Harley Benton ST-62CC Inca Silver

Having only a Les Paul electric, I was looking to add a strat style guitar to the arsenal since I do love the strat tone. I often use guitars in the studio when producing R&B, pop, and hip hop beats, and that's pretty much it - I'm not by any means a great player, and I probably lack some experience with different guitars to make a great review, so take that into concideration when reading this.

That said, I love this guitar, and I find it very easy to play. The neck is pretty thick and really smooth, and I had no sharp frets at all. It feels great.
The pickups sound great, are not very noisy, and give some very useable strat tones, imo.
The guitar was pretty well set up when I got it, but I lowered the action slightly, and fine tuned the intonation to make it perfect.
Using the whammy bar destroys the tuning though, so I added locking tuners which improved things a bit. It is fine when doing a little vibrato effect, but still not enough if used more heavy handed. Probably some further modding is needed for this to be perfect.

The finish surprised me a bit. The current photos look right, but I'm pretty sure Thomann changed them at some point, as I recall that the finish was way more "silver" than greenish when I ordered it. The color is OK, but I can't say I love it. That said, no flaws, dings or anything - it came in great shape.

For the price, I can't see how this can be beaten. For that reason, I think it's a great starter guitar, which you can always mod with nicer hardware later on. I have some way more guitar-experiences friends that were very surprised with this guitar, and liked it alot.
I don't think this will be my last Harley Benton guitar.

I bought this guitar for a partscaster project. I had fender pickups and neck ready to go but when it arrived, it was just so good out of the box that I ended up keeping the original pickups and neck and using the fender ones for another project.

I already knew the colour was something I wanted. The Inca Silver is more a cross between Gold and Silver. It's really stunning and I just had to have it. You'll pay a lot of money for a custom job with this colour as it's so rare.

The Alnico V pickups were clear as a bell, although I did have to adjust the height a little on the pickups to balance the volume and reduce string vibration interference. But that's par for the course on all guitars.

The neck was smooth and way better than what I was expecting. No fret sprout (which I'd ready was sometimes an issue) and the frests were nice and polished (something else I'd read was an issue). I had none of these problems.

The guitar stays in tune very well, after I made some adjustments to the intonation, action and floating trem height & tension.

The only things I will do in future is replace the machines and the tremolo block. I prefer a heavier, brass block for better sustain and the tuners that are in it, I don't think will suffice for that.

I'm thinking now about getting another Harley Benton strat in Lake Placid Blue but then again, this is more than enough to keep me happy.

100%, fully recommended.

Got it, inspected it, found some imperfections like under the vol/tone buttons there were three wrongfully drilled holes. One little mark in the painting but those were so small details that I don´t care.

Spent a few hours to set up the guitar, fret ends, a couple partly high frets, levelled and polished the frets, applied some lemon oil to the fretboard which seemed a little dry.

The tuners are somewhat stiff, but it may get better when applying some oil in them. No slack though. The nut is cut well, the intonation is ok, action was skyhigh but after the procedures I find the guitar to be very good for the price. I like the sounds of the Roswells, measured the ohms with a multimeter and they seemed to be between 5,60 and a little over 6 ohms.

No need to do anything radical here, I may change the bridge to a steel block one though. I enjoy the guitar now as it is, and this Inca Silver is just gorgeus, as is the darker, roasted looking neck! Good job!