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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- If you bought the individual parts for this guitar - even if you bought the CHEAPEST available to you at retail prices - you couldn't put it together for anywhere near the £115 Thomann price tag o this guitar. Tusq nut... tuners... reverse-headstock neck... green and black finished body... hard tail strat bridge... tuners... filtertron style pickups...pots, capacitor, jack socket and switch... Well it's obvious. It would be a fair bit more than £115 and in reality a LOT more than that if you bought a ready-finished body with matching headstock-finished headstock neck.
This guitar came closer to being playable than many budget priced HBs I've encountered in the past. Yes, it needed the action adjusting; the nut slots and the truss rod. Yes there were some clusters of high frets on an overall 'undulating' fingerboard (when under string loading) that I was able to clear up. But they're getting closer. A bit better fret levelling and end-softening work... a bit more time getting a low 1st fret action and HB would be there. As usual I did that work on this guitar - plus I fitted a couple of Tusq string trees to compliment the black Tusq nut so we're still looking at the purchase price + shipping (£125 all in) + my set up fee (minus the purchase cost of the Tusq nut) and plus the £14 for a pair of Tusq string trees. So a total of £125 + £128 + £25 onward courier postage = £278 all-in for a great-looking guitar that's now set up with a lovely low buzz + choke free action and which plays and stays in tune. That's NOT a lot of money all-round... but it IS striking that the work to 'finish' the guitar ends up being as much as buying the guitar. That's the true cost, as it always is. Of course, if you can do that set up work yourself then you get a £125 guitar that requires some investment of your time and skill. But the point here is that without the set up work (the careful attention to fret condition and levelness, nut slots etc) then the guitar IS still un-finished. The problem is that when we're young or lacking in experience we accept that the guitar we buy is 'finished' and ultimately live with the constraints that the factory 'finish' imposes on us.
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Hello Sam!
I wish you all the best and that your pain gets better soon. You can live with pain, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Get well soon and hope you sleep well.
Greetings from Andy from Lake Constance !!
Thanks Andy! It's lessening in intensity a couple of per cent each day (I think!) so I've been able to sleep these last few nights! And picking up a guitar a gain is a good sign :)
About the finish - it's not a wrap, but certainly feels that way. First dings and scratches showed it's actually sandblasted wood dyed black, white filler added and then painted with transparent green. I've sanded mine down and turned out the wood beneath it is quite pretty. Similar to ash.
You're right I think... I was just fascinated to figure out the process they went through. It was a great looking finish, that's for sure.
@@SamDeeksRelovedGuitars It's called a 'ceruse' or 'cerused' finish. And imo it looks even better with actual grain texture, like on Gibson Voodoo series. Pretty surprising to see such labor intensive finish for such cheap guitar - especially considering the veneered headstock.
Anyway, hope your pain is gone by now. Thanks for amazing content. Your videos are extremely informative. I'm actually waiting for a truss rod to arrive from china to test your banana method :). Unfortunately it's double action (couldn't find single or c-shaped on aliexpress). Hope it 's suitable.
I have the same guitar in orange blast. Absolutely love it. Set up using your Banana method.( not 100% perfect but a lot better. I need more practice) On an aside you have my sympathy, I had Shingles last year on the right shoulder & arm. The doc said over the phone I'm giving you painkillers you will need them. She wasn't wrong. Like random lightning strikes down the arm, rashes and constant pain. Crazy illness, hard to believe it sat in the body for over 50 years just waiting. P.S. I was lucky enough to be in time for the antiviral. Thank heavens.
Mad isn't it? "I'm giving you painkillers, you will need them" - well played, that Doc.
I hope you get better soon!
Many thanks Antonio. I'm slowly getting there, but what a strange and potent viral infection that was!
Good to see you back (nearly well), I’m just getting over a combined reaction to flu and covid vax (yak). That's the first time I've heard your banana bouncing on the frets , defo a paper wrap - look how uniformly aligned those grain lines are, now a pretty good sub £300 guitar. That orange worktop mat didn't stay clean for long, think you need a grey one next time - I don't know if it's just me, but had my audio on max and could only just hear you.
Sorry about being quiet... I think it was general feeble-ness :D I'm know some manufacturers used 'photo-finishes' of grain but I don't know whether a guitar could have an all-over wrap.... I just couldn't quite see / feel how they'd achieved this finish.
Thanks Sam. Can not wait to play this.
I'll be packing tonight ready for the off tomorrow Michael :)
Plays great, Light and low action
This guitar is definitely Harley Benton's take on the Slick SL55 from Guitarfetish. It's got different hardware appointments (tuners, controls, bridge) but has the same Filter'Tron type copies for pickups. The question becomes whether or not they were made in the same factories, or just eyeballed the GFS guitar and made a copy. I'm all about a good trebly kerrang, so I like the sound.
