TE-90QM Trans Red : Sadly not as good as it looks

It had to happen eventually, I have bought a few Haley Benton's and they have been great looking - well built guitars, unfortunately this one falls short of the mark. I'm not sure why there is so much difference in the quality but I suspect it comes from a different factory than any of the other models I have.

I had never owned a semi hollow bodied guitar nor a guitar with P90's before so I thought I would take the plunge on this unit as it was within my price range.

It is on first looks a very beautiful looking guitar but once you look deeper it quickly becomes apparent that there are some issues.

The main issue for me is the neck. I had to send back the first guitar sent (apart from a few minor issues) the neck wasn't fitted properly and had been "over" tightened which left some screws spinning which I thought may have been the reason I could not tune it properly.

The replacement had the opposite, two of the fixing screws had not even been tightened and were sticking out about 5mm which I gently finished off fitting. Unfortunately this unit also seems to have tuning issues and I am now trying to figure out why (hopefully I wont need to replace the neck).

On both units the fingerboard itself needed a lot of TLC and the frets were in a very poor condition with some sort of built up composite (corrosion) which was extremely difficult to get off.

I also noticed when sorting out the fingerboard that it appears to have been painted or stained black for some reason which kept coming off when cleaning. I found it strange that they had done this as on the sides you can seen it was actually a lovely medium shade of brown with a touch of purple in it which would have looked great on the entire board.

I feel that Harley Benton have missed a real opportunity here to make this an absolute winner of a guitar, which it still could become.

As noted previously it is a lovely looking instrument with a unique design that unfortunately is let down in the manufacturing and QC process.

At the very least HB I'm hoping that from my review you get on to sorting out the neck issues with your manufacturer.