Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit Single Cut 5-stars Reviews

5 Stars all the way

A joy to build and the end product sounds and looks Amazing

Fantastic

I bought this to build a guitar for my partner as a birthday present, and she loves it.

I learned a ton about wood finishing, painting, and electronics.

Speaking of electronics-- the pickups are amazing. This guitar sounds better than more expensive guitars that I own (and I'm kind of jealous of my partner now, lol)

The neck pocket is also really well-thought out. Unlike bolt-on necks from Fender or Epiphone that just sort of end with a square block, the neck joint on this is curved to provide easier upper-fret access.

My partner loves this guitar and keeps it within arms reach next to her bed.

I would definitely buy this again. Really impressed.

Top!

Good quality, i paint guitar black burst turning to purple and blue. beatiful colors that i couldn't find in an ready guitar at shops!

Fun project for the family

I bought the Single Cut Kit to build with my nephew .

It was a fun afternoon.

Now the kid has a guitar for himself, and he loves it.

Self build kit

Bought the single cut guitar kit, really pleased with kit, nothing to do to the neck whatsoever as it has a brilliant finish, sprayed the body in clear nitrocellulose & it looks great, never sprayed anything before but following instructions & with the correct lacquer it has produced a lovely finish, obviously not workshop but as I mentioned (first time spraying) & the fact that carried the work out, I only changed the tuners, strings & rod cover but only for my own preference, just a cosmetic thing really. Delivered on time with no damage at all, considering the price of this kit you cannot really go wrong & the main thing is you actually assembled it.

Its a project

I bought this kit as a way to learn about guitar building and in general, have some fun. So here are my thoughts:

The body - quite soft wood. Cavities cut nicely, inside quite rough but its the inside so who cares.

The neck - suprisingly nice feeling maple neck. You will need a fret leveling. After a nice fret polish - really nice.

Hardware - Dump it. It is poor quality and honestly - barely usable

Electronics - again, dump them. You can keep the pots, they are half bad but the pickups are good for nothing.

In the end I built a nice guitar and used it more for experience and a funny memory rather than a serious instrument, so i suggest buying it only if you plan doing the same.

Great liitle kit

Firstly i didnt use the pickups in this kit so i cannot say the quality of the tone of those however its by far the best DIY kit ive purchased. The wood quality is perfect and easy to work with. The hardware is better than most other kits ive used and the feel of the guitar is great. Will easily buy again should i do another kit

Great value

Bought this as a present for my daughter, with her sister customising the body. Almost a shame to cover the body, as the wood is beautiful. Quality of finish is above what I expected - the frets didn't need filing for instance. Instructions are clear and assembly took about 2-3 hours. Highly recommend. A couple of suggestions. There was nothing on the wiring for the pick-up switch to show which way to connect it, so it took a loooong time of trial and error to get that right. The only quality disappointment was the plastic parts - the pick-guard especially, as this is so prominent (in the end I made a replacement from a tree in our garden). The pickup surrounds and the covers over the body cavities are also cheap and nasty, but that doesn't show so much so it's not such a big problem.

But these are minor niggles - this is a great value product, and sounds as good as my Epiphone LP, and plays just as well.

High quality of workmanship, I especially liked the neck (even for the cost of the whole set of such quality a neck cannot be bought). The store is super !!! Thanks !!!

Good for DIY projects.

Built two of these and both have perfectly aligned body and neck.

Fretwork is ok. One kit however had a slightly popped up 19-th fret. So get ready to press, file or level them.

Overall it's a great kit for it's price and can be a good base for your project.

Great starter guitar

I am amazed by the final product I got, when I sanded, colored the back with baiz and painted the front of the guitar. Great looking piece. The action is low, I am awaiting for the amp to come to me to test the sount of it also.

Love it

I really like it, good wood, easy to paint. Decent components. Can't say anything about the sound because I mounted the EMG pickups.

great guitar, fun to build

as a birthday gift for the two kids of my fiancée, i bought two LP style guitar kits. the way i finished and built the guitars would probably require as little as a few days to up to a week for one guitar, but i stretched out that period over about a year.

these kits are a great opportunity to own a personalized guitar for the lowest price possible. it is great fun to play your own build, made to your own preference. you just need some time, some inspiration and a bit of dedication. if you don’t want to customize the guitar you could even leave the guitar unfinished or just clear coat it so you could be done in a few hours. i kept the hardware stock on these guitars and used water based stain to color the guitars and finished them with gunstock oil. the only thing i recommend to upgrade are the tuners (and the strings). but the two guitars definitely turned out to our liking.

we live downtown and do not have much space to work on such projects, such as a balcony or extra room to spray paint the guitars or to keep the parts laying around. but as i made myself a Harley Benton ST style guitar a few years before and used staining and oiling as method for coloring and finishing that guitar, i knew how it could work if i could use the same technique on these two.

