My experience in kit guitar building:

I bought the G/A TL kit just before Christmas 09, as I wanted a reasonably priced, good quality Tele clone to go with the new amp I had hoped to purchase in the New Year.

So I bought a partial kit from Chris, (sans pickups & bridge-plate). I started off, by sanding back the body and neck with some 800g wet and dry paper till it was nice and smooth, then went up to 1000g. After some good rubbing, I then went to 2000g wet & dry. That got a nice finish happening. Also as a good tip to get it flatter, after a good sanding, sponge the wood down with a warm, damp cloth or sponge to bring up the grain more, leave it to dry then sand some more. It helps flatten it out better.
I did this 2 or 3 times.

See Pic below:

Next tip was also to BUFF the raw timber with some 0000 grade steel wool! This will bring out a nice semi-mirror finish.

Next came the staining! I chose to do a transparent, faux sunbursty type blood red to orange/yellow to natural on the body edges and just plain yellow on the neck. (To give it that vintage Fendery type of look/feel)

After several coats of water based craft stain, I sanded some more to flatten the raised grain, staining brought up.

Then, it was OFF to the Finishers! Took it to a furniture finishers here who specializes on poly urethane finishes. Even though furniture is his mainstay, he has sprayed numerous guitars and pianos over the years. He even HAD 1 Baby Grand frame in the workshop to finish!

He sprayed it in 2 coats of very light poly and sealed it. Now in hindsight (being 20/20) it should have been 3 coats. Some of the Ash grain still came thru on the body but it adds a NICE texture.
The neck came out beautiful and flat.
See pic:

Those stencil sets are SO hard to come by these days too! NO1 it seems, even older than I (40 & up) seem to remember Lettraset lettering sheets!

WHY is it only ME that remembers them??? Oh well found something suitable in K-Mart! (Lucky)
Came up NICE didn’t it??

Final part of the puzzle was assembly & setup.
For this, I took all the finished parts to Jim Cargill of Cargill Custom guitars and he put it together, setup the neck and dressed the frets for me as it was a VIRGIN neck.

Come up Mickey Mouse didn’t it?

Now, as to the parts used, all were as supplied in the kit, except I opted for a Set of Noiseless Hard Tele Pickups from a 3rd party supplier as well as a Modern Stainless Steel Tele Bridge.

Now, this guitar, plays and sounds GREAT, has a nice bright ring, good sustain due to the ASH body etc, and string thru construction. Has ALL the classic Tele twang and spank, with BIG output due to the high power nature of these type of pickups, plus the added bonus of ZERO noise!

Still authentically Tele, without the big price tag!

All up, I spent around $650 making up this guitar, and it was WELL worth it, considering it’s made HOW I wanted it, to play, look and above all, SOUND!

A good, workman’s guitar, made to a very reasonable budget (I did as much of the work my self to save money) and only contracted out work I didn’t have the tooling or skills to perform my self.

Well WORTH the effort as far as I can say, & recommend it to any guitar/bass slinger for fun, reasonable price and above all, SELF SATISFACTION!

I hope you other amateur guitar builders find some of my experience doing this helpful and informative. (As well as entertaining, a read!)
Thank you for reading and Thanks above all to Guitar Aust for the kit and this competition.

D. Procter, VIC, Australia.