loosen up all the strings and remove the neck to gain access to the truss rod hex box. Then, you have to adjust it just by guessing what the string tension would be if the guitar was in tune... A qualified technician has no problem adjusting these vintage style truss rods but a hobbyist will definitely find this adjustment a bit difficult.
-The singlecoil pickups are ceramics but they're definitely not hot in terms of output. We wanted something a bit hotter for the bridge position so we replaced the stock ceramic pickup with a much hotter 8Kohms ceramic HMV singlecoil pickup from Hong Kong. We kept the original pickup cover though.

Apart from these minor issues, these Bacchus guitars are pretty playable and sound good. They're pretty close to their Japan-made cousins and a few Mex/US-made premium originals are less playable... These are value for money instruments and they're worth checking out!

Here are a few photos of the actual guitar:

Cheers,
Thanos