Harley Benton’s annual DIY Kit Challenge is officially underway, with an open invite to anyone to build their own Harley Benton guitar and place it at the judge’s mercy. Those judges – a panel of experts – will run the rule over your build, with the top three guitars all receiving Thomann vouchers.
We say guitars but the competition is also includes Harley Benton’s DIY bass guitar and ukulele kits. Simply grab one of the super-cheap kits, make a musical instrument out of it and customise it, then upload a video of it to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and tag it #HBDiyKitChallenge so the judges can find it.
Paul Reed Smith started making his guitars at high school. Patrick James Eggle was a teenager working in a guitar store when he started applying his flair for woodwork to making guitars. Maybe the next star of luthiery will emerge out of this.
Truth be told, a lot of the hard work is done here. You will need some basic crafting skills, some tools, and the manual. No need to program the CNC machine. Those fingerboards come pre-installed with inlays and frets. Much of the heavy lifting will be done, which leaves more time for customisation – which is what the judges are looking for.
Entrants will be graded on originality, “overall visual impression”, the quality and craft of your build, and features.
Who knows what that could involve but maybe the electronics wizards out there could go the extra mile and hot-wire the pickups so there’s an out-of-phase voicing or… Well, that square electric guitar kit that Harley Benton makes could be the perfect blank canvas for an all-new guitar shape. It’s basically a rengas chopping board routed for a pair of humbuckers.
The competition is open now and closes on Monday 16 June at 11:59pm CET. As our friendly Harley Benton YouTube host reminds us, you can really go crazy with the builds. Anything goes, just so long as the instrument is playable. After all, we are not monsters.
If you’re thinking of building an electric guitar you have a ton of options. There are Strat-style kits, Flying V-style kits, single-cuts, left-handed options, offset guitars, doublecuts, T-styles and ES-alike semi-hollow kits, all of which have everything you need in the box and are priced from $82 bucks.
See Harley Benton for more details, head over to Thomann to find yourself a DIY kit, and see below for some inspiration.
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