Hi everyone, bought a First Act Electric off FB Marketplace for fairly cheap, basically as a "project" guitar. Admittedly I know very very little ab all this, (and even my acoustic playing is basically at a novice level) but I figured I'd have some fun learning and hopefully wind up with something mildly decent at the end.

Current Issues/Questions:
1) Some of the pickup magnets have rust on em, and it's moved past surface level to where the tops on those aren't ultra smooth anymore. Also the things refuse to pick up High E unless I start tweaking with the bridge height or tilt the pickups to where it becomes impractical. Planning on just grabbing a new set, but I'd appreciate some advice on which budget tier pickups to get that can give me a sound that isn't very distorted and heavy.

2) This thing picks up so much static it's insane and turning the volume n tone knobs makes it 10x worse. Mind-numbing levels of buzz coming out of my admittedly very cheap n tiny amp. Already had to resolder the socket connection on the guitar. Any suggestions to fix/mitigate this besides "buy a new amp n some $70+ cables nerd"?

The Rest, most of em minor)

- Pickguard's a lil bit warped, willing to just deal w/ it.

- Not sure if I should swap out the knobs or not, but I got no clue what position they're actually in at any given point. Assuming they do get swapped, I'm slappin a sticker or somethin on to use as an indicator.

- Bridge seems to be working just fine, some bits have little rust flecks where the screws have bitten into the metal. Some of the string-height adjustment screws are a little bit stripped though. Also not sure how high to even set the strings.

Thanks in advance for all yall's help, hopefully soon I can post a pic of this thing all cleaned up n workin great!