The modded Harley Benton ready to rock

Restrung with a Dean Markley Custom Light 9-46 set, with action, neck relief and intonation all set up as best I could, my Vintage Burst Harley Benton SC-450Plus Vintage Series not only looks a bit better than it did out of the box, but it also plays incredibly better and smoother. A real joy to behold as well as to look at:

Buying this guitar was a truly great decision.

And here's a little soundbite. It's running throught the drive channel of my Blakcstar HT5 ministack (Reverb 5.5, ISF 2, Trebble 6.5, Mid 6, Bass 4.5, Volume 2, Gain 6):

Refining the trussrod cover of the Harley Benton

Gibsons come with super elegant bell-shaped trussrod covers, attached with two screws, one on the top and one on the bottom. This is possible because on Gibson headstocks, you access the trussrod nut through a hole in the headstock, and there is room between the nut and the hole for a centre screw at the bottom of the cover. On budget guitars, the trussrod nut sits directly under the nut, so what you have on the headstock is not a hole, but a groove. As a result you need two bottom screws above and under the groove to attach the trussrod cover. Hence those ugly looking trapeze shaped covers you see on every budget guitar and building kit. Harley Benton is no excpetion to this, but this SC-450Plus model comes at least with the trapeze filed into a nicer, curved and roughly pointy shape.

Harley Benton VT Series trussrod cover.

You will have noticed, as I did, that this not only has a slightly nicer shape than the average budget trussrod cover, but it is also cut out of 3-ply plastic sheet. Now what does this tell you?

Permanently removing the scratchplate of the Harley Benton

Whether a Les Paul type guitar looks better with or without a scratchplate will never cease to be a heated discussion. Personally I like both looks. I kept the original scratchplate on my Gibson but chose not mount it onto a Les Paul kit I once built. In this case, I wanted to take full advantage of the beautiful vintage burst finish so I chose to remove the scratchplate. As a player, I don't rest my picking hand on it anyway.

That scratchplate will go.

The problem with removing a scratchplate is always what to do with the screwholes, Some put the screws back in, but that looks silly.Others cement the hole with some filler, but that's tedious to do and you might damage the finish in the process. So...

Upgrading the hardware of the Harley Benton

You will recall that one of the first remarks upon opening the box was that the bridge looked cheap and inaccurate. I therefore removed it immediately, to replace it with a spare Gotoh Tune-o-matic bridge I had never used in the SG project it was initially meant for.

The stock bridge was not a fine piece of hardware, and all of its saddles were slotted to the same gauge.

This bridge from my spare box would do a perfect replacement.

The other thing I had noticed was that the bridge and tailpiece posts weren't flush with the surface of the carved top.

Upgrading the fretboard of the Harley Benton

Today's operation, while quite time consuming, is by far the most significant in terms of improving the overall performance of the guitar. You remember that already upon opening the box, I had noticed that the surface of the rosewood fretboard was very obivously not up to standard:

The rosewood looks very raw, and the frets look very tarnished as well.

It did look pretty bad, and it felt bad too. The oxyded frets and the poorly sanded fretboard have a rasping effect on the strings whenever you try to apply vibrato or bends. As a result, these - quite essential - techniques not only become very uncomfortable and inaccurate to perform, but they also generate a lot of parasite noise as the string rasps against the raw surfaces. That, very clearly, put this guitar several leagues behind what I would call a decent instrument in terms of comfort and playability. And to be frank I had doubts whether I would be able to sort it out...

Examining the headstock of the Harley Benton

Most focus always goes to the body, so one may easily overlook blemishes or imperfections on the headstock. That would be a mistake since the headstock is where the strings are held and brought in tune. If the headstock and/or its gear are not up to speed, the guitar will likely be no good.

I had already noticed the A string's tuner shaft protruding a little. Anything else?

So far I've been rather pleased with the body, how lucky am I with the headstock?

Does the Harley Benton have a real maple top?

