Ok, so here is the build diary of my very first Pitbull Guitar kit. It's a Telecaster TL-1 kit that I've decided to build straight out of the box, no modifications, small steps etc. The colour choice is the Wudtone Cherry Flamenco, with the silver highlights and extra gloss/no ageing as the final tint. I went for the colourless tint for the neck finish because I want a more 'white' look for the neck than the more common aged yellow (which I plan to do on a Strat build later anyway).
I know there's been some conjecture on here about putting Fender/Gibson decals on these bodies but I'm only making it for myself so for now I'll just copy the logos, but I DO plan to scratch build my own designs down the track and they will definitely have their own brandname/logo.
I must admit it was bloody exciting receiving the box from the posty and opening it for the first time to reveal all the goodies contained within! Apart from the actual guitar parts, a nice touch was the branded Pitbull stuff in there aswell, which gave the feeling that someone had actually prepared the kit with a bit of love. I should also say that there was brilliant communication from Adam too during the purchasing process. Very happy.
Anyway, I did a bit of dummy assembly that night and decided to work out my scale/bridge position etc and to drill the holes for the bridge and neck before I started to stain it, just incase it buggered the finish up later.
I didn't go nuts with hours of sanding because it looked/felt pretty good to me after going through the different grades a paper/steel wool and feeling by hand, but who knows, maybe it will come back to bite me that I didn't spend hours - I guess it's all a learning curve. I actually spent more time evening out the edge curves around the body to look get it all looking uniform.
Next it came to time to start-a-staining! I gotta say I was a bit hesitant to start with the colour but it's amazing how easy it goes on! Unfortunately once I applied the first bit of colour I discovered I had a pretty large glue spot towards the bottom of the body that I didn't notice when damp ragging the body beforehand. I went and bought myself a set of those cheapo wire brushes and worked the area up a bit as suggested in a post by someone in the glue thread. I then applied what I had left of the deep colour coat and manage to mask/mottle the glue spot up a bit. As you can see in the pics it's still there but I suppose it's not as bad as before.
Hit the neck with it's base coat of colourless stain tonight which gave the neck grains just enough colour to stand out a bit more. So I'm pretty happy with the progress so far, just have to be patient for a couple of days before moving onto the next coats.