MichaelW
Well-known member
Ok, I'm not even going to bother saying this is the LAST ONE....because I think I said that 2 guitars ago.....or was 3? Or maybe it was a bass, or 2 basses? I'm losing track.....hahaha.
Lot's of TL;DR below.....
I was so impressed with the Harley Benton "Jaco" fretless bass that I got recently that I found myself looking at the Thomann site at what else Harley Benton made. A Les Paul Junior was something on the way back burner for me, and I was actually thinking about building one at some point and using that as a platform to dip my toes into doing a full finish on a set neck guitar.
The "Junior" is somewhat of a specialty guitar and you kinda have to "get it". A of people don't appreciate all the various sounds, tones and applications you can get out of a single pickup guitar. A lot of it is in manipulating the tone and volume controls, a lot of it is in your hands and how you play it. I won't claim to be proficient at it yet, but it was actually watching Tommy Bukovac's video's and hearing him play and talk about his Juniors that got me interested again.
Single pickup guitars just have something about them that makes them sing in a different way. My personal opinion is that the absence of a second or 3rd pickup reduces the magnetic pull on the strings allowing it to sustain longer and have more harmonic content. But I can't prove that empirically, it's just a SWAG.
Anyway, there's a whole host of interesting extremely affordable guitars and basses from Harley Benton and my understanding is that they are sourced from different manufacturers by Thomann and quality is a bit hit or miss. But the "hits" generally get a lot of rave reviews, which I generally take with a grain of salt.
The LP Junior is definitely one of the ones that gets a lot of rave reviews, much like the Epiphone LP Special I recently got. The price is insane, $159...??? I have no idea how anyone in the food chain makes any money at that price. Shipping to the US was $62, which is less than it costs me to ship a guitar within the US.
Kinda nuts. But I couldn't resist. There's a couple of models, the standard model and the "FAT" model, which has some slightly different specs. The FAT allegedly has a 59 fat neck carve. Comes with Macassar Ebony Fingerboard and has a stacked P90 with a coil split. They were also out of stock. So I grabbed a regular one in Pelham Blue. Kinda glad I did, the "standard" neck is pretty hand filling and I don't think I'd want anything bigger. It's a very comfortable rounded C shape neck very similar to the PRS Pattern Regular (what used to be called "Wide Fat" profile". In fact the standard neck is very much like a true Gibson 59 carve. I have no idea how much bigger the "FAT" is but I bet it's more like a '58 baseball bat carve. I would have preferred the Macassar fingerboard but mine came with an Amaranth FB.
Amaranth is also known as "Purpleheart" and is usually an exotic premium tone wood. It costs an arm and a leg if you want a Purpleheart fb on a custom guitar.
So this is the first thing that I don't like about this guitar, they dyed the fingerboard to a uniform black color. I wish they would have left it natural purpleheart, which can be various hues of red, purple and brown. The heartwood of Purpleheart can also have some very striking figure. The grain is similar to a rosewood but it's harder, more like splitting the difference between rosewood and ebony. Very surprising that Harley uses Amaranth a lot in their guitars. Although its the more plainer trunk wood.
The finish is a very convincing "new" Pelham blue and well done although there was some overspray here and there. The fretwork was immaculate, just blows my mind how good the fretwork is on these cheaper imports the last 5-6 years. The frets were dead level, fret ends beveled and dressed, frets are all well crowned. The frets seem to be a tad bigger than Medium, I would categorize them as medium-jumbo. I did not have to do anything except give them a final polish with the Dremel.
The tuners are Wilkinson branded Kluson style tuners with period correct plastic oval knobs to give it the right look. These are excellent tuners. Very smooth, no backlash and hold tune well. The nut was some cheap plastic (more on that later).
The bridge was an adjustable BADASS style bridge, which I personally detest. But that's a preference thing. For a lot of folks being able to intonate a Junior is a plus.
The electronics, again surprisingly good. It came with FULL SIZE Alpha pots made in Korea. These are actually very good potentiometers. Downside is that they used B500k's for the volume instead of log. The pickup on the standard version is a single coil P90 made by Roswell. Super cheap on Amazon but I am amazed how good it sounded on a $160 guitar. Alnico 5 magnets (allegedly). But it was wound pretty low, about 6.9k and a bit on the bright and thin side.
