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?

Well in fact I have very little to rant about. There's this protruding shaft there, but it's not unusual with vintage style tuners like these:

The vintage shaft is pushed into the hole but not bolted to the tuner machine below. String tension may pull it up a little.

You just need to push it back in, but be aware that it will come out again as soon as you tune up your next string. Never mind. If it bothers you, get more modern tuners with shafts that bolt onto the tuner itself. Alternatively you may loctite the shaft into the hole, but I would not take that risk because I don't want the Loctite to ooze somewhere I don't want it to go, namely into the tuner mechanism below.

For the rest, having determined that the headstock was a two-piece chunk of beautifully filled and finished mahogany with not so much as a speck on the painted top, I had very little left to do:

Those stickers are mandatory for importing and placing the guitar on the market in the European Union...

...but they spoil the beauty of the woodwork so I couldn't care less about them. Gone they are.

And because I'm a perfectionist, I had to clean up flash around the tuner pegs as well:

Tiny flash on the base of the peg.

Tiny file to get rid of it.

The last thing to check was the access to the trussrod. Often on cheap guitars, that hole there is as messy as the control cavities. Well, in this case, it is as clean as the control cavities were:

Nothing to criticise here.

Notice that even though it is not elegantly rounded down towards the head as on the Gibson, the nut is perfectly placed and slotted. I thought about rounding it but then I figured that it's not a bone nut but a plastic one, and if it is hollow, then sanding it down may ruin it completely. Not worth the risk.

Coming up next: the fretboard.