I bought this a Gibson Firebird kit from Pango guitar kits in China. (guitarkit.shop)
For a start, it took them 2 months after I ordered it before they actually sent it. That was after I had chased them up to find out why the tracking number wasn't working several times. It was three months after I ordered it that it actually finally showed up.
On opening the thing up and doing a quick mock build, i noticed that the quality of this kit was questionable. In fact, it was pretty shite! The woodworking was terrible. It had a flame burling veneer that had been sanded through on a couple of corners and had been sanded completely flat at the edges in the middle of the guitar where the center piece is raised.
The neck was seriously bent - I put a flat edge on it and there were noticeable gaps at each end of the neck. (Bowing upward in the middle)
The hardware was also crap - the scratch-plate edges were a terrible cut and had burn marks, the volume/tone knobs look like they were made by 4 year old kids and the chrome finish on the tuners were irregular and poor.
I emailed them to point all this out (including photos) - they replied and apologized and asked me to send photos. (Which I had already done) They replied to that and said they would put it through to their quality control team for assessing. (While saying they would ensure to make everything right)
That's the last I heard from them about that.
I carried on building the guitar, but it certainly had a bit of a sour taste/feel as I did. I was able to straighten the neck using the truss rod. I spent a lot more time on it than I should have trying to hide the factory woodworking flaws. I ended up painting it twice, because even after the work I had done, it still didn't look any good.
I ordered a bunch of hardware to replace the crap they had sent me and made my own scratch plate.
I went to put it together and it dawned on me - it had three P90 pickups, a THREE way switch and 2 vol and 2 tone. I couldn't figure out how the wiring was going to work with this configuration, and their website didn't have a wiring diagram for it. I emailed them 3 weeks ago asking them how I was going to wire this thing up - they replied and said they were going to get their technicians to sort it out, take photos and send them through for me to follow. I'm still badgering them about this, even though I've since done my own research and replaced one of the tone pots with a on/off switch for the middle pickup and sorted it out myself.
I think I'll just keep badgering them until they block me or admit that it can't be wired up as it was...
It's finally at the point where I can say it's finished, but I can't say I enjoyed working on it much. I couldn't even be bothered taking progress pictures as I went!
What have I learned from this experience? Never buy another kit from Pango, and tell other kit builders to stay the hell away from them too!
Update - I asked for progress on the wiring issue yesterday morning. On the 12th February they said it would take 3-4 days. Yesterday afternoon (27th Feb) they stated that they need more time....
Given the quality of the guitar and hardware and my pi$$ed off attitude about the build, it actually looks and plays ok. Pit Bull kit for me all day long after this experience though!
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