Greetings all...
Welcome to my first build thread on this forum - hopefully I can contribute to the community here as much as I've learned through pursuing the threads.
This is my second Pitball kit build, first one being a flying V style guitar I knocked up a few years back (https://i.imgur.com/9GUlxfs.jpg)... Was a fun build but I don't play it much as not fan of the fat Gibson style neck.
I've recently started playing Bass a lot more in the local church band here - I have a cheapo Yamaha 4 string I picked up when Billy Hyde was going bust a few years back now but I'm noticing a lot of the songs we're doing were originally done with a 5 string so after looking around for a cheap 5 string I figured I'd try my hand at building one when I spotted the IB-5 kit.
The kit rocked up last week and on first inspection I had mixed feelings. I was hoping for decent grain pattern on the body as I've always liked ash with a natural finish and have done a few guitars now with swamp ash like this. This seems to be ash but not the species I'm used to working with. Fortunately I think I've got a winner with this one still - the grain pattern differs a little from piece to piece but I think it will still work for a natural finish.
The neck on the other hand is quite disappointing. The fretwork is atrocious along with the nut and nut slot. Quite a few of the frets are shorter than the width of the fretboard by a mm or two. I'm debating whether to go to the effort of just refretting it - I have a spare set of jumbro frets sitting in the draw so perhaps when it's all built and if I'm happy how it turns out I might go ahead and do it. The upper 12 frets also look like they aren't seated properly... On further investigation the centre of the fretboard is actually flat - seems as though whoever was in charge or radius'ing the fretboard decided to take a break and forgot to finish the job. Only way to fix that is to pull the frets and finish radius sanding... I'll give it a fret level anyway and see how much of an issue it ends up being. The neck also appears to have a bit of distortion, I wouldn't call it a twist. The bass side is dead flat, but the treble side has a slight bow. Once the strings are on and there's some tension I'll let it sit for a while and so the neck settles before playing around with the truss rod. The nut was horrid, it looks like it had melted at some point or something and was assembled by a toddler.
The neck pocket seems ok and fitting the neck is tight with no slop and seats nicely without any glaring gaps.
A quick dry set up to see what we're working with...
More to come...
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