Discussion
Anybody here have experience of what our American cousins call 'parting out' - in other words, selling a guitar as components as opposed to whole?
I have a lovely Telecaster that due to continuing poverty I have to reluctantly say goodbye to, and it's been up for sale, on and off, for over a year. It was put together using all the best parts I could find and cost nearly £400 to build - this is just the parts themselves, not including shipping and labour charges. Well I've been asking a lot less than that and there have been no takers. Someone has suggested this 'parting out' idea as an alternative; well it works with MX-5's!
Anyone tried this method and was it positive or negative?
I have a lovely Telecaster that due to continuing poverty I have to reluctantly say goodbye to, and it's been up for sale, on and off, for over a year. It was put together using all the best parts I could find and cost nearly £400 to build - this is just the parts themselves, not including shipping and labour charges. Well I've been asking a lot less than that and there have been no takers. Someone has suggested this 'parting out' idea as an alternative; well it works with MX-5's!
Anyone tried this method and was it positive or negative?
No offence but if the parts only cost you £400 then they can't be the best quality parts. A really good set of pickups would cost half of that to start with, at least. Add in body, pots, tuners, nut, bridge neck etc and there can't be any one part of the guitar that is worth a great deal.
Tbh, if it's an unbranded bitsa guitar, it's an unknown quantity to a buyer, they won't know what it plays like or have any reference for that, so it might be easier to sell as a whole. Then again, taking it to bits and ebaying them seperately might yield results, but you are unlikely to get back what you paid for the parts.
Tbh, if it's an unbranded bitsa guitar, it's an unknown quantity to a buyer, they won't know what it plays like or have any reference for that, so it might be easier to sell as a whole. Then again, taking it to bits and ebaying them seperately might yield results, but you are unlikely to get back what you paid for the parts.
Mastodon2 said:
Tbh, if it's an unbranded bitsa guitar, it's an unknown quantity to a buyer, they won't know what it plays like or have any reference for that, so it might be easier to sell as a whole. Then again, taking it to bits and ebaying them seperately might yield results, but you are unlikely to get back what you paid for the parts.
100% this. Partcasters don't go for much (except if it was a established Warmoth partscaster or exotic woods/pickups etc). People are put-off by the fact that it hasn't got 'Fender' on the headstock, so you might find better luck selling the individual parts. Whilst you might sell stuff more readily, prepare to take a hit on the price, depending on the parts themselves of course. Pickups and hardware tend to sell for least amount of depreciation (again if they are known brands). And woods tend to be the most loss making, unfortunately if they are 'unknown' brands.
I'm already resigned to not get it all back!
I waited a hell of a long time before I found a nice body and neck at a reasonable price. Body was £85, neck £132 (complete with tuners, tree, decal and nut), pickups (from a '62 reissue Tele Custom) £43. Bridge, jack socket and strap buttons were from Allparts, believe the scratchplate and control plate were genuine Fender. Pots were from a Tokai.
Got a local luthier to assemble everything as I didn't trust myself to get the bridge, ferrules etc, in the right places and correctly drill all the holes for the neck and so on.
By the way it pisses all over any other Tele I've ever heard, so if at the end of the day it doesn't go, I won't be too disappointed.
Have a couple others to sell anyway, David Gilmour Strat and the MX-5 Strat some of you lot on here will have seen already.
I waited a hell of a long time before I found a nice body and neck at a reasonable price. Body was £85, neck £132 (complete with tuners, tree, decal and nut), pickups (from a '62 reissue Tele Custom) £43. Bridge, jack socket and strap buttons were from Allparts, believe the scratchplate and control plate were genuine Fender. Pots were from a Tokai.
Got a local luthier to assemble everything as I didn't trust myself to get the bridge, ferrules etc, in the right places and correctly drill all the holes for the neck and so on.
By the way it pisses all over any other Tele I've ever heard, so if at the end of the day it doesn't go, I won't be too disappointed.
Have a couple others to sell anyway, David Gilmour Strat and the MX-5 Strat some of you lot on here will have seen already.
Tbh, none of those parts sound all that great. Again this is no dig, but what I'm getting from your post is that the guitar is more than a sum of it's parts. I can't see any of those parts, perhaps bar 1962 pickups, being all that hard to come by and even with rarity factor included, they aren't worth that much.
The value of a part is not always definitive of it's quality of course, for example I prefer Dimarzio pickups to Bareknuckles - but BKPs cost about 40% more than Dimarzios, so cost isn't everything. But what you've done is taken a bunch of cheap-ish parts that you knew would work well together, had them assembled with care and made a great guitar out of it. If you undo that magic, you are left with a bunch of cheap-ish parts again.
I think if you want to sell it, you really need to get someone playing it - then someone will realise why it's worth £400 to you.
The value of a part is not always definitive of it's quality of course, for example I prefer Dimarzio pickups to Bareknuckles - but BKPs cost about 40% more than Dimarzios, so cost isn't everything. But what you've done is taken a bunch of cheap-ish parts that you knew would work well together, had them assembled with care and made a great guitar out of it. If you undo that magic, you are left with a bunch of cheap-ish parts again.
I think if you want to sell it, you really need to get someone playing it - then someone will realise why it's worth £400 to you.
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