One Saturday morning, my local dealer had a very nasty looking dreadnought, new, labelled as a factory reject and for sale at 45 pounds ($70). This all-laminated, all-softwood 'guitar' was Chinese made and branded Encore. The top was a pallid white but uneven, with an inexplicable patch of very attractive grained wood in one place. It had a piezo pickup and Chinese tension-adjustable Grover copy machines, so I picked it up, and found that apart from slicing my hand on a fret edge and had perfect intonation and actually sounded good, so I bought it to take it apart, try my hand at refinishing (difficult, you need something to practice on) and see what the top was really like.
Well, now it is the biggest mess you ever saw, I know a lot more about how and why ultra-cheap guitar tops are made. My first move was to strip it down, and sand down the top. This appeared to produce a flat wood result, but the surface was so lumpy and uneven that it had almost untouched dips and over-sanded bumps. These showed a very attractive grain, looked like fir or cypress. So then I stripped the super-thick varnish off the front chemically, and got sanding again. After an hour, the top looked great, except for those dips. The white, bleached wood was stuffed with bright white grain filler under the lacquer. Once I got down through this, a fine bookmatched veneer pattern emerged. Ok, I thought, keep sanding.
Mistake! The reason these cheap guitars look so pale is that the laminated top has an incredibly thin veneer of spruce (or something like it). Instead of another sheet of wood cross-set to the grain of this, what's underneath is a carefully split packing case - complete with black printed symbols! The veneer on top is so thin that to hide the compressed board sheet underneath they have to use a white filler straight on the grain, sand this, then lacquer. My sanding revealed not only the grain of the veneer, but a large black letter S and something like a pagoda roof, visible through the couple of thou of wood left left on the most bumpy part. A good laminated top will have two layers, but the front veneer will be much thicker and the inside layer will be 'real wood'.
Now, after applying some stain and a finish, totally sorting the frets (you could rock a flat file like a see-saw on the 14th fret), smoothing the whole neck down, I have the ugliest looking perfect sounding cardboard guitar in the world. At various points on the now almost flat, smooth front you can see the texture of the packing case through the veneer - plus those black symbols.
It was a worthwhile exercise - the guitar can serve a useful purpose as a knockabout instrument for all comers to play, as I really hate having to say 'no' to enthusiastic and slighty well oiled audience members who ask if they can 'have a shot' with my Lowden. This one can get stored in the pub cellar and come out at folk nights to protect the Lowden from interference, without making me seem too uptight.
When my packing-case Chinese guitar was finally refinished and the top very lightly protected (drying wax) the sound was transformed even more than the appearance. A massive shift away from a thin, ultra-bright wiry treble and almost no bass (which it had with the thick coat of lacquer) to a well-balanced, slightly quieter sound with a clear delicate treble and surprisingly warm, full bass. It's quiet, but not all that bad to play, and remains so accurate in intonation that when you play a unison or an octave, you can hardly tell two strings are playing. It is also perfect right up to the top fret and plays a perfect second octave B on the top E string against the open B string. This really does surprise me and I intend to take some accurate measurements and record them for future reference. I have played many very high quality guitars which are just not this accurate.