I could not believe how great it looked when I took it out of the box, there were no visible flaws, looks much better in the flesh. The neck has a great feel to it. The pickups are great, I thought that would be a definite mod - the tone is pure tele, even the tuning pegs are passable, they hold their tune and look great, however I may change them for higher quality ones. It’s quite heavy, but I personally prefer that. The pots a smooth and nicely weighted.
The only real negative is that the cavities do not have any form of shielding. All single coil pickups, unless you buy noiseless ones are noisy, especially with high gain. There are loads of YouTube videos that teach you how to shield the cavities to greatly reduce the noise. I purchased two A4 sheets of copper self adhesive shielding for £8.00 and followed instruction carefully on a hand picked YouTube tutorial from an expert - you need to do some soldering and adding earth wires to the pots And output jack, but the rest if the work is quite easy. I also tightly twisted the hot and earth wires from the pickups and to the output jack, this also reduces the hum. When completing this task I was amazed at the difference, it virtually got rid of any hum, the difference was literally night & day - I would defiantly recommend this mod. The only other thing I did was to file the fret ends and polish up the frets, which were quite scratchy, this is quite normal for a cheap guitar, but easy to rectify yourself - again there are loads of top luthiers that show you how to this on YouTube. It’s worth taking your time doing this and after filing, use varying grades of sandpaper for smoothing the fret ends only, doing so will make the fret ends ultra smooth, just like on any high end guitar. To finish the frets, I used an automotive metal paste polish to shine them up. The frets now are super smooth and shinny. This guitar is a no brainer, even if you are a skilled pro player, with a few cheap mods you can have a quality tele costing over 10 to 15 times than the cost of the HB, even with the mods.
I also purchased some brass saddles, they are supposed to give you more sustain, but to be honest I did not see a great difference, so the stock ones will still be OK, but I do like the look of the brass ones, another cheap mod, about £7.00 for a left handed set too.
