Hey James, Welcome Aboard.

We highly recommend starting a build diary and posting your progress (with lots of pics ) and questions in there. We all like to follow along and might spot problems before they occur. You will also get better answers to your questions if people can see what you are doing.

To Answer your first two:

*Copied from an earlier post of mine*

1. Yes, you need to determine the scale length and glue the neck accordingly. The tang on the end of the neck pretty much never gets pushed hard up against the pickup cavity, so there is room there to mark it.

You want 628mm ( I believe) from the inside of the nut to the high E saddle on the bridge (don't measure to the 12th and then from 12th to the bridge, the fret placement is fine, the overall measurement is more accurate for this), with the intonation adjustment wound most of the way forward. You can wrap tape around the posts to temporarily install them without pushing the inserts in. This is also a good time to check neck alignment by temporarily installing the low and high E tuners and running some ordinary string down to the bridge. Make sure they run with an even gap down each side of the neck and you are all good.

Here's a pic of me doing that on an ES kit (Lying on the bench is better, this one had a really tight neck fit so it could sit in the stand)

You can see the neck tang stops short of the back of the neck pickup route.



Also, just be careful when glueing and clamping, You want to make sure there is enough break angle on the neck. If you clamp too hard on the tang of the neck you can greatly reduce that angle which will cause action problems later. Good contact at the heel is the most important.

You can check the break angle with any straight edge like this with the neck clamped.



Different guitar in that pic, but same principle - you want room to have the bridge posts wound out a bit so the bridge sits up off the body.

2. The kit electronics are absolutely fine, but are nothing special. I have a number of guitars that use the kit covered chrome humbuckers and I actually quite like the sound out of them. The pots likewise are totally serviceable, but are probably likely to wear out a bit quicker than better quality ones. In terms of pickup upgrades the Toneriders that Pitbull sells are pretty highly regarded, but really its something of a personal taste thing, so you might know better than us what you'd prefer, or might have to spend some time trying different ones to find what you are after.

These hollow body kits are a bit more mucking around installing electronics, but it's not terribly difficult to upgrade down the track. There is a lot of work to do to get it to playable guitar so it's certainly something you could leave for now and focus on getting it put together and playing well first.