In fairness, this is a great guitar for $150 or whatever. However, as the headline says, stay away in the U. S. A. I now own 5 Harley Bentons. The first 2 came in mostly without a hitch (one had a lousy nut, but for $250 everything else was very good). The particular model that I am rating here came in my second haul and it is actually a pretty decent instrument. The volume knob is cheap and falling apart, but that's a really easy fix and or cheap repair making $280 (purchase + shipping + repair) a very good deal for this.
With that said, I got a Fusion 3 w a floyd (a super strat) along side of this guitar. It had some MAJOR fret issues and the high B/E strings were unplayable. In order to make an exchange, I would have had to have shipped back to Germany, and the cheapest option was in excess of $400 which is as much as I paid for it. My other option was to take it to a luthier and have them do a $500 refret (it came with stainless.) Since I didn't want to do either, I removed the neck and found that the frets were both unseated (there was a gap between most of the frets and the fret board), and many of the fret slots were cut way too wide. So, my options were between paying $400 to send it back, paying $500 to have it refret professionally, or pay $400 for the tools to do the repair myself along with 15-20 hours of elbow grease.
Thomann sucks. While they do in fact provide an excellent bargain, you will have a blemish or two (of the 5 I've owned, only one came in perfect shape and it was the most expensive HB coming in at $600 shipped.) You are simply rolling the dice as to how much the repairs will cost you. I have since bought 2 EARTs from Amazon. They're both flawless and can very easily be exchanged if there is an issue. The tele is just short of $300, which is maybe an extra $80 after you have this thing shipped. I HIGHLY recommend getting an EART to a Harley Benton. They're a much better instrument for roughly the same price and you don't have to deal with the worst music company in the world.
