So I have now finished the Harley Benton strat.
This is the second one I have done and while they both have EMG active pickup sets they are different beasts. This one has the EMG KH21 Loaded Pick guard Active Pickup Set. This is a hard tail with a block of mahogany in the trem cavity, one of my own stainless steel bridges with stainless steel saddles. Since there is no tremolo I could use the space which would normally be where the springs would go to fit a battery box.
The build was fairly straight forward except for the neck mountings which I had to plug and re drill as, from the factory, they were well out of line! I used 4mm inserts in the neck, made a new neck plate from stainless with stainless steel fixings. I’m not convinced that this is better than traditional wood screws but it will be easier to remove the neck for when I do the re fret.