Glarry 1/8 Antique Solid Wood Handmade Violin for Beginners with Case + Bow + Rosin + Strings + Shoulder Rest + Tuner

This is well priced, but it is definitively what people call a "violin shaped object" (VSO). VSO are great for parents who don't want to pay for really nice instruments/ high rental prices and you don't even know if your kid is going to stick with it, but even among the VSO, this has gotta be on the lower end. To make this playable for my kid: 1. sanded the rough pointy parts out of the unvarnished wood of the neck , 2. sanded and lowered the nut and made the grooves smoother 3. reshaped the bridge a little lower, 4. sanded and reshaped tuning pegs and added peg compound, 5. sanded and smoothed down parts of the bow frog that were splintery and rough. What I couldn't fix was that the fingerboard itself was attached not quite straight - I should've returned it, but by the time I realized this, I'd already done all that work. Separate of the VSO structural issues, I also 1. replaced the terrible strings with D'Addario Ascente strings, 2. got a chinrest pad, 3. got a shoulder foam pad. I am not a violin maker nor professional musician, just learned violin for fun for a goodly number of years. Unless you've got experience and willing to put in the elbow grease, this VSO may not be good for you and your kid, because if you don't know how to do all these fixes, your kid may have a harder time learning and playing and give up when they have an extra hard time playing and making better sounds (and your ears will suffer too). I don't know if all Glarry violins are this bad, but I later had better luck with another VSO at a different size, from the brand Paititi, which was about 50% more expensive (arguably this was cheaper if you take into account how much time I put into fixing up the Glarry), but it was actually relatively playable out of the box (just got the strings and chinrest pad to improve sound and comfort).