This was intended to be a mod platform for me (and I guess for a lot of folks). I ordered a Wolfetone P90 "Meaner 90" which is his medium output P90. It's just around 9k and perfect output for this style guitar for me. Wolfe Macleod is a super nice guy, super responsive and communicative. I placed the order and he emailed to let me know he got the order. Then emailed me later in the day to tell me he finished winding it, then shipped it the next day. I got the pickup 3 days after placing the online order.
Amazing. Big shout out to @Big Monk and @cdwillis for the recommendation. I had never heard of Wolfe Pickups before. I'm definitely going to be getting more. They're a great value right now with his 25% discount code.
So starting at the top, the first thing that had to go was the plastic nut. It was well cut, perfect nut action in fact. But I replaced it with a bone nut. After popping off the old nut I had to do a little work making sure the surface was flat, all the glue sanded off and the new bone but would sit perfectly flat and against the fingerboard. I use a set of small cheap diamond files I got at Harbor Frieght for these little jobs.
I have the new "pre-slotted" bone nut fit and roughed in here. A dab of tghtbond glue, and the best clamp in the world is just stringing it back up and letting it sit under tension while the glue dries.
I'm one of those that likes to do the final shaping after the nut is installed. I have a couple of little files I made like over 30 years ago for these tasks. It's just a regular file, cut down and epoxied to a hunk of teak.
After shaping I'll hit it with some 400 grit and then 800 grit dry sanding.
Then the final step, I've been liking this Scratch-X stuff lately, does a million little tasks from car headlights, to boat repair to guitar stuff.
Finished nut. Not my best work but it'll do.
Here's a spot of paint overspray that I mentioned. Hard part was to scrape the overspray off without scraping too deep into the dyed fingerboard.
This is the original wirng, very clean, full size Alpha pots. Cavity was painted with shielding paint but not very well.
When my pickup showed up I was impatient to hear what it sounded like even though the replacement bridge I ordered hadn't arrived yet, so I installed it and it sounded like TOTAL CRAP. I had horrible ground hum and I tore my hair out for a couple hours trying different things to fix the issue. I finally gave up and concluded that I must have put in a bad pot. So I ordered some replacements. While I was waiting, I decided to strip the guitar and re-shield the cavities with the MG Nickel shielding paint. In the process of stripping I found my problem. I had wired the output jack backwards......
. Just goes to show, all the experience in the world doesn't alleviate "dumbassedness" which I can be often guilty of.
Anyway, I went ahead and repainted and let it dry.
Continued in next post.......
Lot's of TL;DR below.....
I was so impressed with the Harley Benton "Jaco" fretless bass that I got recently that I found myself looking at the Thomann site at what else Harley Benton made. A Les Paul Junior was something on the way back burner for me, and I was actually thinking about building one at some point and using that as a platform to dip my toes into doing a full finish on a set neck guitar.
The "Junior" is somewhat of a specialty guitar and you kinda have to "get it". A of people don't appreciate all the various sounds, tones and applications you can get out of a single pickup guitar. A lot of it is in manipulating the tone and volume controls, a lot of it is in your hands and how you play it. I won't claim to be proficient at it yet, but it was actually watching Tommy Bukovac's video's and hearing him play and talk about his Juniors that got me interested again.
Single pickup guitars just have something about them that makes them sing in a different way. My personal opinion is that the absence of a second or 3rd pickup reduces the magnetic pull on the strings allowing it to sustain longer and have more harmonic content. But I can't prove that empirically, it's just a SWAG.
Anyway, there's a whole host of interesting extremely affordable guitars and basses from Harley Benton and my understanding is that they are sourced from different manufacturers by Thomann and quality is a bit hit or miss. But the "hits" generally get a lot of rave reviews, which I generally take with a grain of salt.
The LP Junior is definitely one of the ones that gets a lot of rave reviews, much like the Epiphone LP Special I recently got. The price is insane, $159...??? I have no idea how anyone in the food chain makes any money at that price. Shipping to the US was $62, which is less than it costs me to ship a guitar within the US.
Kinda nuts. But I couldn't resist. There's a couple of models, the standard model and the "FAT" model, which has some slightly different specs. The FAT allegedly has a 59 fat neck carve. Comes with Macassar Ebony Fingerboard and has a stacked P90 with a coil split. They were also out of stock. So I grabbed a regular one in Pelham Blue. Kinda glad I did, the "standard" neck is pretty hand filling and I don't think I'd want anything bigger. It's a very comfortable rounded C shape neck very similar to the PRS Pattern Regular (what used to be called "Wide Fat" profile". In fact the standard neck is very much like a true Gibson 59 carve. I have no idea how much bigger the "FAT" is but I bet it's more like a '58 baseball bat carve. I would have preferred the Macassar fingerboard but mine came with an Amaranth FB.
