Harley Benton Telecaster Kit - Part 1

As many of you will know I recently receiving the gift of a Harley Benton Telecaster Kit and as my degree is coming to an end I have been able to begin the project!

The body of the guitar came fully sanded and sealed so was ready for the application of primer. I bought all the finishing sprays from manchesterguitartech.co.uk, and I can definitely recommend that site - Steve was very helpful and patient answering my questions. I strung up the guitar body using an old wire coat hanger to an old clothes dryer in my garden as it is important to spray in a well ventilated area, such as outside. After reading the instructions from the website and doing some Youtubing I had in my mind the basic form of how to spray. This included starting the spray just off the body of the guitar as a buildup of paint can often occur at the beginning of the spray. With long, repeated motions the primer was easy applied. After three coats of primer I was happy the guitar was covered nicely and no grain was visible.

Guitar body with primer applied

I left the primer to full dry for 24 hours before spraying on the nitrocellulose finish. I decided to go for the sonic blue colour, a colour which I've always loved but never chosen for a guitar before, sticking to more traditional reds or blacks, but it seemed right to go for a bit of a different colour for this project. Spraying on the colour I took more care and attention not to let the lacquer build up as I knew this would be visible on the final finish. Again the process was simple and the results were really good.

Applying the sonic blue nitro

Makeshift guitar spraying solutions

Due to the nature of nitrocellulose lacquer, the colour finish itself would be an acceptable top coat, as it has a slight sheen and with some buffing would come up nicely, however I wanted to protect the body of this guitar so decided to add a few coats of a clear gloss lacquer. Again it's a nitrocellulose lacquer, so would not be like the thick poly finishes on some guitar bodies, and hopefully will age nicely. Applying the gloss in the same method as the primer and colour coats was simple. I am now in the stage of waiting for the gloss coat to fully dry - I am going to leave it for a week before buffing the finish to a mirror level of shininess.




Whilst waiting for the finish to dry I have begun work on the neck of the guitar. On the uncut headstock I copied roughly the Fender headstock shape and cut it out using a coping saw. This proved quite challenging, mainly because I haven't done accurate sawing before, but with some sanding I am happy with the results. No one looks at the headstock that much anyway... I also attached the tuners to the headstock, which was easy to do and they look fairly sturdy. This was one area a guitar luthier friend of mine suggested might need pretty immediate upgrading, however I will see how they cope with a set of my favoured 10-52 D'Addario strings.

I am really looking forward to hearing this guitar, it is slowly looking more and more like a telecaster, I just really hope it's usable and playable! Hopefully by this time next week the project will be complete. As well as these blog posts I will also create a video which will show the process of building the guitar as well as an audio demonstration.