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Win a Cort G250 SE Guitar in our Guitar Bomb Free UK Giveaway
YIKES what a dog. It looks like I'd made it.
The customer facing bullshit lies are the icing on the cake though...
At the moment I'm looking for:
* Hamer Watson, SS2, Vintage S, T62.
* Music Man Luke 1, Luke II
Please drop me a message.
I actually did my bit to help promote Ian back in 2015. He spammed me on Facebook asking me to promote his brand (we'd had no previous contact). I was a bit annoyed but for some reason I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and made this thread:
https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/57197/
Various builders commented pointing out that it is not economically viable to build quality guitars by hand at the prices he advertised. Something was amiss. These points were made quite reasonably. Ian's replies to these reasonable criticisms were unnecessarily defensive, and I was quite embarrassed that I ever posted the thread.
And now this. At least we know why they were cheap now.
However, I got in touch with the guy and he immediately offered me the money back and would cover the postage. I felt a bit guilty in case I was being too picky ( in hindsight I wasn’t ) so I paid the postage and lesson learnt.
This guitar looks to be in another class of hacked about driftwood altogether and he sounds like a prize cocknugget to boot.
If you’re buying a custom build, it’s the height of optimism to rely on pics alone before laying down your wedge.
As I said 5 years ago I saw no way to run a business making high quality, hand made guitars for the amounts he was charging without losing money.
In my opinion something has to give- either the price goes up, quality goes down, or you get into mass production to bring the cost down.
I wrote a dissertation about this specific issue, use PRS as a case study.
As an aside, I got out of guitar building because of these issues- I won't go into specifics but it was at least in part because I couldn't charge what it cost me to make in terms of labour and I didn't want to invest in CNC/automation technology without having an established business.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
Sadly doesn't seem to be a surprise given the general naivety shown in the old thread here.
Appalling. Worse than most DIY builds and 'luthier course' guitars I've seen... not remotely acceptable as a commercial product he's charging money for. There's also a horrendously bodged fingerboard inlay dot in the first pic, which seems to have been overlooked in the catalogue of other faults.
Add shady business practices and outright lies on top and it really isn't a good picture.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein