Harley Benton MS60 set up

Pete couriered me this brand new Harley Benton MS 60, hot in from Thomann's online shop for a full set up. It's a budget guitar - retailing at £107-ish before shipping so always interesting to judge whether spending the same money again on couriering it to Reloved Guitars for a set up makes sense.

What did I find? Not too bad a guitar. Playable out of the box? Again, the answer depends on who you are and your expectations. This HB required precision fret levelling to iron out buzzes at the desired low action - but not much; just a light work over.

The first and most annoying thing about this guitar was the amount of buzzing and rattling from that engineering masterpiece, the tune-o-matic bridge. It was hard to even assess the condition of the frets and notes thanks to so much bridge rattle. The action started out at 2.5mm at the bass side and 2.0mm at the treble side on the last fret - too high for my liking. Bringing it down quickly revealed some buzzing particularly on the thicker wound strings.

The nut overhung at both ends... and the slots were a bit too low (almost) for my liking on some of the strings. My decision was to lower all the slots to the lowest ones - 0.2mm. From that point IF the guitar then didn't play well I would shim the whole nut instead of doing repairs on the two slots that arrive already cut too low.

As it happens, the 0.2mm worked out fine so I didn't need to shim the nut.

There was evidence of one fret being glued with superglue (some visible spillage) - just as had happened with the HB Les Paul I bought for Dave recently.

Once I'd set the nut slots, the relief and done some fret levelling AND packed the tune-o-matic bridge with rubber inserts to stop the damn rattling, it was playing nicely.

The final insult (thanks again tune-o-matic) was having to take off the bridge and reverse 3 of the saddles to reach the correct intonation. As it happened it was the opposite 3 saddles to the ones I predicted, but the inconvenience was still there - something that's all too common on guitars with this bridge.