Very Belated Harley Benton PB-50 Build Diary

[Huge Hands]

Hello all,

 

I am very late in posting this up, but Christmas 2023, I bought my son a Harley Benton acoustic g****r from Thomann and managed to sneak myself in a PB-50 (sunburst a'la Sting) into the order. All delivered to my house from Germany before the big day for under £200.  I don't really play 4 strings these days but I love the original Precision look. I have not seen a decent 5 string one without blowing a wads ot cash on a custom, so thought I would get it for my own guilty pleasure, and at that price (I think it was £105), it was hard for me to refuse 

 

I liked the bass straight out of the box and apart from filing down a few rough fret edges, it was ready to go.

 

I spoke to forumites on here who kindly sent me the templates to cut down the headstock to match. This concerned me as with my blunderbuss approach and giant sausage fingers, I reckoned I'd be left with a snapped headstock and a bloodstained house.

 

But then during Christmas 2024 I had a dafter idea. I have always loved the look of upside down headstocks, so why not look for a lefty neck for it?  I also looked for original look bridge and pup covers....

 

I was talking to @Merton about it last week and realised I hadn't posted a thread about it 

 

I did complete it in January and don't have the greatest amount of photos from the build, but happy with the results, so here we go ...

[Huge Hands]

First I added a bridge cover. I've not had covers on any of my basses before, apart from a really cheap thing as a kid which had threaded bolts sticking of the body that you spun a knurled nut on to. This made the cover much more easily and quickly  removable than having screws through it. 

 

I was discussing it with some friends and started looking online. We came up with the idea of threaded inserts in the body, with knurled top bolts that screwed into them. This would avoid having two prongs of death sticking out of the bass when the cover was off.

 

So, off I went (as gingerly as I know how) with my trusty Makita.

 

I was worried about drilling too far into the body so thick the thread was only about 4mm deep. It worked great but if I had my time again I would have ordered a longer insert and kept the 4mm bolt. As I had to add some foam as a spacer to the pickup cover edge to allow it to fully tighten against the body without rattling. (Pics of that later).

[Huge Hands]

So I had it like this for about 12 months. The bridge (and later pickup cover) were opportune Fender branded buys from eBay and such like which were about £35 each.

 

The inserts and bolts were a bit of a bulk buy only thing so came to about £20 if memory serves.

[PaulThePlug]

Good Darts, loves a HBP50 modder post.

Did it get a lefty stock?

 

Here is mine.

Edited 3 hours ago by PaulThePlug