Good day everyone.
I'm Michel from Italy and this is my first build experience that just started.
After a couple of years where the idea of building a kit was crossing my mind, I found this lovely ATL-1SB "THINLINE" kit that PitBull's staff discovered in a dark dusty forgotten corner of the warehouse, and I fall in love with the spalted maple top so I adopted her and some groove.
PitBull sent the package very very quickly but due to covid the delivery was quite long and when it finally arrived I was a little disappointed about the customs taxes, 60 for 150 kit...but there are so many things that are disappointing me in Italy that I'm not surprised at all.
Opening the box I get immediately super happy because the top was exactly the one of the picture and I love it.
I checked the package content and unlikely, murphy is really on me, it was missing the potentiometers and PU selector. No big issue because with a very fast answer PitBull's staff send me back the missing part (probably it will be another 3 months of wait for the delivery and who knows about international taxes
I read the quick guide and I tried the mock build and checked the body and neck.
The body has a very nice spalted maple top, did I say that I like it very much? because I do
It looks very well made, a little chip around a predrill but it will be covered by the pickguard so no big deal about it. Something to sand into the PU holes, the f-hole to finish a little better, and just another thin sand all over the body.
neck and fretboard look good, frets seem well-positioned. The back needs to be sanded a little more than the body and there are 3/4 hits but they look like the one you can fix with wet cloth and iron. I think that fret also needs the last sand.
My plan about the kit is to keep it as more natural as possible but I have some fantasies about it...
Body top 90% it will natural with truoil but 10% I'm hypothesizing to give a light hand of some color to get a different contrast with the dark veins but note sure yet (some of those tones you're not getting if it is a blue or green)
The body back....my biggest fantasy is to try the Lichtenberg effect but I dislike my life not that much to risk the life for it so probably I'll move to another fantasy less dangerous like the Shou Sugi Ban, a light one, without "burning down the house"
Fretboard 99% it will only truoil everywhere
Headstock I probably move to a kind of rapacious profile
Probably I will change the pickguard (a deep Shou Sugi Ban one) but quite sure I'll give it a little mod to it because I'm gonna try to add a built-in LPB-1 boost just to make the first build easier and to give a punch to the pickups
The only thing so far that worried me is the little gap between body and neck. I didn't finish yet the instruction but I guess that a bolted neck don't need glue so I think that a filler is not the best idea....perhaps shaping a little piece of wood to glue to the body is a better solution
Some pics of the kit
Nice build and great music to everyone
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