Maple capping a mahogany body serves a number of purposes, it defines the tone and general acoustics of the instrument, it helps protect the body against warpage, and it does offer superior aesthetic options such as flamed and quilted tops among others. On many guitars, the quality and look of the maple top alone suffice to shift the guitar into premium category, and/or to inflate its price by anything between a hundred and several hundred bucks. So what you get a full mahogany set neck guitar for €158 with a maple top that looks like bookmatched flame (one of the most expensive outfits of maple), you start to wonder:

• Is there truly a cap or was the shape of the top carved into the mahogany instead, like on the very first cheap Chinese guitar kit I bought a few years ago?
• If there is a cap, is it real maple, or something else, a softer and less noble timber?
• Is the flaming part of the massive top (it never is in this price range), is it veneer, or is it photoflame (a picture of a flamed top glued under the coating)?
• If it's veneer, how thin is it? Usually as thin as they can make it.

That certainly looks like a flamed top.

It does look bookmatched alright (i.e. symmetric along the axis of the guitar).

And it's evenly figured all across the surface.

So what's the truth of it? Only one way to know:

Cavity search on the Harley Benton

It is always worth having a look at the control cavities of any guitar because it's often very telling of how much care was taken to build the instrument. The cheaper the gear, the messier those normally invisible cavities can be. And that's also where it is the easiest to evaluate the quality of the timber used, because surfaces are generally roughly routed, not sanded, not painted or finished in any way. So here, based on the price point, I was expecting some sort of a disaster.

The volume and tone pots' cavity

The toggle switch cavity

And I have to say...

Embellishing the toggle switch of the Harley Benton

You'll recall that last time around, I cleaned up the switch tip. Well that was the easier part. What I really wanted to fix was this horribly bulky and ugly looking hex nut securing the switch, and the very inelegant, rather coarse, B&W switch plate:

On a power tool it would be okay. On a fine instrument it should look better than that.

Having said that, note that...

Cleaning up the plastics of the Harley Benton

Probably one of the most obvious telltale signs of cheapness is poorly sanded plastic moldings with flash around them. They look bad, they feel bad, but luckily in most cases they're very easy to clean up, and the results can be rewarding, both in terms of comfort and in terms of looks. So that's an easy place to start. Let's take for instance this bridge pickup ring here:

Flash on both sides.

Of course...

First quick fixes on the Harley Benton

Let's pick this up where we left off, and let's take that loose bottom strap pin down from the guitar attic to the workbench in the basement.

That pin knocked an ugly dent into the finish.

The rather thin and short screw came loose in no time, revealing that...

Close inspection of the Harley Benton out of the box

I always dread the first close inspection of anything I ordered without having seen it first. Zooming in on every little detail and finding every possible blemish is not being unfair, it's just what you would do anyway. And here I got loads to look at for my -- admittedly little -- money.

Starting with the bridge, which is spec'ed as a "Deluxe Tune-o-matic". It is a ToM alright but what is Deluxe about it I can't tell. The posts are the same simple ones you can only turn with a flat screwdriver, the chrome plating is quite gross, but most importantly the saddles look very rough and they are all slotted to the same gauge.

Even the low E (.46) doesn't sit snugly, and the high E (.10) is lost in the groove. Nothing Deluxe to me!

By the way...

Unboxing the Harley Benton

The order was placed at 3:40 on a Monday afternoon, the pack arrived on Thursday morning at 11:30, and even in the midst of the pre-Xmas madness, is only came so late because UPS mistakenly sent it to Cologne instead of Brussels at first, causing a 24 hour delay. Kudos to Thomann anyway for the quick and free shipping.

The guitar came thoroughly and neatly packaged with ample protection around it, hopefully it did not get damaged in transit. Straight out of the box, it did look very okay:

It does look almost as good as on the stock pictures.

Upgrading my bargain Harley Benton from Thomann

I have had a number of guitars over the years. It is fair to say I have plenty of them now. I remember some of the first Chinese mass produced pieces of junk I've had, twenty years ago. They were really terrible, and there are still plenty of those out there. I got rid of one just last week (and it was actually a recent one, from 2014, and of a brand owned by none other than the big G...). Total waste of trees.

Yet more and more often I've been coming across quite good reviews of white label Chinese guitars. In particular Thomann's latest run of their EOM branded single cuts seemed to stand out of the lot. And they do really look pretty on the pictures! Especially the Harley Benton SC-450Plus VB Vintage Series which comes the closest to my all-time favourite and fancy, the Desert Burst Les Paul Traditional.

That's the real stuff by Gibson.

And that's the Harley Benton's stock picture from the Thomann website.

What the hell, I thought...