Harley Benton TE-90FLT LH VW Deluxe Series

I currently own 3 Harley Benton electrics (TE-52, CST-24T and this one) a JB-20 bass and a GS Travel-E acoustic.

So far this has been the only Harley Benton I've chosen not to modify at all. After a quick DIY setup the guitar feels and plays brilliantly, holds tune, and sounds huge! Oh, and it looks killer!

To my mind, the time of fearing budget guitars is over. I'm a professional musician, and played over 300 shows last year. My Harley Bentons got equal stage time to my USA Strat, and frankly far more compliments! Once covid is dealt with this TE-90FLT will absolutely be coming out on stage with me.

If you want to see it in action you can head to my YouTube channel (ptfguitarist) and jump straight to my Harley Benton playlist.

Highly recommended guitar, regardless of whether you're just starting out or you've been doing it for decades!

After watching a number of youtube reviews of harley benton guitars,i finally decided to pull the trigger and see if the HB hype is justified. As I am big fan of T-style guitars,the choice has fallen to this cabronita style telly.
The guitar came in almost perfect condition with decent setup. Only thing that required work was output jack which was loose. No biggy, it was 5 minute job to fix this.
I was pleasantly surprised with the built quality; this feels and looks like much more expensive guitar. All the parts and switches ( tuners excluded) are the real deal. Playability is also great ; it is light guitar (which i prefer) and the neck feels amazing.
As for the sound, filtertrone style pickups were perhaps the most positive surprise for me as i thougth i would swap them for sure, given the price of the guitar. Boy i was wrong. Pickups have their own character with a lot of single-coilly chaim and snap to them,but also at the same time having paf-like humbucker characteristics. They work great both clean and with overdrive.
As a last point i would like to mention perhaps the only weak point of the guitar- the tuners.
They are inprecise and feel cheap which leaves a bad afrertaste in,what is otherwise, a great guitar.Of course these can easily enough be swapped out,so it is not a deal-breaker,but i think this guitar is good enough to deserve much better quality tuners as a standard feature.To recap if you like the looks of it and are looking to add telly-style model with filtertrons to your collection, i would highly recommend to give this model a try. You will not be disapointed.

You know what was a great surprise about this guitar and the best thing about it as far as I'm concerned? (Hint: it's not the rarely-seen pickup type or the style.) It's the RADIUS of the fingerboard! Yes, it looks and feels like the neck has a vintage-style (small, rounded) radius. So it feels surprisingly like an older Fender or one of those nice Fender Japan reissues. Makes me scratch my head as the reviews on Youtube mention that it has a flat radius fingerboard. Did I get a (welcome) production-line anomaly delivered to me on this purchase?
Love the color and the style. Con: I hate the volume knob location. Just like on a Strat or Jazzmaster, it gets in the way of my strumming hand. I removed and relocated it as I usually do on my double-cut Fender-style guitars.
Thomann's best and most original Tele style guitar. Definitely not as extremely heavy as the TE-52 and TE-20 that I also purchased. With Thomann, I feel like a 53-year old kid in a candy store. :o)

I have only been playing for about a month but I love everything about this guitar. The only thing I can compare this to is a super cheap strat copy that I got from "a certain" online retailer. The difference is staggering. For just a little more money I got so much more guitar with this HB. Right out of the box the action and intonation are spot on, the fret ends are smooth all the way down the neck. The finish is beautiful and the tones from the Roswell pickups are amazing and I'm loving the reverse headstock. I couldn't be happier. I would absolutely purchase an HB again. Great Stuff!!

Pros:
Great neck, very good fret-work. Very comfortable to play.
Also the finish overall, looks nice.
The tone is great.

Cons:
Came with the selector completely chipped off...
One of the saddles had different color (??)
The tuners were quite mediocre - i expected that, and intended to replace them anyway.
The tone control was like On/Off switch.
The neck didn't fit exactly in the socket.

If I'd noticed all of these things earlier - i would return it...But at the time I decided to keep it because of the pros above. The problems looked fixable (to me).

I am very happy to spent that so much time on researching the many possibilities Thomann gives to us lefties, this guitar was a great choice. Only issues with mine are that the tone control does not make any difference at all, the pot knobs and the selector are a bit wobbly, but these are easy cheap fixes, wanted to dig there anyway.
Also the reverse headstock is fine on a leftie guitar, as there is a plethora of 6L tuner sets to choose from while in 6R much less option available. Stock tuners here do their job ok for now.
Out of the box the frets needed filing and polish, the neck half-turn on the rod, a fresh set of 9 hybrid strings, setting the action to medium-low and intonation, but it is what you do with every new guitar.
Despite the chambered body - mine is a single piece of beautiful grain ash - and bellycontour this is a heavy guitar, did not weighted yet but feels heavier than my JB-62 but worth it's weight in gold. Okay, silver.
Thank you Thomann!