Anyone have a Harley Benton guitar?

[CrowsofFritz]

I cancelled last minute. Have to move to a new place. The casino is causing all landlords to sell or raise prices.

[vomitHatSteve]

Any my order got delayed another 4 days.

Them saying that their estimated delivery dates are based on a good-faith accounting of info provided by their manufacturer seems pretty disingenuous since they are the manufacturer.

[vomitHatSteve]

Hey! My bass is in the mail. Huzzah!

[vomitHatSteve]

Wow, that was a fast shipment. They put it in the box tuesday; it arrived today. It definitely needs a setup tho. We'll see how it takes to the extra thick strings and downtuning

[CrowsofFritz]

Wow, that was a fast shipment. They put it in the box tuesday; it arrived today. It definitely needs a setup tho. We'll see how it takes to the extra thick strings and downtuning

PIIIIIIICS!

But yeah, regarding shipping, I had an album get to me in just two days from Japan. Crazy!

[vomitHatSteve]

Wow, that was a fast shipment. They put it in the box tuesday; it arrived today. It definitely needs a setup tho. We'll see how it takes to the extra thick strings and downtuning

PIIIIIIICS!

Oh fine!


Look at how low that action is! No wonder it buzzes at the 12th fret.

[CrowsofFritz]

Damn, almost makes me regret cancelling

[vomitHatSteve]

K, so i gigged out with it yesterday
It sounded good and looked very nice. Everyone seemed quite impressed by it.
BUT
Turns out it is an extended scale. Website says it's 34" scale but it was at least 37.5" from nut to bridge end. We put long strings in, but they were still a fraction short of the nut. I'll have to buy extra longs, which is gonna be pricey in b tuning
The bridge has these guide cylinders in it that are held in with tension alone and would be easy to lose track of. To make matters worse, since it's such a long scale, there's not that much tension and i kept knocking the strings off them. I even dropped one at one point
And the factory setup was quite bad

So with the right strings, setup, and technique, you could get excellent sounds from it. But i may end up replacing the bridge entirely so i can go back to my patented "slam the plectrum down as hard as you physically can" strum style

edit: corrected some measurements.

[Greg_L]

"slam the plectrum down as hard as you physically can" strum style

Atta boy!

[vomitHatSteve]

So update on my HB fakenbaker: I'm about $200 in so far getting it to where I want it to be. If I'd done all the work myself instead of kicking it over to a friend's guitar shop, I'd probably still be at about $125 or so.

Things I've done so far:
The stock bridge was garbage. The saddles are held on by string tension, and with a long scale like this, there's not much of that. We ended up replacing it with a standard Rick bridge, which did involve routing the body out a little. This was the cheapest bridge that would maintain the string height we needed without doing something janky with shims
The nut was cheap. We filed it down to fit b-tuned strings, but it still snapped during about my 3rd gig with it. We have another, sturdier plastic saddle nut in there, but if it breaks, we're going to have to go for one of the expensive ones.

I'm hoping that's all I need for now, but I wouldn't be surprised if something else goes wrong.

[rayc]

They def. aren't hard gigging instruments. My Rick12 HB is still doing well, BUT it doesn't get used like a bass, let's face it, or gigged so it's a different animal.
The long scale is the oddity - having not been advertised as such.