Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit DC Style

I assembled and spray painted the guitar in two days. It was very easy, providing patience is of the essence. Although some components feel rather cheap and therefore not as sturdy, to be expected at this price, with new pickup, bridge, etc upgrades the guitar sounds fantastic. It took me a while to adjust the truss rod to my requirements but in the end I got the guitar to sound and look the way I wanted. I hate compromise. PS I have rated the sound only one star because I never used the pickups it came equipped with, therefore I couldn't express my view, however, if I were to rate it based on my pickup upgrade, I would have rated it five stars.

I bought this to experiment with. This is dirt cheep and you want something like this to practice your painting and finishing on.
I did not even bother to try the electronics, they felt very cheep, and I had an Epiphone harness and pickups I used instead. The tuners also felt very cheap so I thrashed them along with the strings and the plastic jack cable.
I used the knobs. I like those!
Anyway: the neck fit the body perfectly and was better than I expected, a pleasant surprise. The was well cut and fine for my purpose.

BUT the neck dive on this guitar is tremendous. Even when sitting down it is too much. SG's are notorious neck divers, but this is far worse. This may be vary across individual kits, I don't know, but I fear the is not a significant difference.

I'd not built a kit guitar before, but always wanted to, and I'd always wanted a double-cut style guitar, so this seemed an inexpensive way in. Out of the box, all seemed fine at first, until I realised the instructions were subtly different from the collection of guitar parts in front of me. The instructions were for a similar model and one assumes the manufacturer had thought it 'near enough' so as not to go to the expense of authoring a separate document. However during assembly certain things became a matter of guesswork. Why was there a black unsoldered earth lead with nowhere for it to go? Why was the output jack routed through the front and not the bottom? There was scant information as to which pickup went in which position and the same for the wiring. Despite these challenges I was able (after painting) to put the guitar together in an afternoon, and the resulting instrument was easy to set up (no truss rod adjustment needed) and was a pleasure to play. I really think though, that the instructions were awful and a novice with perhaps less experience of working on guitars than I, could have been in real trouble.