I bought an F2512 when they first appeared and were being offered with or without internal pickups. (No one will be surprised to learn that I chose the "sans pickup" version!)
I quite like the guitar and have had no issues with it at all.
But in the past several years I've noticed numerous F2512s being sold as damaged, or as factory seconds due to one issue or another.
I wonder if the success of the model (a Guild jumbo 12-string for around 400 bucks?! -- hard to beat!) has lead to some "streamlining" of the build process?
Whatever it is, their quaity control seems to be suffering.
In the video, Ted Woodford points out the glue used between the bridge and guitar top as being some sort of epoxy, which should make it impossible to separate from the top, yet he had no issue removing it in the video. It brings up the following questions:
1. Why are they using epoxy, and whether or not the epoxy (I am making an assumption that it was a two part epoxy) was properly mixed (resin to hardener). Seeing how easy it was to remove, it appears not to have been properly mixed. As a follow up to that, why didn't they use the standard aliphatic (Titebond I/standard wood glue)?
2. If you watch the video carefully, you can see that the "wings" of the bridge were the reason that the bridge was lifting off. That raises the question as to whether the bridge was properly fitted to the guitar from the factory. If epoxy was properly used, maybe this doesn't matter, but the epoxy used wasn't working properly either, so the bridge lifted.
3. The point that Ted Woodford raises about gluing onto a plastic finish and the glue not being able to bond to the plastic (or nitro for that matter) finish is true for aliphatic and hide glues, but if it was indeed an epoxy glue, it should have bonded. All of the decent quality epoxies will bond to just about anything. Brings into question the quality of the glue used to bond the bridge to the guitar top, and also whether it was even epoxy in the first place.
The whole bridge to guitar top bonding thing is why I posted the video in the first place. I don't have a baritone from the Chinese Guild factory myself, but maybe the "stuck" bridge pin problem is actually related to the same glue issue that was shown in the video. Perhaps the bridges are shifting forward very slightly under string tension, which is jamming the bridge pins into place and not allowing them to be removed?
