My father and I are working together on building an ESB-4SC that arrived a couple of weeks ago. Pitbull's was the only hollow body bass kit we could find online, and happily the consensus on the forum seems to be that it's a good one. We've decided to build some instruments as a diversion from our regular work, and I've always wanted to learn the bass, so here we go.
First some confessions: I barely play guitar. My father doesn't play guitar at all. And neither of us has ever played a bass guitar. Also, we've never disassembled a guitar or looked at the innards. Luckily we're pretty handy guys, and there's a lot of great info here. So, we think we've got a pretty good handle on what needs to be done.
After oohing and aahing at the contents of the box, and confirming that we had all of the parts, my father did the sanding on the neck and body. Perhaps we should have checked neck alignment first, but I wasn't going to be around for a while and we were eager to get work started on the project. Luckily, no ill came of it.
Next, we bolted the neck on to check neck alignment.
The neck was actually a tiny bit too big to fit in the pocket correctly, so some careful judicious sanding was needed. Also, there was a bit of...slag? in the pocket (wood bits in the corners that hadn't been routed out correctly), so a bit of time with a file was needed to clean that up. Once we were sure the neck was seating in place properly, we threw some clamps on it.
...then we had to learn what a floating bridge and trapeze tailpiece are. Luckily, Google (and this forum) to the rescue! After figuring out the proper alignment of the tailpiece and putting in a couple of screws, we found that the action was WAY too high. We knew the nut was too tall, but the bigger problem lay with the bridge. Luckily user Dekka28 has been down this road before us, building this same guitar, also as his first build, and he asked a LOT of excellent questions in his build thread here:
In regard to the bridge, Dingobass gave the excellent tip of putting a piece of 180 sandpaper upside down on the body of the guitar, and using that to sand the base of the bridge (go up and down, neck to trapeze, not side to side, to make sure the bridge conforms to the curve of the guitar).
We sanded the bridge lower than it needed to be, so that we won't need to be at the bottom of the bridge height adjusters when we get into final intonation. When we were happy that all of our measurements are at least in the ballpark, we unclamped the neck from the body, and knocked out the nut and placed an order for a TUSQ nut from amazon.
Next we stained the body and neck, deciding that we'd do the staining while the guitar was still in two pieces, and then glue in the neck so the guitar could be finished as a single unit. We used Solar Lux dyes (because our friend had some on hand, and we'd read that they were good for this sort of thing), applying medium brown mahogany to the neck and the sides of the body, and golden fruitwood to the front and back. (We did the back, then let it dry thoroughly. Then did the neck and sides, letting them dry. Then we did the front.) The dyes looked great while they were wet, but ended up very "flat" looking when they dried.
(I'm out of attachments on this post, so tale continued next post!)
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