quote: ... just don't have the interest in doing the right thing re-building it 99% original parts25.00?
I wonder why that 25.00 is tacked on the description? Perhaps the seller may have pasted the description from the original auction, in which case that may be the price they paid.
I'm not faulting the seller - even though it suggests a possible 1,000% profit margin - my point is that it's rare to find real deals on eBay any more.
That snare was probably untouched for 80 years or more (according to
the old Slingerland catalogs, it appears to be @ 1936 confetti finish Radio King - their student model) and it has to have suffered the worst extremes of heat and cold for the finish to have disintegrated like that.
To paraphrase Alan Watts; the difference between wealth and money is that you walk into a grocery store with money, and leave with wealth. I'd venture to say that the same is true of price and value.
Is it worth $280? All I can say is: not to me.
My dad met a man who claimed to have a Stradivarius violin. He wanted to know what it was worth, so he took some pictures and sent them to me. It was in a similar condition as that snare. Nobody had touched it in at least a generation or more, and the wood was cracked, parts were missing and weird molds were growing on the case.
I told him that it was worthless, that zillions of Strad copies had been made and that all of Stradivarius' violins are accounted for (the really valuable instruments are his violas, by the way, because you can't have a strad quartet without one.
One sold for $45MILLION, making it the most expensive musical instrument in the history of mankind).
Prior to 1891, when international law dictated that all violins with Stradivarius labels must cite country of manufacture, a Strad label just indicated the style of violin, and was almost exclusively used on student grade instruments.
From the Smithsonian Institution's Stradivarius archive;
quote:...Affixing a label with the master?s name was not intended to deceive the purchaser but rather to indicate the model around which an instrument was designed. At that time, the purchaser knew he was buying an inexpensive violin and accepted the label as a reference to its derivation. ...
The guy refused to believe his Stradivarius was kindling because his head was full of ... Well, ideas for how he'd spend his million$ (I was going to say something else ), instead of throwing money away on a proper appraisal - so an expert could tell him that his Strad was kindling - he just stopped being friends with my dad. No value lost there, in my astoundingly humble opinion.
There was a classified ads magazine in New England called the Want Advertiser that was a fantastic source of deals for over half a century
until eBay and the internet killed it. There were thousands of instruments and parts in every weekly issue.
I worked at Daddy's Junky Music, the world's largest retailer of used instruments at the time (
eBay and the Internet killed them, too), with 20 stores throughout New England, especially a huge store directly across the street from Berklee Music College. I bought and sold tons of guitars and banjos through the WA and either sold them to Daddy's or just re-listed them in the WA, especially Alembics and Martins (the Alembics listed in my profile are just the ones I could remember!) I never lost a cent on the transactions. Some - especially the fretless Excel (with the most amazing pillow quilted maple top I've ever seen), which I bought for $350 and sold that night for $1100, I never even played!
I really miss those days. Since you couldn't look something up on the internet, in almost every case, people simply didn't know the value of the instruments they were selling, much less the price. You simply can't find deals on eBay anymore. Like the Slingerland snare that set off this seemingly never-ending rant: it's just overpriced junk. Humph.
The system is broken.
Oh yeah, one more thing:
quote:(The band is Tongue)
Maybe so, but the drummer is a Dick (according to the picture).
Okay, rant over. I need coffee.
