Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit T-Style Reviews

great fun

i got this guitar kit because i wanted to learn the inner workings of a guitar.

i had a lot of fun putting this together and it plays like a dream.

It comes with instructions and all the tools you need.

Every part comes in a separate bag so its easy to see what to do.

I was surprised with the build quality of the guitar.

the body is a solid piece of wood and has a nice grain on it.

The wood was already treated so you dont need to do anything with it but you can if you wanted to.

the guitar had that classic tele 'twangy' sound and is a cheap alternative to a fender or squire.

I hope to try my hand at another guitar kit soon

Pretty good - quite fun weekend project.

I actually like the sound of this basswood based kit and the pickups while not top notch are pretty reasonable,

I spent quite a lot of time with mine cutting the headstock to Telecaster shape (and almost as much money on paint/lacquer) getting it to look quite professional.

A few niggles with cable routing holes not being drilled from neck pickup to control chamber and really poorly drilled machinehead mounting holes which were completely out of position for one machinehead that required filling and re-drilling.

Shame about having a top loading bridge and not through body string loading. Bridge is longer than standard Fender too so not straightforward to put a fender bridge on as the mounting holes will not align.

Great Telecaster type Kit

This is my second one.

Great kit for the price can not fault it.

Arrived at the normal speed fast, packaged well and complete.

I have built a number of guitars over the years and recomend this kit for anyone who might not have built one before as it is a comprehensive kit of parts.

As I said great value for the money you will not be disappointed.

Regards

AndyU

Fantastic value for money

The kit arrived on time and in good order. This is a outstanding kit for the money .The body is three piece basswood ,nicely finished and sanded smooth. The neck was straight , with good frets and a good quality rosewood finger board with no grain filler !No sharp edges !! The tuners are very good but not of the highest quality but do stay in tune .Everything else included is very good quality, electronics are good , pick ups are good and even things like the screws are good quality . If you are thinking about building a kit this is the one to buy . So let me tell you about the build I finished my body in a wudtone finish , the body really came out nice. I cut the head stock with a jigsaw using a very fine blade into the shape I wanted and used a satin varnish just on the headstock.The back of the neck is already finished in a satin finish so I have left it like that and has a very nice grain pattern . Assembly was very straight forward just take your time . 90% of the predrilled holes were in the correct places . The only ones that were to big for the screws were the ones for the jack plate but this is easily remedied with some wood slithers used to plug the holes .Once assembled and set up I was really surprised how good this kit sounds really twangy on the bridge pick up everything you would expect from a tele .

T-style guitar

This is a good quality guitar that is easy to assemble. Components are better than the price suggests and the body and neck are made to a very good standard. The head stock takes a bit of work to reshape but this can be done by downloading free templates from the internet. I treated the body using a few coats of Truoil and this created a remarkable finish. A few frets needed rubbing because they were slightly proud but all in all this kit is excellent value for money. This is the second kit I have bought and I have been equally impressed with both.

Nice cheap intro to kit guitars

Great for the price. Fretboard is good. Body is decent. I bought this as an intro to guitar finishing and from-scratch setups. Pleasantly surprising in terms of playability and sound (apart from the super bad bridge pickup).

Way better than the price would suggest

Quite frankly I'm amazed at the quality of this kit. The body is made of nice wood with an excellent finish which doesn't need much more than a few hours sanding to get it ready for lacquer/paint. The neck is a nice piece of maple with a good rosewood fingerboard. The fret job is great too - no rough ends or edges. The pickguard is 3-ply (I'd expected it to be a cheap brittle single ply). The hardware is adequate, and along with the pickups will probably be upgraded in time.

All-in-all, its worth way more than the price tag, and I suspect we'll buy more in the future :-)

Great buy

This was project number 2 after completing a Jazz Bass a couple of weeks earlier. A lot of fun to do and great value although there were one or two issues such as a couple of screw holes not being in the correct place and the neck not being completely straight but for the money you really can't complain.

Fairly obvious points but worth highlighting, if you haven't tried one of these before then it's worth remembering that you will need to get paint and lacquer for finishing it, and while there isn't a lot of craft skill required reshaping the head or body its a lot easier if you have access to a workbench and half decent tools.

Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to get to know gutars without risking their pride and joy.

Excellent value for Money

I'm very impressed with some aspects, less so with others, but overall this is superb value.

The impressive bits:

- The neck is really nicely done, fret edges are nicely rolled with no sharp edges.

- The body overall quality is good. It's a four-piece slab, put together well.

The not-so-good bits:

- My body had some very minor dents, which a bit of wood filler sorted.

- I had to expand the bridge pickup routing a little to get the bridge plate to sit right.

- Not all the screw holes are 100% accurate

- The supplied machine heads seem like the weakest part, lots of slop/backlash in the movement. I replaced these before fitting.

The jury's out on the pickups and the solderless wiring harness - I'm old fashioned I guess!

In all, though, I'd really recommend this as a good kit to enjoy finishing and assembling a guitar for the first time.

Great kit in almost every way

I bought this kit as a 1st thing of this kind in my life.

The good:

Assembling it was very easy, however, plan on your body finishing options, they can be time consuming.

Every important hole in the wood was in the correct place.

Neck is surprisingly straight.

Pickups work well, but have in mind that their sound is hot exactly ultra high quality.

All electronics work like a charm, no hum, no scratchy sound when turning pots...

I was worried about tuning machines, as there were some bad comments about them, but they are 100% good enough.

