Harley Benton TE-52 NA LH Vintage Series

I could not believe how great it looked when I took it out of the box, there were no visible flaws, looks much better in the flesh. The neck has a great feel to it. The pickups are great, I thought that would be a definite mod - the tone is pure tele, even the tuning pegs are passable, they hold their tune and look great, however I may change them for higher quality ones. It’s quite heavy, but I personally prefer that. The pots a smooth and nicely weighted.
The only real negative is that the cavities do not have any form of shielding. All single coil pickups, unless you buy noiseless ones are noisy, especially with high gain. There are loads of YouTube videos that teach you how to shield the cavities to greatly reduce the noise. I purchased two A4 sheets of copper self adhesive shielding for £8.00 and followed instruction carefully on a hand picked YouTube tutorial from an expert - you need to do some soldering and adding earth wires to the pots And output jack, but the rest if the work is quite easy. I also tightly twisted the hot and earth wires from the pickups and to the output jack, this also reduces the hum. When completing this task I was amazed at the difference, it virtually got rid of any hum, the difference was literally night & day - I would defiantly recommend this mod. The only other thing I did was to file the fret ends and polish up the frets, which were quite scratchy, this is quite normal for a cheap guitar, but easy to rectify yourself - again there are loads of top luthiers that show you how to this on YouTube. It’s worth taking your time doing this and after filing, use varying grades of sandpaper for smoothing the fret ends only, doing so will make the fret ends ultra smooth, just like on any high end guitar. To finish the frets, I used an automotive metal paste polish to shine them up. The frets now are super smooth and shinny. This guitar is a no brainer, even if you are a skilled pro player, with a few cheap mods you can have a quality tele costing over 10 to 15 times than the cost of the HB, even with the mods.
I also purchased some brass saddles, they are supposed to give you more sustain, but to be honest I did not see a great difference, so the stock ones will still be OK, but I do like the look of the brass ones, another cheap mod, about £7.00 for a left handed set too.

Ordered sat , arrived Wednesday , as always thomann are a delight to deal with, tracking is great and email letting you know it's arriving that day is very handy. I bought this guitar as a back up , I use a USA standard for gigging and I need another tele in case something goes wrong , well it's gone very right .
First though what's wrong , I don't know how they do it but with all 3. Guitars I've had from thomann the strings are all tarnished so expect to change them straight away , I'm a stickler for new strings so I change every month or every third gig so you might be ok with a bit of a clean with some fast fret.
The nut is always too high , this is common on every guitar , i put a capo on the first fret , have a play , if there's no buzz then the height of the string above the 2nd fret is the optimum height , remove the nut and sand the bottom till it's the right height and put back, if you take too much away use a strip of wet and dry sandpaper to shim , the higher the grade the thinner the paper so you can get it perfect.
The frets are tarnished , polish out with some 00 wire wool and while your at it have a run down the back of the neck with the wire wool as well.
I had a set of compensated brass saddles which I added as well )7.99 eBay) and then I did the string height and intonation.
These are all common faults with guitars 5 times the price of this one so it's nit picking to the extreme m now onto the good things about this guitar.
EVERYTHING ......seriously it looks great, the body is a lot lighter in hue than the pics on the site but that's the only thing light about it , it's a heavy body and you need that for sustain , the neck is lovely ,it's the first HB i haven't had to fret level or anything , it feels like a much more expensive guitar and it looks like a much more expensive guitar and here's the kicker it sounds like a much more expensive guitar , I seriously think these wilkinson pickups are better sounding than my American standard , that's fitted with a SD humbucker in the neck slot and I was planning on putting the old fender one in this but no chance , it sounds exactly like a tele should , the tone and vol pots work perfectly for once with great taper . I was playing this till 2am last night and when I stopped I just looked at it for 10 mins in shock , I'm a pro musician with lots of guitars at the high end so I was doing comparisons using a looper to go tone against tone and this knocked it out of the park.
Forget about getting that classic vibe or that Mexican , go for this and spend the money you save on an valve amp .
I was going to relic this , reshape the headstock and put a fender sticker on it but no way , I'm using this live next week and I want everyone to know this is a Harley Benton guitar that cost £120.
Buy this , go for the brass saddles as well as it improves the sound and intonation and youll have a guitar better than a triple the price classic vibe with an hours work.

This is the second TE-52 NA LH I've bought, having very regretfully sold the first one I bought (review below). Big mistake. The very fact that I've bought a replacement is testament to just how good a guitar this is. The build quality is excellent, and the rest - well, here's my original review:

I write this review with the price firmly in mind. I was looking for a rhythm guitar, and having bought the outstanding CST-24T, I decided to give the Harley Benton TE-52 a go. At around £115, I didn't think I could go far wrong. When it arrived I was knocked out - this truly is a great looking Telecaster copy, with a really lovely finish. I expected a little setting up would be required; however, I decided that I'd simply tune it first and give it a try. The action was a little too low but the intonation was pretty good. But the first time I did a string bend, well... The string grated horrible across the fret, as did any bend in any position. The fret ends were finished well, but the top surfaces were a bit rough. I am going to set the guitar up and fit heavy gauge strings, but I will have to deal with the frets first, which is a little disappointing considering the quality of the CST-24T I bought. However, when considering the price, this Telecaster copy really is a great guitar and is highly recommended."
I have to say, I'm upgrading my review to 5 stars. I polished the frets and set the guitar up. And now, well, I just love it. I can't put it down.

And as I said last time: all I can say is, just get one. You will not regret it.

Got this on a whim, because I wanted a basic Telecaster-like platform and to see what the Harley Benton rumors were all about.

Though it arrived apparently well packaged I'm guessing the UPS monkeys managed to somehow squeeze the box into too small a space which ended up bending the axle of the tone pot. Operating it during play was extremely awkward. Customer service at Thomann was on the case though, they sent me a complete spare control panel so I could make the instrument (near) perfect again.

Because now it really is almost perfect. The body is flawless. The neck perfect. A slight bulge in the pick guard though. The tuners are great and feel very precise. Nut is cut very well. It even arrived in tune. Fret work is great from the first to the last fret. No high frets. Action is on the high side of medium. Intonation is good. The neck feels as good as it looks. Neck pickup sounds just like it should. Bridge pickup is probably this quitar's only (slight) weakness. It sounds good but the neck pickup is so nice it makes the bridge pickup look bad :). I may end up replacing it (and the bridge) for something else, though realistically speaking there's really no need.

There's one flaw at the back. The string holes are not in line. No big deal but it does look sloppy. Also, If you're looking for something light you're going to be in trouble with this guy though, mine feels really really heavy at 4254 grams.