Your Best Bargain / Worst Sale

[Ashborygirl]

Intrigued as to people's best ever bargains or the gear they sold, only to see the value rocket later.

 

I'll kick off with a 2006 purchase of a mint '84 Wal Custom from eBay for £850.  I thought I was Alan Sugar when I flipped it for £1600 a week later.  I was offered it back during Covid for (gulp) £7k.

 

I also sold 2 Klon Centaurs for £215 each around 2009.  They're now 20 times that price.

[Steve Browning]

Best bargain is an easy one for me. 

 

I managed to win a Mesa Road Ready 2x18 on Ebay for 62 quid. The auction finished at something daft like 6:30 on a Sunday morning. 

 

I sometimes paired it with my Diesel 2x15 using a Bass 400 and a 400+. It sounded immense. 

[musicbassman]

A 1962 Strat bought for £130 from a music shop in Kingston (Kingston in London, not Jamaica)

Mind you, this was in 1973, and that was about the going rate at the time................. 😲

[machinehead]

WAL Mk 1 fretless.  Passed on for £200 in 1989.  It still causes me nightmares. 

 

Frank.

 

[tauzero]

A 2000 fatneck Warwick Thumb NT from Germany in around 2006. £550 (with hard case), and another £220 to have it defretted and the neck slimmed to JD Thumb proportions.

[neepheid]

Not a sale, but I traded a very rare Guild B402-A for a G&L El Toro (itself not a super common beast), thought I had done the right thing at the time but now I think I should have held onto the Guild.  I think they only made about 335 of them.  Oops!

[binky_bass]

A USA Custom Shop Conklin 8 string bass with magnetic, piezo and midi pickups for £300 - bare in mind the build price of such a thing a few years ago (before Bill Conklin passed away) was $12,000. Still have it, will never sell it. 

[LowB_FTW]

Best buy was my Vox AC-50 amp, which I got together with a Vox VR-115, for £150 in the early '90s. Granted, it was by no means a bargain for me at the time, as I think I was only earning about £70 a month.

I still have both items, and the amp now goes for considerably more than what I paid for it, but I love it, so I'm not gonna part with it.

 

Mark

[Jackroadkill]

I bought a Boss CE-1, a real one, not a reissue, for a hundred quid about twenty five years ago.  I sold it for £250 five or so years later....  Should have held onto it and sold it in the last few years.

[ProjeKtWEREWOLF]

Cioks DC7 for £120. Unused in box, with all box 'candy'. Superb deal in my opinion. 

Edited May 4, 2024 by ProjeKtWEREWOLF

[Mykesbass]

Picked up a Cry Baby at a local hose clearance place for £3. Exchanged next day at a Brighton guitar shop for a set of D'addario chrome bass strings.

 

I have no idea how I disposed of my 1970s Electro Harmonix Poly chorus, but I know I wouldn't have sold it for much.

[BreadBin]

I spotted a Washburn A10 guitar on FB marketplace for £80. The guy selling it was clearly not short of a few quid so I didn't feel bad at all when I sold it for 5 times as much.

[uk_lefty]

I think I've only made a profit on two basses: an MIJ Precision that I wish I still had, and a Washburn Status that sounded great, looked amazing but just wouldn't be getting gigs after my 80s experiment band failed to get off the ground. The regrettable sale that often haunts me is my Warwick Streamer LX, bought for about £400 in the early 2000's and sold for about the same a year or two later after never truly bonding it regularly reappears on BC, Reverb and eBay every few years for £900 or more https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/226072472758?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=174vNm9IScK&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=XRJhsZSpS5O&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

It's a lovely, lovely bass and now I'm a bit older and wiser I'd love to give it another go. But I can't at that price.

[ProjeKtWEREWOLF]

Westone Thunder 1A for free on Facebook. It came with a little practice amp too. Absolutely amazing. The preamp was dodgy (and eventually burned out), which did cost me eventually though. 

[Shambo]

The £820 I paid for a Pro Precision a few years ago wasn't massively underpriced but it was a good price for the time.

 

Its value for me was massively enhanced though when it turned out that it was a total player; light, resonant, perfect fit & finish and already sporting a few pre-loved blemishes.

