Getting broken guitars and tube amps.

[madkatb]

@MeCayden So, how did you make out? pm me if you want some older tube gear. It will be reasonably priced but not for "next to nothing".

[bob p]

Here's an angle that you might not have considered: if you want a good supply of broken guitars or amps to work on, you could buy a perfectly good guitar or amp online, and have it shipped to you by UPS or Fedex.

[Mick Bailey]

As soon as you call out you are looking for something, people realize it has value, at least to you. The price goes up.

Spot on.

People ask me all the time if I sell used equipment. I don't. If I could buy broken amps, repair them and sell them on with a guarantee, and at the same time make a reasonable income (don't ever mention profit) I would. The prices people are asking for busted gear is way too high to be realistic. If you make a 'profit' you're exploiting them, taking advantage or whatever. They don't see you as earning your money.

I had a Laney VC30 in with a shorted OPT, broken handle, mismatched and very tired output tubes, torn speaker cloth and punctured speaker cone (a mic stand had gone through it). The guy decided not to have it fixed because it "wasn't worth it"; he'd rather buy a Fender something-or-other and asked me if I was interested in buying it. As I'd got all the parts in apart from the cloth, I said yes. I asked how much and he said they're going for about £350, so he'd want around £250 for it "as it stands". When I explained about the cost of parts and time, and needing to offer a guarantee, all he replied was "Yes, but you're going to make money out of me".

I didn't bother.

I have had lucky finds, but in my lifetime they don't add up to much. Most people research prices and won't give you a break even if something is a wreck.

[bob p]

The basic problem is that some people are too cheap to place value on someone else's time and expertise. And when they do recognize the value of someone else's expertise, some of these people will try to stand in your way. It's as if they don't like it when your studying has led to knowledge that gives you an "unfair" advantage over them.

As an example, I once asked for a repair manual from the librarian at one of the carver amplifier fan sites. he refused to let me have it, and said:

"The manuals are for our members who don't know how to repair amps. If I gave you the service manual, you'd be able to buy broken amps cheaply and repair them. "

I never understood his logic, but I think it was based in jealousy.

[Enzo]

People in general tend not to have any idea of the scale of most anything. They write a letter to the President or the CEO of General Motors or Mick Jagger, and somehow have the idea two or three letters arrive for them in a month, and why didn't they take the time to read and respond? People think you have all this high tech fancy stuff they don't understand, and all you have to do is plug the amp into a tester, and it tells you what to do. People thinking the repair bill ought to be based on what the amp is worth. SO that crappy little Gorilla practice amp ought to cost $5 to fix I suppose. Of course that formula goes out the window when their $1500 amp needs something. Gasoline has been in the $3.50-$4 range for a long while. The local paper gets a steady stream of angry letters. Gas goes up 20 cents and they scream conspiracy and gouging. A 5% price move. If an 80 cent can of corn went up 4 cents - a 5% price move - they don't bat an eye. People buy service based on rates many times. I remember once someone called me and asked my rates. At the time they were $30 an hour. Customer says he is going up the road to a different guy who only charges $25 an hour. I said I am going to do that in an hour, how many hours you think the other shop will take? Blank. No idea what I meant. They don't know what we do, they haven't a clue.


Plus they think we are whores. I used to do service calls, mainly juke boxes. I got tired of schlepping my 50 pound toolbox up and down basement stairs and stopped. Someone calls and wants a jukebox service call, and I explained I no longer do them. Guy puts on a talking to a 10 year old voice and says "I'll make it worth your whiiiii-llle. I'll give you $50." To which I replied, "Back when I did service calls, they started at $100, so thank you but no." Offended them. I once had a couple come to my counter when I worked in the music store, asked me to come fix their jukebox (Or maybe pinball, I forget now), and I told them I didn't do that any longer. After a bit of arguing, they left. A couple weeks later the lady returned to scold me. "We had to call someone in Detroit to come up and fix our jukebox, it cost us an extra $150." Apparently my fault.

[DrGonz78]

Around Sept. of 2011 I set out to start finding anything guitar/amp related to buy. My goal was to find broken and/or neglected amplifiers that people were not gonna spend money on to have them serviced. One point I always made was that even $30 was better than using that thing as a doorstop. Say the amp is worth $130 working and average repair is $80-100, so there is my price bench mark $30-50 for that amp. It seemed to work out pretty good around that time and just started buying all these amps. Point here is that most people are not wanting me to come pick up the amp and fix it for them for profit. Anyway when I first started to learn somethings here online (MEF) I was not at all a confident repair person. So, at first offering my services would be a gross lie, since I had none. To buy a broken amp and fix it as the owner of this amp was the only way to go. Remember to tell the person that you are taking all the risk and the amp might turn into spare parts just laying around. However, I started getting lucky (especially when I found this site) and got to fixing some amps. I have so much to learn but I can say to anyone here that buying broken amps is fun!! It was the way I got my feet wet towards learning about amp repair. Ebay is the worst place to look for broken amps. If you are looking for something special that you want to keep then ebay might work, but not for cheap. I never feel bad when I hand good hard earned money over to somebody for a broken piece of gear, no matter how low the price. For sometimes they just want it gone and other times they might ask for a bit more... When people ask too much for something it is actually quite hilarious and I tell them good luck!!

