Harley Benton TE-62DB CAR

The guitar looks amazing and the build quality and finish were near flawless. Just a couple of tiny blemishes in the finish on the back of the body and that's it. I had tuning issues at the bridge where strings were pinging out of tune while playing. I fitted a bone nut, round barrel string trees and a Wilkinson bridge with compensated brass saddles and the tuning issues were gone. The strings were cutting into little notches in the metal bridge which obviously caused the pinging noises and tuning problems. After these upgrades the guitar plays fine now and i'm happy to have bought it.

This was my first HB. Living in Australia, we have Artist Guitars, which I guess is our local HB competitor and I've bought may guitars form them. However, they don't offer double bound teles, so I had to pull the trigger on this. Shipped for a few dollars under AUD$400 landed in Melbourne. That's pretty impressive. Arrived well boxed and no chance of damage from shipping. The only flaw was that the tone knob was tightened at the nut. A few twists of a wrench fixed that. The weight is great and sounds from the pickups are classic tele. Don't get sucked in to changing them. If you play in a band, you wont have to. The fret edges are its let down. While the fret work is good with no buzzing after I adjusted the truss rod, the edges are a little sharp across the neck. Intonation is fine for a tele too, which means they drilled the holes for the bridge in the right spot. The candy apple red is a great addition to my collection and I look forwrad to playing it on stage.

Pro's. Out of the box it looked good,the neck feels great,no blemishes.Tuners do an ok job but i wasn't expecting that much from them anyway. Pickups sound surprisingly good so i won't be changing them.Overall a very nice first impression.

Con's. The action was high and alot of fret buzz. Lowering the action made it worse so i checked the truss rod,decent enough relief in the neck. Out with the fret rocker to see how uneven the frets were,not good.Levelled the frets and managed to get 1.75 and the treble end an 2.00 at the 12th fret bass end without too much buzz. Changing the strings every ferrule fell out of it's back pocket.Superglued back in.

To be honest for the money this is a good guitar despite the work i had to do on it. Out of the box it was not gig worthy so think about taking it to a luthier if you're planning on taking it out live. Mine i would descibe as salmon pink if you think it's going to be red. I bought a cheap guitar with low expectations so i feel i got good value for money but wouldn't buy another one.