The bad:

Some (2) holes on the body for mounting pickguard were few mm off. Took me 20 seconds with a powerdrill to fix that. (you could probably do that by just screwing the screw straight in the wood if you don't have powerdrill)

Neck slot on pickguard was about 1mm to narrow, so i filed it to correct size (another 20sec of work).

Slight fret buzz on lower frets of low E string, nothing that can't be fixed

The ugly:

Body is made of 3 pieces of wood, and that is not the most beautifull thing in the world.

Wood has a few small knots, but nothing too bad.

tl;dr

MUCH MUCH MUCH more than you could ask for this price, 10/10

Decent, cheap, started kit for thpse who want tp experiment

I bought this kit to get started on building my own guitars. I have no previous knowledge of electronics etc so I thought this would be ideal.

First of all, let me point out that this is a cheap kit so don't expect £1000's worth of quality parts. Not going to happen. However you do get so nice budget parts to have a try with. You will also need to shape the headstock as it is a wedge shape in its original shape.

Once put together, it plays ok but does need some setting up etc but the instructions will show you how to do a basic job on that to start you off. I wouldn't bother with the free strings you get though. Put some decent ones on instead.

My "tele" now has a paisley pink finish and is ready for some new quality pickups etc to go in it.

Overall , its a good way to start you off. If you don't like the way it plays then you can get replacement parts of auction sites to sort most of those issues.

Pleased with the outcome.

Good quality for the price

I saw many bad kits that cost more than this with lower quality.

4 piece body, nice cut, correctly drilled, good neck, fretwork as expected poor, but anyway I will refret this and change nut. You can leave the parts that don't affect on sound, but other parts (pickups, electronics, tuners and bridge) should be replaced if you want decent sounding and playing guitar.

Great budget kit

I bought this kit to have something to play on while I was temporarily working on a project in Germany. I didn't want to give a lot of money for the guitar since I had a few already at home, and since I'm a DIY guy, this seemed like a great deal.

When I received the guitar, I was quite suprised to see that the guitar was playable to say the least, and seemed to be of quite better quality than a lot of the similarly priced alternatives. Sure, the frets needed serious work (filing, dressing, leveling), not all parts fit perfectly, and obviously nothing is perfectly finished nor do all parts fit perfectly. But still, with a little final setup and finish work, you get a very playable intrument, that even produces a decent sound with the stock pickups (with suprisingly little noise for single coils).

All in all, I would highly recommend this as a beginner guitar, or as a nice, cheap DIY project.

Not bad, but Kit S-style was better

I built before one Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit-S, which was super quality. Now with a minor disappointment considering the slightly twisted neck. Otherwise the wooden parts were ok and the pickups were only slightly worse than before. The sound volume is uneven: e1 doesn't play loud enough. This can be compensated with EQ in amp.

I made another body from pine: it gives a special warm tone to the instrument. Anyway this kit was far less expensive than a separate neck plus pickups plus extras.

Excellent value for money

I just bought this and I have to say that I put it together straight away just to make sure everything worked and to see how it sounds. I was amazed, for £60 it's fantastic, plays well sounds pretty good - i love it. Only downside is probably that the positioning of some of the screw holes is a bit dodgy but with a bit of jiggering this is not really an issue. Buy one, you won't regret it.

tele kit.

Body and neck very good. hardvare- not the best. Pu bad. in generel far over expected quality for the Money.

If you just asamble right from box, it will be a guitar slightly under medium. If you got skils and maby a little expiriens it CAN be a very god guitar.

Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit T-Style

Since I've always wanted to have a Telecaster and had interest in DIY, I bought this gutar kit. All required items were included. No soldering was needed. Even a set of strings was included. The guitar neck was delivered with a top plate in the raw state. The final shape had to be designed by myself. All parts fit very well together. The body was already so far treated, that it just needed to be sanded and painted. The fully assembled guitar sounds very similar to the original. The very simple mechanics and the very slightly warped neck are still tolerable for the purchase price.

A fully functioning guitar

This was my first a attemp to actually built a guitar, so I bought the cheapest kit i could find.

The building:

First at all you should try if the neck fits onto the body. At my set it didn't fit perfectly because the neck was i little bit to wide. But no problem, just a little bit of filling and sanding. The body is already prepared, so you can im paint it immediately. I didn't know that, so I also sanded it and prepared it with a filller coat. I used standard car spray cans for the painting. It's important to paint in thin layers and wait at least 12h between. If you want a really smooth surface you have to sand the body in between. At the and 4-5 layers of clear coat. The neck needs no painting or clear coat.

The rest of the assembly is easy, it's just screwing there is no soldering necessary.

The set up ( neck, bridge, string action) was not a big deal. Only the high e-string is a little bit near at the edge of the neck and the tie bars are very sharp. The filling takes a lot of time.

I don't know if the quality of the guitar kits differs, but I'm very happy with my self built guitar. The mechanics are surpringly god and also the pickups aren't that bad.

NB: The guitar weights about 3,6kg ( In my case with a lot of paint)

Surprisingly good

I bought this for my husband as a Christmas present and he has just finished putting it together. He changed the bridge plate for a string-through-body type and used a recessed jack socket but, other than that, all the components fitted together with no problems. He has made a few adjustments to the truss rod and intonation and was planning to level and dress the frets. In fact it plays really well as it is and he has left it to settle down for a while before he decides whether to level them or leave them as they are. Excellent value for money!

Don't overlook this genuine bargain

For a first time build look no further. Quality parts and when assembled one great sounding guitar. i would thoroughly recommend this and a lot of my guitar playiing friends have it on their wish list.

Buy one, BUY ONE NOW!