This is my Five String Explorer Bass. It's my first attempt at a Pit Bull Kit. I built the Bass fairly much as it came but replaced the bridge with a Schaller bridge to give a little extra adjustment. Apart from that, I modifed the control cavity to realign the volume control to be parallel with the body line and removed the tone control altogether after dowling the hole. The body is painted black with a pinstripe binding and then finished with a gloss clear coat. Maybe real binding on the next one. The neck was finished with Dingotone Clear neck finish. I have to say, I love the Dingotone finishes and I am currently using both neck and body finishes on an SV-1 guitar. I hope you like my new toy.
Finally finished my Explorer Bass Build. Took sometime getting in the parts for my modifications and getting the action right with the extra height on the bridge, but got there with the help of shims ! Really pleased with the result !
Finally finished this kit. It was my first time to build this kind of kit. I used a wood filler with black acrylic paint then mahogany stain then true-oil. I misplaced the bridge and had to adjust it later. Surprisingly the frets were perfect from the box. I needed only to work on sharp edges.
Finally! This was over 2 years in the making. I was pleasantly interrupted by a baby girl, but it's ready to break in. I still have an annoying buzz from the electronics, but I'll deal with that later. Nothing so bad as I can't take it to the gig this weekend. Very exciting. I learned a lot as this was my first build. A huge thank you to t his entire community and PB Guitars. I will do another!
Four photos of the new build, after erm two years. Ordered late '17 for Xmas '17 for my son, the body and neck were stained and then... nothing, until recently. Today I grew a pair and got my soldering skills on, and here's the result. The cavities are copper lines, the finish is matt, and the sound through his bass cab and a Rat pedal set to stun is the most doom metal sound imaginable.
Next: to a real luthier to set it up, dress the frets, and put some superior strings on it. My son - who in the photo is just in from a day working in a bike park, hence the dirty socks! - who came in damp and miserable after a long day hiring and fixing bikes in the British autumnal rain, and his mood span round!
Our first ever guitar build for my son and I ... I'm a computer programmer, and he wouldn't know a woodworking tool if he fell over one, so we think it turned out pretty well. Had a professional luthier go over it once we were done, and he was pleasantly surprised ... said he gets a lot of people bringing in kit builds that are "so bad there's not much I can do with it". Slight height adjustment on this one by filing out the nut, and it was good to go.
Not a "built using only stuff from the kit except for this long list of stuff I changed" build ... we don't really know what we're doing, so this was built with just the stuff from the kit, no modifications. Lowest string is a little quiet ... luthier thinks that's probably just a result of cheap pickups. Might be something we look at in the future, if I stumble across better "soap bar" pickups.
5 coats of matte black, airbrushed lightning, then 2 coats of high gloss clear. Again, I'm a programmer, not a painter :-D
An FV-B was going to be our next build, but apparently Pitbull doesn't have those kits anymore? Terrible shame.
Last edited by toksicy2kl; 15-06-2023 at 08:51 AM.
Reason: Adding details
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