So good in fact, that I culled the herd in the knowledge that I'd be hard pressed to find another bass I enjoyed playing more.

In a roundabout way, it's saved me a fortune.

 

(I still can't help but occasionally pine for a Jazz to go with it)

[Leonard Smalls]

'82 Wal custom from Allbang and Strummit for £500 in '90-91ish. Had to take out a loan to pay for it... Still got it! (not the loan!!)

[joeystrange]

Not me, but a guitarist in one of my bands sold his Tom DeLonge Gibson 333 for £1000 about a decade ago when he needed the money. They now go for anywhere between £5000-7000.

[Downunderwonder]

An all tube 200w amp, no hiss, pops or squeaks, for around about 70 quid because nobody else wanted to give it a home.

[OliverBlackman]

Best buy was a Fender American Deluxe Jazz V in trans red. It was mint and only £400 on eBay! Should have been more patient with it but traded it on here after a few years.

 

Worst sell was a 3EQ Musicman Stingray. Traded it for an Overwater Jazz and a bit of cash that valued it at £500. Would be double that now, and again should have showed more patience with it.

[Lozz196]

In 2015 I bought a Fender US Standard Precision for about £850 new when they were retailing at around £1200. It’s been my fave bass ever since. 

[Paul S]

My best buy was a Yamaha SB-35 for £250.  The most fabulous little 32" scale thing ever with a tone to die for.  I sold it when I 'moved to 5 string basses permanently' which lasted around 3 months before I was scouring the classifieds for 4 stringers again🥴.  Unlikely to find another one, certainly not at that price.  I stopped contacting the guy who bought it for fear of a restraining order.

 

Worst buy - where to start? 😄  I have a knack of buying basses at top dollar then selling when the prices are at a low ebb.  My short-lived 'exclusively playing 5 string' period was a particularly rich vein of money loss.  Financially the worst hit was a rare and elusive Yamaha BB-5000 that I imported from Japan only to discover, when it arrived, that I didn't like it.  When I sold it an inherent issue with the neck I was unaware of meant in total I lost about £800.  Ouch.   

 

Policy decision now is to steer away from Yamahas. 😂

Edited May 5, 2024 by Paul S

[miles'tone]

Best buy: a Harley Benton deko 550fl - £48 delivery included. The only thing wrong about it was the D stamp for it's deko status.

 

Worst sell: pretty much everything I've ever sold.

Edited May 6, 2024 by miles'tone

[casapete]

Slight derail - does anybody else keep a record of what they buy and sell?
I’ve only done this for the last few years, but it’s amazing how much you can

forget what you paid for something and what you sold things for too. Handy

for when you come to part with things so you can set a fair selling price. ( Also

useful when dealing with your tax return! ) 

 

Back OT, I try to break even with stuff - buy s/h at a reasonable price and then

if I don’t get on with it then hopefully won’t lose much either. However, fads/trends

often come along to scupper this but that’s just how the market goes I guess, same 

as anything else really. Recent hikes in s/h ( and new ) stuff has definitely slowed

me down in buying things though - in my mind a tidy Mexican Precision is worth

around £350/£400, whereas they now seem to be more like £500/£550 or more. 
 

Sold a couple of Stingrays a few years ago before they hit the current s/h price 

of around £1250 - £1400, but still got back around what I paid for them. 

 

[Woodinblack]

Well,  lots of things like above, where things were just much cheaper then than now, but it recent times I guess a Spector RST5 £1100 a couple of years back. Or a chapman stick for £1400.

Actually, no, scrap that, my favourite, Gibson The Paul 1979 for £400 a couple of years back, matched the one that I wanted in 1981 but my dad wouldn't guarantor the loan (for perfectly reasonable reasons!).

[T-Bay]

Best bargain I think was my Squier Jazz, bought unseen as a backup and dropped off by a mate. Turned out to have a Fender replacement neck and £250 of pickups in it. Bought for the grand price of £40 non-working, which turned out to be a broken earth wire and sorted in less than half an hour. Not worth massive money but I have hundreds of hours of pleasure out of it and happy to bounce around like an idiot with it, which I certainly don’t with more expensive basses.