Your guitar stories...

[MALAM]

My girlfriend has had this old flamenco guitar knocking about the house for years. It has been abused....it's been taken on camping trips and has generally been treated like a piece of crap. I didn't pay much attention to it until today. I thought the back and sides looked pretty decent for a crap guitar- this lead me to the label inside. After doing some research on the net this morning, I found that it's a fairly rare Ricardo Sanchis dating from sometime between 1911-1938. If it was mint, it'd be worth £3k plus

Then last week, I missed out on a 1954 Jose Ramirez flamenco at a local auction. The only other one like it on the net was up for $7000. It sold at auction for £40.

So peeps, check those old shitters you have lying about. They might actually be worth something :-)

[mellowsun]

I started on an ancient parlour sized guitar I found in my parents loft when I was about 16. I think it dated back to the 1930s. Had scalloped frets, a bowed neck and an action of about 2 inches! Don't know if it would be worth anything, not sure it still there, but I do remember thinking that the rosewood back and sides were pretty nice ...
________
SchoolGirls

[Bogwhoppit]

There was this one time at Bandcamp.........................

[impmann]

(About 15 years ago...)

A chap walked into our shop and asked if we bought amplifiers.

"Yes - what is it?"

"Dunno - to be honest, I pulled it out of a skip in the late 70s when I thought I'd start a punk band. Its been in various sheds and garages since."

"Hmmm - where is it?"

"Five minutes around the corner"

So I wandered round to the guy's house and he opens the shed door and sitting there is a Fawn Tolex, Dark Copper Top AC30 complete with its Blue Speakers... Seeing as the bloke hadn't ever plugged it in, I chanced my arm and offered him £50 for it. He accepted and even gave me a hand to lug it back to the shop.

After a swift check over (visual), I plugged it into a Variac and brought the voltage up to 240v in slow stages until the pilot lamp glowed. No humming sound through the speakers...

I plugged in a guitar and gave it a quick strum... "BRRRRRRAAAAAANNNNNNGGGGG".

The damn thing only worked perfectly! I gigged it that weekend. Amazing amp. Sadly I sold it for £350 in 2000 when I had an ill-advised lifestyle change and ran out of cash...

[KrisUK]

I haven't got any of my own but a friend of a friend has someone that works for the council.

Anyway, an old man died in one of the council houses with no family or living relatives and this friend of a friend and another guy are sent to clear out the house. They find 2 guitars there and one of which was a very old Martin. I forget which model and what the other guitar was but the Martin was something quite pricey nonetheless. He knew what it was straight away but kept quiet. So he asks his boss for permission to keep it and voila! Free vintage Martin!

[ZenOvertone]

OK, an amp story -

I bought a lonely looking little Marshall PA20 in a small music shop in 1990 for £25. Was bodged by the previous owner so instead of volume-tone on each channels it had two volumes and bass/treble (with dymo tape stuck on when I got it over the aluminium panel). Never worked properly - the output was very low despite valve changes etc. Cabinet in good shape and had the original vinyl cover. Was getting in the way and I stuck it on Ebay in 2001 not expecting anything significant - until it was sold to a guy who shipped it to the US for £550, well over the odds I thought at the time but this was before the 18w forums really took off and all the clones began appearing.

[boogie man]

My dad was clearing out my great uncle's house 20 or so years back.. Everything had to go as the old boy had to go into in a home and the house and it's contents had to pay for his care. Seems the old guy had made a lot of money in his lifetime as he'd been the first to import Max Factor cosmetics into th UK. Consequently he had a lot of expensive stuff lying around. My dad found an old ukulele which he thought I might like...I took it home and promptly forgot about it until very recently. Turned out to be fairly rare and collectible and from the 1920's. I sold it through the classifieds on this forum for £350.

Let's not dwell on the custom made leather case he also found in the same house that contained a 1950's Leica camera and various lenses...my old man thought he'd made a killing by getting £500 from a dealer for it. Whimper.

[uncle_psychosis]

This is my favourite guitar story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXquT6ylr08

[DiscoStu]

I bought an old guitar from a neighbour in the early 90s. Her son had left his gear in her house when he left to join the Police. So it had been sitting there for something like 10 years or so, doing nothing. I kinda knew what it was but kept schtum when she said her son would be more than happy with £150 for it.
So there I was with a mint condition, all original Ibanez PS-10 Paul Stanley, in its mint original case! I got it valued a couple of years later in Making Music magazine (remember that?) by the 'Guitar Guru', who put a price of £500-600 on it. I had no intention of ever selling it but was curious to know how well I'd done.
Well, I'd done even better than he thought, as it turned out! I hit a low patch financially about 7 years ago and resorted to selling it on eBay to get by. I got £1100 for it! I couldn't believe it! The reissues had come out by then which may have unexpectedly improved the prices on the originals.
Either that or the buyer was a mental KISS fan!

[GtrLass]

A lot of this sounds very unethical indeed.