P.S. Can't tell you how many times I was ready to walk away or did walk away from buy and they were like hey come back here!! They want it gone, you want it for learning, and some profit to spend on another amp later is priceless learning.

[km6xz]

Any field that is commonly a hobby to someone, such as music or cars, is a bad way to make a living. Since hobbyists do not count their hobby time as valuable, afterall, it is a pastime. They do not count the time's value lost compared to what it would have been if spent doing something else. The same work, investment in test instruments, training/education, and diagnostic chops needed to fix a hot rod or guitar amp, if applied to a non-hobby field such as oil exploration/survey equipment, or medical equipment is viewed as much more valuable time and a company seeking the service would not blink when getting a $1000 labor bill for a repair requiring the same work that a guitar amp tech struggles to get $100 for. It is not a hobby for non-hobbyists, they know how much not having the item in-service is worth to them and think that $1000 is a bargain compared to their real hourly losses.
Dealing with hobbyist musicians needs to be a hobby in itself to justify the modest income potential for a tech.

The hourly rate is a misguided charging model since it does not account for the dramatic difference between bench time and a shop's total expense to repair the item. If a 1 hour job is going for $60 an hour, it does not follow that a 3 hour job or 1/2 hour job scales the same way. A half hour job loses money no matter how much is charged because the support services within the shop are essentially a stable portion of any repair, regardless of length of time used by a bench tech. A 30 minute job does not take the counter person 1/2 the time to deal with the customer. Having the parts in stock or getting it if not, does not take 1/2 the time as a 1 hour job. A 1/2 hour job, when accounting for the non-bench soldering/fixing time, is just as high in overhead as a 3 hour job. Customers have no idea, realistically, to estimate the time that is appropriate and often reward bad techs more than skilled techs by willingly paying a guy who slaves 3 hours on an amp due to his lack of skill whereas thinks he is ripped off if a tech with excellent diagnostic skills and intimate knowledge of a unit charges 1/2 as much but takes 1/3 the time.
A better model would be to separate the time on the bench from the value of the unit being returned to functioning condition. What is the value to the customer to have his problem go away. A business customer, knows how much his problem is costing him and having the problem go away has a non-trivial value to him. A hobbyist does not place realistic price on his problem going away, because there is no calculation of loss.
I ran into the same sort of thinking with recording where most studios charged by the hour. But that was[is] a bad model, I changed it for evaluating the value for a project as a whole. The incentive was to become efficient and effective and not waste time which endeared us to labels who have the love hate relationship with producers/groups. The producers tend to ignore budgets and contracted completion-by dates that are critical when there are dozens of departments in a label which sets their schedule on those dates. Spending an extra 3 weeks tweaking a vocal track blowing the budget and causing anger by all the people related to packaging that record who set their work schedule by the contracted delivery date. We got projects done well under time and under budget so being rewarded with lower than normal accumulated hour charges was unfair. We added value to the project by having the producer not blow the budget and not blow the delivery date. Producers were given an incentive by labels for coming in under budget by getting a percentage of that savings. Win-Win-Win situation, we got paid by the project, plus got use of the room back to book another project faster. Not many people figured that out among the independent studio industry. They kept quoting hourly rates.
Repair is actually harder to budget time for so more flexibility needs to be built in to the estimate. Some shops set fixed prices by type: "tube amp 50 watts or less= $125, tube amp more than 50watts $175, Solid State amps 500 watts or less"....etc. That does not reflect the true value of the repair but can average out over hundreds of repairs for easy repairs to cover 3 day dogs.

Tech'ing is one field where skill is an income limiter, a bad tech who shotguns and introduces more problems often makes more than a skilled tech who can diagnose well, if charging by time. Relating this to hobby repairs, collecting old gear and fixing it is fun and a great way to spend a cold rainy day but if the time was used in more productive ways in generating income, buying a functioning unit probably is more cost effective and probably works better than an old unit repaired without thorough knowledge of measuring and verifying performance. The value of a pastime and recreation is the important factor in deciding if rebuilding an old unit is worth it.

[Enzo]

People are also hung up on amp cost. A guy brings in some amp worth about $300 on the street, but he found it at a garage same or whatever for $30. I tell him it will take about $80 to fix it, and he says, "Screw that I only paid $30 for it." So $110 for a $300 amp is not a deal?

[DrGonz78]

Trust me it is not a bad deal at all and as a hobbyist it adds to my hobby fund when I sell it. Personally I am not so hung up on making money and being a capitalist. I should but I really don't care. I really care about finding a new beast to tame and learning. I have a few crap projects laying around for a rainy day and I bet you I will always come up on top. Lets just say my hobby has helped me to see what is important. That is fulfillment!! When I am working on amps... I am Not... Sitting on the couch every night after work watching SH!t Television, that is as rotten to the mind as smoking Crack!! LOL! Seriously there are two worlds of thought being represented here... One is that of Hobby town and the other of lets make money town. I am just still living in hobby town for a while... I have a few people that bring me projects to work on... It still feels good! Later down the line as I get better at repairs that may be just a curse. But for right now I love hobby town as it is all about the purity of learning and nothing else. I love that the most~!!

[Enzo]

Nothing wrong with having a day job and coming home to hobby amp work. But when amp repair IS your day job, then the making money part becomes important.