Harley Benton Electric Guitar Kit ST-Style

i bought this kit as a present to myself. i was a bit nervous about how it would work out, but the result is a great looking, customized guitar that i customized even more with fender custom 69 pick ups and a quite complicated wiring and push pull pots to connect the pickups in almost any thinkable way. maybe a bridge to far for an amateur guitar player like myself. but definitely fascinating to build and to play. sounds wonderful with my vox ac4tv.

i always liked Stratocaster guitars, but never really played guitar that well to buy one or vice versa. and i really disliked the red and sunburst colored ‘standard’ strats with their white scratch plates. at some point i started to dream of a stratocaster in walnut brown with black details, but there was nog really budget nor the need to buy a guitar.

at some point i was drooling at the Squier classic vibe 60 for it’s sound and affordability, at the Harley Benton ST 70 Black Paisly for it’s looks and absurd low pricing, and the USA strats for their legacy. while still being confronted with my empty wallet, i noticed the HB kit guitars and started to consider to buy one and make it mine, the way i wanted it to be.

after a bit of research online, i took the risk and ordered a kit with additional tuners and whammy block as upgrade (thank you thomann for advising that), a bunch of extra strings and many black replacement parts to replace the original white details. in the meanwhile i had found out walnut fender strats already existed and the idea that i was going to make such an expensive guitar on a tiny budget was quite motivating.

i spent days figuring out how to color and finish the guitar, get a good deal for used custom 69’s pick ups, and figure out how to wire them up in the most versatile way with push pull pots etc. i lost myself in the theory of wiring electronics, ordered some more parts and a soldering kit and soldered a totally new scratch plate with none of the electronics that were in the original kit. (the kit comes with a presoldered scratch plate loaded with all pick ups, pot meters, switches etc wired up). the result of my experiment was a guitar with a lot of possibilities in sound, but was not as easy to understand in it’s operation (and the pot meters seemed to turn the wrong way too) but after a while i found my way in it soundwise, even though i sometimes still think about simplifying the wiring scheme and removing the push pull pots.

i sanded down the body and neck to make the body brown with water based stains in a mix of a few woody colors and black. the sanding took some time, but the staining went well. it quite easily turned out as i wished, which was a bit of a surprise as i expected a long road to find the perfect color with a lot of hard-to-repair mistakes. it was almost disappointing that it was so easy. i used gunstock oil as finish. the result was great.

after i finished the woodwork, i replaced all the white details (scratch plate, knobs, pot meters etc) by black ones and there it was. my strat style guitar in the looks that i dreamt of with the pickups that i wanted and a nice sound that was still a bit to complicated to navigate, because of the advanced options that i did not really oversee when i was designing the wiring. ;-) but i liked the result.

funny thing was that it took a while to get used to this guitar and that i preferred my epiphone dot for quite a while. only after i bought a second hand vox ac4tv amp and connected it to my ST style guitar i got really hooked by it’s beautiful tone.

all together i can say it was a great journey to ’build’ this guitar. i made it a bit more complicated by replacing all the electronics and using stain and oil instead of lacquer. but in it’s essence it is an easy to assemble kit that you can turn into quite a nice guitar while having a lot of fun. definitely a recommendation for anyone who wants to make a guitar to his/her own liking and anyone who would like to understand (better) how a guitar works. it is great!