tonymckenziecom | 9 years ago
Be shocked. Is this the worst guitar you could buy? A brand new Harley Benton SC450 Plus Vintage from Thomann with huge problems as supplied. I show the problems then try and repair the bad workmanship and try hard to turn it in to a better guitar, the results however are not worth the extra costs. I thought at one stage they were but silly me.
If you own one of these guitars (Harley Benton 450 Vintage) you might not want to look at this video - that is, unless you know yours has bad workmanship on it. I show how I gut this guitar, fix the inherent awful work from the factory as best could be achieved and make this guitar actually play like a cheap Les Paul might (but not actually remotely like a Gibson despite the money spent on the parts). It was far from the guitar as advertised before I bought it.
Cost to do it (including buying the guitar) was around £450 to £600 ($600 to $850) so was this all worth the effort? And do you have the skills to fix what was basically extremely bad workmanship that was a new guitar and 'checked and setup' (they suggested) as supplied in such a really bad way. Lets be clear - they did not check this guitar but they say they did on a little included docket. See for yourself what was supplied and be very shocked! The video shows exactly what was sold to me and I would not want to 'hide' anything about this guitar so that others can make an informed decision before purchase.
Here is some of what I did to try and fix this guitar: I fitted Bare Knuckle Pickups - really great pickups ('The Mule' Versions), completely installed new wiring, fitted genuine Gibson bridge and stop/tailpiece, gutted the electronics and finally set this guitar up correctly. Sadly wasted on this.
The result is a guitar that I thought might have had 'that' sound and had better play-ability than when I bought it, but overall the guitar still remained based on a 'basic flawed' guitar with questionable parentage and (maybe) woods and/or other quality issues. It will never improve. But if you are short of money, or if you own one of these then it's probably not worth doing this. I doubt that you will ever get that 'Gibson' tone from this guitar even after the hundreds of pounds extra that I spent trying.
I could have faffed around and sent this guitar back, but I did not, mainly because I was going to update it anyway. And I really did not want to go to all the trouble with returns.
Ultimately I removed all the parts later and gave up on this upgrade. It was just about fit for that. I would never give this guitar to anyone because, well, I like to keep my friends. Eventually it met with the band saw and was then really half a guitar.
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