H80 Series Strat Copies

The Harmony H80 Series is a series of Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese built copies of the Fender Stratocaster manufactured by multiple building houses including: Samick (who made Hondo, Aria Pro II, Memphis, and others), Yako (who made the Squier Affinity and Bullet model lines), and possibly many others, as the H80 varies from year to year.  There were two distinct versions of H80, the H80T which came with a tremolo, and a short-run of H80BGs that were made in black on black with gold hardware for a limited time.  These guitars share bodies and hardware with the Memphis 302 line, and the Kramer KS400 strat copy.  The H-80 product line was in production from 1987, till 2005 at the earliest, where the Wishbook catalogs that carried these started carrying Jay Turser instruments in their place.

GENERAL SPECIFICATIONS

NECKS

Necks were rock maple with maple fretboards, 21 medium sized frets, roughly about a 10" fretboard radius, black dot inlays, and a plastic nut.  They used the ubiquitous individual "Diamond Back" machine heads, and had a headstock end Truss Rod adjuster.  The neck was affixed with a standard Fender-style 4-bolt neck attachment, sometimes with a plastic body protector between the neckplate, sometimes without.  Usually this neck plate has "Harmony est xxxx" stamped into it.  String trees on earlier guitars were plastic, round affairs, while later revisions had butterfly clips like a 70's Fender.

BODIES

Bodies can vary wildly in contouring and shape detail depending on the year the guitar was built and possibly what building house made it at the time.  The rounder bodies came earlier and seem to come in more color variety, while later bodies starting around 1989-1990 were slightly thicker, wider, and "boxier" with less rounded edges.  These bodies are usually routed for three single coils but some may have been made with an HSS route.  The body is made out of plywood veneer, and the fact that this is is easily noticeable because the arm and belly contours are covered by the black of the sunburst unlike a solid hardwood would instrument would have done.

PICKUPS

The H80T came with 2 different styles of pickup.  One style is what we would call "Samick X13" Style, which were similar to the single coils Samick put in Strat Copies and Hondo Paul Dean III's in the early 80's.  They look like regular strat pickups from the top, but from the bottom a metal cover covers up a deep, tall, and slightly wider than normal assembly that has a magnet, pole pieces, the coil, and the wiring securely stuck into the pickup with paraffin wax.  Sometimes these pickups can be hotter than usual as well, up to 11K in some cases.  The later guitars featured more traditional Stratocaster style pickups with molded plastic bobbins instead of the flatwork held together by the pole pieces and wax potting like a real Fender pickup would be.  These pickups all used Ceramic magnets and can be quite twangy, though I have heard/seen some of the later ones advertised as having Alnico magnets (probably Alnico V).

ELECTRONICS

These were wired up like a standard USA Fender Stratocaster from 1979 onward is.  Basically, 1 master volume, 2 tone controls (one for the neck pickup, one for the middle pickup), and a 5-way selector switch allowing the selection of neck (all the way up), neck+middle, middle, middle+bridge, and then Bridge (all the way back).  The components used were typically rather cheap, usually Alpha pots, and a pretty common, cheap, and easier to figure out copycat version of a Stratocaster selector switch that does not fit regular Strat pickguards (at least not in most cases).  Usually the pickguards were single ply white plastic or black plastic, though some earlier guitars seem to have left the factory with multi-ply pickguards.  

BRIDGE

The bridge on the surface looks like your standard, run-of-the-mill, six screw import vintage style "Fender Style Tremolo (vibrato)".  However, this is most often a very cheap iteration that does not have a proper "intertia block" in back (the thick aluminum block the springs attach to, strings run through, and the whammy bar screws into).  Instead, it seems most of the H80Ts I've seen with a vibrato have a "C" shaped piece of steel - very thick - with the collet for the whammy bar welded to it on one side for structural support. Then the bottom is drilled with six holes for strings, and 5 holes for the counterbalance springs in between.  A common problem with this vibrato is that the collet for the vibrato bar, if it's badly welded, will rip loose under heavy use, and then will require replacement of the intertia block, or more likely, the whole vibrato.  That said, this vibrato can stay in tune quite well if you follow any best practices for setting up a Stratocaster style tremolo.  These vibratos use import bars without the plastic tip on the end, also, old screw-in Floyd Rose bars work.

COLORS

The original H80s all came in a "Vintage White" color that looked more like Fender's mid 1950's Desert Tan in 1986.  In 1988, Candy Apple Red and Sunburst were introduced.  All of these had white pickguards.  Sometime during the 80's and possibly 90's production runs a special H80BG model was made that was black, with a black pickguard, and gold hardware.  By the early-mid 1990's, Tan and Candy Apple Red were temporarily discontinued for awhile.  Later on, black was introduced as a color option.  Toward the end of the 90's, a Olympic White version appeared with a black pickguard.  As the 2000's started up and Westheimer group bought the company out, the H80 was redesigned as the "Classic Guitar Kit" and had some upgrades, including a pearloid pickguard instead of the single ply white or less common black ones Harmony had been using since the 80's.