Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit ST-Style Reviews

Ideal kit for home diy project, amazing result, you will enjoy

The set arrived on time carefully packed with all the elements and parts. The quality of work is excellent, it can be assembled and used immediately. But still I will process the wood by sanding and coating (transparent dark shade) to be able to see the beautiful patterns of the wood. The neck is beautiful, smooth, precise, it fits perfectly on the hand. Yes, you can invest in better pickup's, but the supplied kit is also great.

I highly recommend it, my rating is pure five.

A pretty decent guitar kit

Really well made, frets were almost perfect, very little flaws on the neck and body that are worth noting. Hardware is cheap, but easily replaceable. If you want a solid mod platform s style guitar with more customization options, this is the best way to go.

Great Guitar kit

The guitar that came out from this kit is one of my favorites. I used the pickups I wanted and changed the nut for a graphtech one although when I took out the one included one it was very resonant.

Great product, can yield a great guitar.

Flawless Product

It came with a safe package. All parts separated with the thick nylon bags. Also came from Germany to Turkey just in 15 days even in the x-mass period. Generally, I'm happy with the product but I must say that it has a wonderful neck. Frets are correct and no sharp ends. The body is light but it will be heavier after painting and mounting the electronics. I'm really happy and looking forward to getting another one.

A satisfying, straightforward, and decent sounding guitar project

After seeing videos on YouTube and varying quality (it appears the T-style kits are the best by far, which will be my next purchase), I was pleasantly surprised by the entire kit.

Firstly the body. Smooth and well cut, it could have been left as is but the sealant had to go so I could prime it for painting. Sanding by hand using 120, 400, and 600 grit sandpaper as I went, the sealant varied from very little along the back and front to seemingly truckloads along the belly cut. Still, when I couldn't get anymore out, it didn't look too different and I couldn't see any defects. Although the painting process would reveal some anyway (sanding and spraying over the two sections along the back resolved that).

The neck feels extremely smooth and shaping the headstock didn't take long (cutting by hand with a Japanese saw). The frets felt smooth enough out of the box that only an absolute perfectionist would be sanding and polishing them. More importantly, they're also level. Which happily saved me some work! :)

The pickups are decent ceramic ones without much in the way of breakup at the extreme ends. Functional and certainly on a par with guitars that use ceramic pickups from any brand that cost upwards of £200 (depending on how cheeky the brand is). If you want Alnico pickups, either buy a prebuilt Harley Benton (from £110+), a Kramer VS-211 (£109+), or buy a set of Alnico pickups either to immediately replace or later on down the line (set aside £20-£30).

The tuners are much the same as any inexpensive electric guitar. They work and, with the guitar setup properly, stay in tune. Although locking tuners would be advised at some point.

The same can be said for the strings, good enough for setup but I replaced them with a set of 9s I had laying around (budget Johnny Brook brand but they sound better to me).

The real joy though is having a guitar that you painted and put together without any need for soldering. Straight out of the box, you could have this all put together in about an hour or so - although if you're going to be painting this, obviously expect to add days to the build time to allow for adequate drying time as you build up the layers. Paint and lacquer (or clear coat if you go with that instead), expect to set aside around £15 or monetary equivalent for primer, main colour, and lacquer. Of course. if you have unused paint/varnish laying about...

Overall, I'd say if you're willing to budget about £50 extra to cover any tooling and materials you'll need, you'll have a perfectly playable guitar that will not look like any other and, provided you can play well enough, will impress all around you. Expect to tell the story of your kit build many times over! I built this for my sister for her to learn to play guitar on. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I get requests...

I give this kit 4/5 overall - but the enjoyment I derived from the entire project means it gets top marks 5/5 from me!

Nice guitar

Nice and easy building project. Gives you a good insight on the 'mechanics' of an electric guitar.

We used normal acrylic paint and finished it off with transparent finish.

The guitar feels fine, has a nice clean sound. Eay to adjust bridge and truss-rod.

Very pleased with it.

Nice

Really nice for learning about the gitarr and how it works.

Also fun to start building from.

Suprisingly good quality for the money.

Quality control

String heads get stuck in the tremelo block.. To save time and frustration of an exchange, I made some modifications for string removal by using 'pop rivets' pressed in the string hole of the trem-block and then knocking out the pin. This reduced the size of the string hole preventing the string heads from getting stuck in the block .

Pickups are noisy, even with shielding paint in the cavities and shielding under the pick guard.

I really wasn't expecting much from this cheap guitar. I repair pedals and amps and only needed something for testing them....