Well THAT'S interesting. I've not heard of 'Slick' as a brand. So it's a GuitarFetish product eh? Quick search shows you're right - they are very similar. The one I found was also relic'd
www.tdpri.com/threads/slick-sl55-1st-impression.1083658/
@@SamDeeksRelovedGuitars Yeah, that relic'ing a feature of the GFS Slick brand (named for Earl Slick) of guitars and guitar products. My main guitar strap is a "distressed" leather Slick Strap that I've customized with some paint and rubber stamps. I've got set of the GF-Trons that the SL55 is equipped with for one of my two in-process guitar builds.
The Harley Benton FLT90 is a very nice guitar but the Slick SL is much better quality. Worlds apart.
Interesting colour scheme. Pickups sound too bright for a Tele-style guitar.
As for shingles - the range can be from almost nothing to totally debilitating pain/itch (and sadly for you it sounds as if you are at the worse end of the spectrum). There is no rhyme or reason for the who, when and how bad an attack can be 😞
Hope you get over this attack soon, and don't have any more attacks.
Thanks Rob! You're right I do think I got a dose from the bad end of the scale. I drove the missus to various hospital appointments today and every bump in the road was painful (and there are loads of them in the West Country!!).
I think the pickups DID sound bright... personally I prefer taming high frequencies to not having enough of them. I quite liked the overall tone.
how do you decide "exactly 1.5" for the relief? is it just what this type of guitar deserves, or is it tailored to this one customer?
@@ChrisChocol unless a customer specifies a ‘feel’ that demands a higher / deeper relief, my target is ‘a tiny bit more than none’. This is very unscientific but I want to avoid backbow for sure; and a fraction more curved than dead flat is a way to be sure of that. How much? If you need numbers for your feeler gauge then 0.1 or 0.15 is slightly more than none and definitely doesn’t give a feeling of high action in the middle of the neck when played. After a while, you just get to quickly assess ‘yep, this is nearly flat but a whiff of relief; that’ll do’. Some people make strong arguments for dead flat. I can go with that - but how do you quickly tell the difference between dead flat and backbowed (which will choke off noted played in the 1st half of the neck)? Quickest way is by dialling in that tiny whiff of relief; “there - it’s definitely not backbowed now” :)
Just to add - you said "1.5mm".... 1.5mm is the typical target 'last fret low E action' that I set. If you meant THAT figure; it's a height of action that my customers (and I) seem to like. As with anything, I can go higher if requested but very often not much lower; experience shows me that for MOST wooden-necked electric guitars, the combination of 1.5mm last fret low E action (across to 1.25mm last fret high E action) + precision fret levelling is a workable / achievable target action without buzzes or chokes on notes and bends.
@SamDeeksRelovedGuitars dam Sam, thanks
had 2mm in my head from my little experience. seems trifling it's so small
really like the videos. thank you
Hope you are feeling better. What did you think of the sound of the pickups? I have the guitar in it's original neutral colour. Have ordered a neck to replace the reverse headstock, new tuners and will get a new bridge. I quite like the pickups. I don't know how close they are to Gretch Filtertrons, but the middle pickup was the kind of weak setting until I raised them.
Hi - I quite liked them. I thought they were very bright / brash but in a good way. Didn't stay with them long enough to really get a proper sense of them though.
And that's a wrap, right?
"It's (not) a wrap! Lunch everybody!"
'Personally'', concussion, stop moaning. Change the Broadronesque pick ups, it's an ugly guitar, change the machine heads, go to California, the truss rod adjustment should be enough. Go to California. Send me a postcard, please. Shingles-been there, done that.Twang.
are you OK, do you need some help ?
In case anyone was wondering, Eric's regular 'stream of consciousness' posts are just his inner Beat Poet coming to the fore :D You know what's funny is how it seems everyone's had shingles - yet in my experience, I don't remember anyone talking about it. Maybe that's just blokes & the fact that we don't share our health gripes?
@@SamDeeksRelovedGuitars Stop talking about beer and football while male suicide rates are far higher than females among humans. It is not 'weak' to be honest and open if you feel depressed and anxious. Trauma cannot be cured with drugs and alcohol. You don't have to be right. All you have to do is be candid.
@@ericcrawford9827 Agree with you. Thankfully I never talk about beer or football since neither of them feature in my life these days. Having said that, my 'beer stories' would definitely be longer than my 'football stories'!
@@SamDeeksRelovedGuitars Beer and football was a sexist remark., but any form of navigating away from why men hide their way from confronting issues that they feel they need to hide from society, other than trying to address results in damage or death of either gender.