Harley Benton ST-90SA Swamp Ash DLX Series

My exemplar looks good. Its not the best looking grain but certainly not the worst. The strings were rusty but Thomann agreed t send new ones. The middle pickup's g-string pole piece is staggered too low. It basically on the same level as the b-string pole piece. This is wrong and Thomann agreed to compensate me for it, selling me the guitar as B-Stock which is ok with me. Otherwise the pickup sounds good.

The pickguard is UGLY :) but we all have heard this so many times right ;) Will change that soon to Brown 4 ply Tort.

All electrics work well. Pickups sound good but need some brightening up on my Bugera V5 Infinium.

The frets and fretboard is flawless! Awesome fret work here eventhough some frets dont touch the board completely. They should have been pressed in a bit more. As long they dont start moving all is good. They sure are well leveled and crowned! Frets had slight patina which was kids stuff to remove with some fine steel wool (first protecting the fretboard of course).

The Tremolo works very well and needed a bit tightening so to create balance between the string tension and the trem springs. This is important especially if one plays bending style a lot.

Nut is very likely bone and is cut well.

NOW! The neck heel and neck pocket were not in tight fit! I assume the guitar builder first assembled the pickguard on the body and then fitting the neck to the body. I say this because the pickguard is hanging 2 mm over the edge of the neck pocket pushing the neck away from the body for that much. I had to shave the pickguard a bit to get a ood fit.

Low E string sounds dull above the 12th fret even after changing new strings. Im still trying all the tips and tricks to fix this (lowering pickups, adjusting intonation, arious string action, down tunning, fixing the saddle for Low E ...)

All in all a very good guitar for the money! Oh and the neck is C shappe but not thick nor too thin, just right I would say.

EDIT; after trying for some time now to adjust the intonation above the 12th fret and not succeeding I lloked closer at the fretboard and discovered that the frets above the 12th fret were misplaced!!! No wonder I could not fix the intonation they were spaced wrongly. Thomann took the guitar back and gave me back my money. I ordered the ST-62MN Black instead and now have a very fine guitar indeed.

First impression of the guitar was a good look, but a really bad chemical smell. I had to put the guitar in another room for 2 days to let it lose the worst of its annoying smell. The wood grain on the 2 piece glued body is really nice though not a top notch quality (maybe grade B). The finish is smooth and feels nice. Fret ends poke out a bit, so you need to file them down. String action was at at the upper limit of whats acceptable for an electric guitar. Trying to lower the action resulted in buzz. Intonation was adjusted well. Sound was good and stratty, but very noisy in the single PU positions.
Normally i don't use a tremolo, if i had i would have seen the major issue on this guitar probably sooner. So it took until i changed the strings to find out, when suddenly the 2 point tremolo bushings came out of the body. After some disassembly and removing the bushings from their holes (by hand!) it showed that they were fixed already with small wood chips.
Conclusion: a 2 point trem guitar with too big holes for the tremolo pretty much make the guitar worthless or due to expensive repair. An option would be installing a 6 screw tremolo while filling the 2 bushing holes, anyhow for a new guitar its too much work. Its a pity since the guitar is not that crappy, nevertheless i was sending it back, luckily Thomann agreed with a refund.