I was not originally going to document this, but decided to put up some photos and describe a bit of what I've done to build my kit.
Just a little detail on the front - I'm a fairly experienced wood worker and have a reasonably equipped shop. I've also built a number of instruments already, some from scratch, and some from pieces of others. That said, in this kit, there were a number of 'firsts' for me. This was my first carved top instrument for example.
For this kit, I used the Siminoff book that IV includes with the kit in a combo. I found the book to be really helpful. I also read on this forum for several months. I used the search function to search out all the different steps I had to perform before and as I did them.
I started by graduating the top. I purchased a small finger plane from IV with the kit. I love this tool. I'm also terrible using a plane, but getting much better. I made a digital graduation gauge to measure the top with and found that extremely useful to measure the Siminoff graduations. (pic does show the back, not the top... but I love that plane!)
I then spent considerable time fitting the neck to the body. Unfortunately, the fit here in the kit was beyond terrible. Hindsight, I really should have reached out to IV for a new neck. In the end, I got a good fit in all directions except one. I used a digital angle gauge to help with the neck angle and set it at 5.5 degrees (it glued up at about 5.3 when clamped hard). However, I have a left to right tilt, which means I ended up with my bridge angled a bit - I shaved one foot a bit and raised one adjuster to deal with this. Overall, it is 1.6 degrees to the right. does not affect sound, but bothers me from a build accuracy perspective.
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