after sanding down the bodies and necks (they are prepared to be lacquered so needed to be stripped of that before using a different finish) i colored and oiled the wood. i used our kitchen table as workplace. the sanding is a bit of work and gives a lot of dust, but the result is great. one of the guitars is stained purely black, the second one fades from blue to yellow, which gives quite a great vintage effect. i didn’t sand down the second body and neck thoroughly enough the first time, so i had to redo that partly as the stain did not cover the wood well on all parts. that was a bit discouraging, but in the end it wasn’t that bad and actually this guitar turned out even better than i could imagine, even though it didn’t came out exactly as i planned. the hardest thing was to keep the binding on the body white. and even though i put some protective tape on it, after i removed it, i still had to scratch some stain of that got to the binding anyway.

assembling the guitars was quite easy and foolproof, even though sometimes you wonder if you should connect something to this or to that, it can not really go wrong and is quite interesting if you never knew how a guitar actually works.

remarkable fact is that the sound of the two guitars is quite different. they both have a clear lp style sound, but the one has a clearer and cleaner sound and the second has a warmer sound, a bit raw, like if the guitar has been drinking and smoking and living a rock and roll lifestyle for a few decades. it is an amazing sound, that makes me want to build a third one for myself, hoping that it will have the same voice. not sure if it are the pickups that are slightly different or the uniqueness of the wooden parts in the bodies and necks, but they really have quite a different sound.

the guitars were bought a few months apart and the second guitar came from a new batch, as they were sold out for a while in between. i guess you can not really predict how your guitar is going to sound exactly, but they both sound very well, especially if you consider the price.

pro’s

- good looking, classic lp style guitar

- cheap

- totally customizable in appearance

- interesting to build

- easy to assemble

- good sound

- scratchplate, etc also available in black (sold separately)

- complete

cons

- tuners work but are a bit wobbly

all together: these two guitar kits made me and their young owners filled with pride. finishing the guitar can be made as easy and fast or complicated and time consuming as you want, but should be quite manageable. it is not hard to assemble the guitar, and the results look and sound solid and good. recommended for anyone who dares to paint, lacquer or stain a bit of wood and knows how to handle a screwdriver. and of course for anyone who dreams about a personalized guitar and does not want to spend a fortune on it.

Very Surprised!

I ordered this kit to keep me occupied during this isolation in the UK. Built the kit, modified it and know I have a Les Paul style guitar that gives my Epiphones a run for their money, very impressed, although a lot of wrk went into building this kit to get it to a decent paable standard , but then again, that s half the fun! Better than just buying something off the shelf, I will be doing this again, once the kits come back in stock! S :)>>>

Well Worth It

Well worth the value for money, Things i would say about this product, It is great fun to make getting dyes to make a sunburst is the start then all the sanding.As it starts to come together you can really see the Satisfaction of making it youself. Really great product

5/5 on value for money alone. Great kit !

The kit is absolutely superb. For the price of one seymour duncan pickup, you get an entire LP style guitar. The provided instructional manual is great and very clear, and only a couple of basic handheld tools are required for assembly.

I highly recommend giving this a go. A great way to spend an afternoon putting it together, and guitar you're left with is great.

Only a couple of niggles.. There were no screws for the strap buttons as the ones provided slipped right out of the pilot holes. The truss rod cover pilot holes were slightly in the wrong place,,,, and that was about it !. The neck needed a little cleaning and the frets needed a quick buff (but an hour of playing would sort that). I don't know what the provided strings were like, I tossed them out.

Easy to build and customize

Easy to build and refinish. A nice kit with lots of modification options that you can do. I'm adding a balanced output to be able to feed a mic level output into my console. That way I can sent unbalanced to effects boxes and an amp and direct at the same time. This allows both a clean and an effects track to be recorded to my studio workstation. The only con I've encountered is that the electronics were not clearly labelled which meant I had to test and mark the interconnects before mounting on the head of the guitar. Building the kit has helped me learn a great deal about guitar construction. A number of things I never really thought about with my other guitars. Overall a beautiful kit and I'll hopefully build others in the future.

Unbelievable

This kit is easy to build, the quality of the neck is incredible for the money spent, the body is also ok, pickups are what you can get with the minimum expense but the sound is not bad at all, in reality at the end of the building you get a playable instrument which is a good base for future improvements (machine heads, bridge, pickups above all).

The it is also funny to build, definitively recommended!

A decent produkt for its price

A good kit , everything fits nicely together.

Quite joyful to build your own guitar and by tuning and finishing it with a nice paint job you will be proud of your work and learn a lot about guitars.

All up to you

An amazing kit in total, but let me break down the various different parts for clarity and to help set some proper expectations.

Wiring:

In general is kind of ok if you really have no clue what you are doing, but my advice would be to use something better for various reasons (scratching sounds, loud hiss, sticky knobs, bad switch),

Pickups:

They almost make the sounds you need them to, as long as you don't compare them to something else.

But the second you put a better set of pickups (irongear?) in it you'll have a beautifully singing masterpiece.

General hardware:

It works.

Change the tuners and you will get better tuning stability. Change the bridge and you will have better intonation, better sustain and less weird overtones.

Add some graphite in the nut slots (draw in them with a pencil) and it's just fine for now.

Wood and general make:

Amazing!

In all fairness, this is what you paid for. Everything else matters little.

Sand your surfaces with no shortcuts, show the finish some love, do a proper set up, do a fret dress and you have a GREAT guitar.

Summary: 98 euros of amazing possibility!