I have always loved the sound of slide guitar. It’s why I bought a Dobro reproduction (Chibson Version), I’ve thought of doing an acoustic Reso kit, but they are all fairly pricey, and there seems to be a lot more work to them.
When Adam popped up with these electro Reso kits, I knew I had to have one!
https://www.pitbullguitars.com/shop/guitars/pit-bull-guitars-esr-1-resonator-style-electric-guitar-kit/
So it has sat boxed in the lab vault, while other things were being progressed, and it got pulled out over the course of this week, for a good look and inspection.
That’s when the difficulties of building this kit became apparent.
The binding and arched back plate are beautiful, the Ebony neck is dark and even and the quality of the sanded finish on the neck is brilliant.
The cone is a standard 10.5” (It's actually 10 9/16" or 268.28 mm for the Young 'Uns) spider type, it is pressed aluminium, not spun as you can see from the press form marks around the cone rim. The ideal is that the rim of the cone seats firmly against the rim of the sound well and no glue or fastener attachement is required as the string tension over the bridge and through the arms of the "Spider" hold everything where it should be. Interestingly enough the cone comes complete with four screw holes punched through the rim, which prevented it from seating properly (or so i thought). I dressed the burrs on the backside of those holes very carefully with a small flat diamond file to get them flat.
After i'd done this, i was surprised to find that the cone rim still did not locate properly, you can see the gap below the rim in the photo below, the seating issue wasn't due to the screw hole burrs, it was the fact that the cone base actually sat on the rear of the sound well, the sound well was too shallow to accommodate it.
When I looked into it closer, I found that there was a 16th inch clearance that would need to be eliminated to get the cone sitting right on the rim, I set up to take out an 1/8” to give clearance on the base of the cone. After some careful measuring I decided the best thing to do would be to jig up and deepen the well with a Palm router. There's not a lot of material at the bottom of this well so I am a little unsure of how this will turn out. But there is no hurry to start ripping in with a router just yet. Further study is needed.
The other issue that became obvious was our old friend the neck pup ring interfering with the end of the neck.
The neck sets up perfectly to a 24.75” scale length, but there is no way that neck pup with go in with out some mod. The eagle eyed forumites might also notice that the Hole for the decorative chrome screen is not, strictly speaking, round. A minor issue all it means is that the screen doesn't fit snugly, but it is another fix needed and a tad annoying.
This kit comes with a piezo style pup that sits under the Ebony bridge, but again there is a little niggle here. Both the bridge and the piezo are one continuous length, which will obscure access to the cone adjustment screw. I have a lot of scrap Maple and some scrap ebony. I may experiment with making my own split hybrid bridge pieces.
Not so sure I can manually split the Piezo though....It may just have to be that way in the first iteration. Specific split bridges are available, but I am not sure i want to outlay for that straight up. Not when the one I want, costs almost as much as this complete kit!
It is also necessary to create your own cable access hole between the control cavity and the sound well as this is not pre-drilled, neither is there a cable access for the neck pup.
The only other niggle is the control cavity not having a recessed cover.
On the whole, it will be a challenging build. There are a lot of little fettling and fit issues that need to be addressed and these will require some careful work and much deliberation.
The noted challenges aside, I’m reasonably impressed with the kit overall. The presentation of the whole is great, neck fit and centrality is spot on and the quality of the bright work is excellent. It does have its issues, but with the exception of the cone issue, they are similar ones to those that crop up form time to time on the other kits.
I would caution anyone thinking of getting one that it is definitely not a beginner kit.
We shall keep you all posted!
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