Harley Benton Fusion-III HSH Roasted FBLB

I purchased this on backorder in April and ended up reciting the first guitar about a month later. The first guitar was okay but had a large chip out of the neck by the nut, which looked like it had been done at the factory. There were a few other issues also, such as swirling all over the finish, a chip on the headstock and the tone pot had no resistance at all and just spun by itself.

I returned for a replacement with thomann promising to do additional QC checks to make sure these issues weren't present and also reduce the action, which was high on the previous guitar.

The new guitar arrived with a slightly smaller but very similar chip in the wood by the nut, so seems like this is someone being a bit heavy handed at the factory when installing the nut.

The new guitar also has a few other issues: a hairline crack at the neck pocket, a very wobbly selector switch, tooling marks and scratches on the frets, a squeaky tremolo (resolved by wd40), and the high e string is too close to the edge of the fretboard meaning it slips off often and a very badly mismatched flame maple veneer. Nothing major but still frustrating issues. I will be getting the guitar set up at a local shop to improve the playability, so hopefully some of these issues will be solved then.

I took a small partial refund instead of returning because I can't be bothered to get a replacement and then have the same issues again.

However, overall the guitar plays quite well and sounds really good. I love the roswells with my modelling amp as they sound great with all the presets. The guitar is nice and light and the neck is very playable, chunkier than my Fender modern c, but very nice to play.

I think 3 stars is fair, because although it is a nice guitar that has been made with nice components, the quality of workmanship and qc is behind the competition. I won't be returning this but in the future I think I will just stick with higher end squiers, as they haven't let me down in the past.

Well, in theory and on specs it looks great but…
First of all the guitar arrived with a really bad setup. The action was practically unplayable, even a cheap acoustic guitar would have had lower action. Intonation was nowhere near decent. The neck humbucker was installed very sloppy and tilted in a way so that the side closer to the neck is quite higher than the other side and the pickups were not even slightly balanced, the neck pickup was a lot louder than the other two.
I decided to take it to a professional for a setup and a few other things came up. Some fretwork had to be done (I ordered one more guitar at the same time, a Harley Benton ST-200, that is more than three times cheaper than the Fusion but it had a better fretwork, and the Fusion is promoted as pro series, go figure). Apart from having to level the neck pickup it turned out that it’s impossible to lift the bridge pickup so both humbuckers had to be tweaked. And according to the guy that did my setup the humbuckers were not installed properly at all and even after some work on it still the neck pickup stays a bit tilted. OK, lack of any setup can be kind of accepted but if you have to repair a sloppy job during manufacturing on a brand new guitar, that’s not quite OK.
On top of all that, there are small imperfections with the paint on the headstock and two small chips in the finish on the bottom part of the fretboard. Things like chips on the finish are unacceptable even for a much cheaper guitar.
I guess if you are a YouTuber or some professional reviewer you’d get quite a nice instrument but if you’re just a regular customer based on my experience, it’s not like that, or in best case scenario it’s hit or miss.