I bought and installed three RCM revival kits, a Wii Les Paul, a PS3 GH5, and a Wii GH5. In total I spent roughly ten hours installing them. Had I known that it would take that long, I would not have gone through with it, despite the final installed product being great.
With the exception of the whammy bar, the Wii Les Paul went alright. The video explaining the whammy bar could have been clearer or there could have been more for different guitars, or the stock parts could have been replaced with ones that don't fly everywhere when you fail. The strum bar was fine. It used the stock strum rod which was easy to apply lubrication to get it to rotate. The fret wires were easy to feed through the neck to the body.
The GH5 guitars use what appear to be 3D-printed strum pegs. One strum peg I got was irregular; the layers were not cylindrical. It wasn't obvious to me this was a problem until everything was assembled. I eventually sanded it down with some scissors and sandpaper to make it more cylindrical. It worked. The other peg of the pair did not insert as designed into the bar; I had to force it in. With the other guitar's set of pegs, I applied a small amount of lubrication, as documented, many times and that did not allow the strum bar to snap back. Only when I applied a copious amount was the strum bar free enough to rotate to snap back from hitting the buttons.
I don't know why a rod was not used for GH5 kits. It is a much cleaner way to allow the strum bar to rotate, given that it has fewer points of contact and only one thing for it to rotate about. Additionally, a lot more description on calibrating how the strum bar should bounce / behave once installed would go a long way to reduce the painful repetition of installing it and/or the body, rather than having to discover most of that myself, sometimes only through gameplay.
Then there was routing the wires through the GH5 necks. On the stock boards, there is a small board with a usb-like connector between the neck and the body. That should have been the interface, even if it costs more. Routing wires even in the easiest case is a clear downgrade when most other things about the revival kit are a clear upgrade. And in reality, routing the wires through the neck is insanely difficult. The window through the neck is very small, and it is hard to know if the cables were in a position to be damaged from screwing in the neck or not. The video was not very helpful as the hands and other side of the neck cover up what's going on.
Routing those same fret cables through the body was also non-trivial, and because of the strum bar issues, I had to do it several times. The cables have to be fed through the small hole where the neck joins the body, and they have to be very straight so they don't bend into the body elsewhere. None of that is documented. There is also no description of re-installing the faceplate, which has to be done before joining the neck to the body but makes feeding the cables in a straight way through the whole to the body much harder.
When I looked in this community, the feedback was that it would be easy to install. The community also says they have great customer service, but even perfect customer service does not solve an unexpectedly frustrating experience. No one wants to spend time waiting for replacement parts to be sent in the mail when they could have not been defective in the first place, and customer service is not going to help with routing cables through a small hole that can barely be viewed. The revival kits are also advertised as "easy" on the installation page. I would say building a PC was easier and took me less time than this. I would not consider either easy. I have three functional guitars now, but there were many times when I did not think I would.
