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...