Great kit

I've tried kits from other manufacturers and these are significantly better. The necks in particular show a level of care to the construction and finish that is way above the competition. Hardware is functional but at this price is obviously not great. Upgrading is very simple to do and still brings the guitar in at a very reasonable price. The telecaster model is a little more simple to construct if you're doing this for the first time but neither should cause any difficulty for anyone with a little DIY experience.

Body poorly manufactured with patchy attempted repairs

Bought this as a Christmas present for my 13YO lad, for his first woodwork project. Shipping to UK was quick and efficient, but a quick look at it, before putting it away for the big day, led to serious disappointment.

I've rated sound as okay, giving it the benefit of the doubt, as we've not assembled it yet.

Let me start by saying I know this kit is cheap - however, it should surely be manufactured to a minimum standard that it could actually be used as a guitar when completed....

Neck pocket was routed way too big, then a bit of balsa wood (?) glued part way down the side in a pathetic attempt to stop the neck from slopping around.

Bridge screw alignment all over the place, sending strings to one side of the neck.

Pickup routing has broken out in places and trem spring cut out is broken out and split.

Overall not terribly impressed.

I will temper the boy's expectations when he opens it, but this is going to turn into a lesson on how to repair others' shoddy workmanship rather than a nice Father-Son project resulting in the lad having an instrument he put together himself and finished how he wanted it.

The next one we buy WON'T be a Harley Benton.

Can't go wrong

For the price can't go wrong with it as a second guitar, i wanted a ST style guitar with the wammy bar. For the price it's upgradable and lets you have a something with your own spin.

Strat Kit

Really enjoyed building this guitar for a friend... The strings supplied are really bad but the kit was good quality. I bought this kit after building a T style kit.

Good with a bit of work

There were some poorly routed holes

There's alot of fretbuzz higher up the neck

Those are the only problems the electronics work fine and sounds fine as well.

So a great project guitar for learning to work on your own instruments

It sounds

...like a strat and it works...but! of course material is cheap...you?ve got what you have paid for...you can rebuilt it on your own and do what you want to, it is easy...this is what is this kit focused on...so why not to make something unique from this piece

Ok to learn building guitars, not nicely done

There is a line that I draw when talking about price and quality.

Even though it was a cheap kit, I don't think that it should be manufactured without care.

The body's center line was at about 15 degrees off to the glue line of the wood pieces. There was serious discoloration on some. There was also a crack going through the thickness of the body, parallel with the top face, deep enough not to be able to sand it out.

I also had to redrill almost all the holes on the body, as they were either not in line or not in the right place.

The neck pocket had on its contour a router bite, which was covered by the pickguard, but still I consider it lack of care.

The neck was ok, after a fret leveling it became a great neck.

The tuning machines are really poor quality, but for this price I can't complain

The best way to describe the pickups is that they make sound :) it's nothing special, but again for the price of the kit you can't buy one decent pickup.

That being said, decent tool to learn how to build a guitar, do fret jobs and so on.

Poor material. Miss some parts so quality control needs to be audit to avoid such problems. HW doesn't have any quality what so ever. It only make sense if you want to start building your own guitar.

My first own build guitar

To fill up the Christmas holiday I order the ST kit. Although I just starting guitar playing with some old LP I build the ST rapidly without problems. The result was astonishing for such a low cost guitar. I still improving the sound by tuning the action. Now I am awaiting my 3rd guitar, a HB CST24T. I am curious!

What you see is what you get

To me this was a learning experience. Building the thing was fun, although I did miss a few tools to do so at first. But Wanting to get the guitar built I just bought the right drill bits and all.

After redrilling some holes and finishing the entire guitar, I enjoyed it for a while. Although I did feel that the tremolo detuned it too much so I wanted to mod it with a Floyd Rose trem, but found out the wood was way to soft to do that. After the mod was made, sadly. I'd say, if you're interested in learning to build a guitar, this is an amazing start. Modding isn't recommended, but still a good investment in knowledge. Just do it.

Making sounds

Overall good quality, but some pre drilled holes are out by some way. Not a real problem but it's a silly mistake, anyway will re drill the holes and get the kit up and playing although I am using pribora voodoo pickups instead of the supplied kit and better quality pots and switches. Cant tell you what it sounds like yet so cant rate it.

Fun project

I had a lot of fun building a guitar from this kit. Every component in the kit is usable, considering the price point. The neck is massive, I mean full on baseball bat and on the one that i got i had to do a lot of fret work (rolling the edges and sanding the fret sprout). Witch to be honest you should expect to do when you get a kit like this one. The fretboard is really dry and had a few crack, but nothing too serious. The body is super light, but it is a laminate of about 5 mm pieces of wood stacked on top of eachother and glued together. It's a fun project to build, but it is not worth investing in high end hardware and pickups in it