Amaranth is also known as "Purpleheart" and is usually an exotic premium tone wood. It costs an arm and a leg if you want a Purpleheart fb on a custom guitar.
So this is the first thing that I don't like about this guitar, they dyed the fingerboard to a uniform black color. I wish they would have left it natural purpleheart, which can be various hues of red, purple and brown. The heartwood of Purpleheart can also have some very striking figure. The grain is similar to a rosewood but it's harder, more like splitting the difference between rosewood and ebony. Very surprising that Harley uses Amaranth a lot in their guitars. Although its the more plainer trunk wood.
The finish is a very convincing "new" Pelham blue and well done although there was some overspray here and there. The fretwork was immaculate, just blows my mind how good the fretwork is on these cheaper imports the last 5-6 years. The frets were dead level, fret ends beveled and dressed, frets are all well crowned. The frets seem to be a tad bigger than Medium, I would categorize them as medium-jumbo. I did not have to do anything except give them a final polish with the Dremel.
The tuners are Wilkinson branded Kluson style tuners with period correct plastic oval knobs to give it the right look. These are excellent tuners. Very smooth, no backlash and hold tune well. The nut was some cheap plastic (more on that later).
The bridge was an adjustable BADASS style bridge, which I personally detest. But that's a preference thing. For a lot of folks being able to intonate a Junior is a plus.
The electronics, again surprisingly good. It came with FULL SIZE Alpha pots made in Korea. These are actually very good potentiometers. Downside is that they used B500k's for the volume instead of log. The pickup on the standard version is a single coil P90 made by Roswell. Super cheap on Amazon but I am amazed how good it sounded on a $160 guitar. Alnico 5 magnets (allegedly). But it was wound pretty low, about 6.9k and a bit on the bright and thin side.
This was intended to be a mod platform for me (and I guess for a lot of folks). I ordered a Wolfetone P90 "Meaner 90" which is his medium output P90. It's just around 9k and perfect output for this style guitar for me. Wolfe Macleod is a super nice guy, super responsive and communicative. I placed the order and he emailed to let me know he got the order. Then emailed me later in the day to tell me he finished winding it, then shipped it the next day. I got the pickup 3 days after placing the online order.
Amazing. Big shout out to @Big Monk and @cdwillis for the recommendation. I had never heard of Wolfe Pickups before. I'm definitely going to be getting more. They're a great value right now with his 25% discount code.So starting at the top, the first thing that had to go was the plastic nut. It was well cut, perfect nut action in fact. But I replaced it with a bone nut. After popping off the old nut I had to do a little work making sure the surface was flat, all the glue sanded off and the new bone but would sit perfectly flat and against the fingerboard. I use a set of small cheap diamond files I got at Harbor Frieght for these little jobs.
I have the new "pre-slotted" bone nut fit and roughed in here. A dab of tghtbond glue, and the best clamp in the world is just stringing it back up and letting it sit under tension while the glue dries.
I'm one of those that likes to do the final shaping after the nut is installed. I have a couple of little files I made like over 30 years ago for these tasks. It's just a regular file, cut down and epoxied to a hunk of teak.
After shaping I'll hit it with some 400 grit and then 800 grit dry sanding.
Then the final step, I've been liking this Scratch-X stuff lately, does a million little tasks from car headlights, to boat repair to guitar stuff.
Finished nut. Not my best work but it'll do.
Here's a spot of paint overspray that I mentioned. Hard part was to scrape the overspray off without scraping too deep into the dyed fingerboard.
This is the original wirng, very clean, full size Alpha pots. Cavity was painted with shielding paint but not very well.
When my pickup showed up I was impatient to hear what it sounded like even though the replacement bridge I ordered hadn't arrived yet, so I installed it and it sounded like TOTAL CRAP. I had horrible ground hum and I tore my hair out for a couple hours trying different things to fix the issue. I finally gave up and concluded that I must have put in a bad pot. So I ordered some replacements. While I was waiting, I decided to strip the guitar and re-shield the cavities with the MG Nickel shielding paint. In the process of stripping I found my problem. I had wired the output jack backwards......
. Just goes to show, all the experience in the world doesn't alleviate "dumbassedness" which I can be often guilty of.Anyway, I went ahead and repainted and let it dry.
Continued in next post.......
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