Jesus those things are big!

> It was unreasonably heavy and made of cheap wood, with a neck like a carved baseball bat.

Guitar necks need to withstand the tension of the strings, and any Russian-educated engineer tasked by the politburo with making a guitar out of fiberboard[^2], will plug tension plus safety margins into the secant formula[^1] and immediately realize that some steel rods from Magnitogorsk for reinforcement are in order, and promptly discover that they only have 1/2'' ones. Oh well.

[^1]: http://www.engineeringcorecourses.com/solidmechanics2/C5-buc...

[^2]: Not that there's anything wrong with fiberboard for guitars; see Danelectro. In fact, if you own a laser cutter and want to make something cool with it, an electric guitar is a great project.

A lot of those Soviet guitars didn't have truss rods. Maybe none of them did. Some of them look cool but the quality is terrible.