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.

Can those posts be pushed further into their holes? (Note the stock bridge post without a thumbwheel on the left).

I tried gently hammering them further in without damaging the top surface. To that end, with the guitar resting flat on a thick yoga mat on my workbench, I laid a rubber hammer on top of the post and gently hammered the rubber with a steel hammer. The posts moved ever so slightly further in, not making a massive difference:

Better but not perfect. I did the same on the other side as well. (Note the Gotoh bridge and its post with a thumbwheel).

What remained then was to slot the blank saddles of the Gotoh bridge to the right gauge for the 9-46 strings I was going to use. Ideally a set of nut files such as this Göldo kit is what you need, but momentarily I did not have mine at hand so I used a thin triangular file, working my way gradually into each saddle only so far as needed to accommodate the thickness of its string.

To do it nice and proper I gently blocked (or rather rested) the bridge in a vice.

Luckily the bridge came with a thin centre marker on each saddle so I knew where to file. You'll note that on this model, all saddles are turned in the same direction, whereas on most Tune-o-Matic bridges, the three upper saddles are turned opposite to the three lower ones. I saw on a forum that using the appropriate tool, those tiny nuts on the back side of this Gotoh bridge can be removed, the screws can be released and the saddles can be reversed. However I do not have such a fine tool and I didn't want to strip either the screwheads or the nuts with thick pliers. As long as the intonation can be set correctly for every string, there's nothing wrong with all saddles facing in the same direction.

After filing, I sanded down the grooves with 600 grit sandpaper to minimise the risk of string breakage.

The end result looks much finer than the original stock bridge.

The Gotoh bridge sat perfectly on the posts of the stock bridge so in principle I could have kept them. However it came with its own, much nicer posts, ones with thumbwheels, so I figured that if by any chance they did fit the threads of the stock studs in the body of the guitar, I would replace them as well. Amazingly, they did fit, so as you have guessed from the earlier pictures, I now have thumbwheels under my bridge, allowing me to adjust the action of the guitar without a screwdriver if needed.

With that bridge problem solved, the rest of the hardware needed no particular attention. Unlike the bridge, the stock stopbar looked nice and sturdy enough so I kept it.

There's nothing wrong with this piece of hardware.

The last thing to do was to remove the protection foil from the Wilkinson pickup covers, to reveal their nice shiny chrome finish. The neck pickup seems a bit scratchy but clearly not enough for me to care.

Bridge pickup.

Neck pickup.

With that, the body's chrome harware was ready for restringing, shining away pleasantly.

Hardware all set.

COMING UP NEXT: Removing the scratchplate.