If i didn't have bad luck...
posted on 04 Jan 2011 under category Meta
… I’d have no luck at all, or so the old song goes.
Maybe no luck would be the way to go, given my experiences with bad luck this past month. This will probably be the last time I bother buying a new instrument. I just don’t have the endurance for it anymore.
So, I had some extra birthday cash in early November and I decided that I wanted to get a new guitar. For quite some time I’d had my mind set on getting a BC Rich Mockingbird - I’ve always liked how it’s a strange mix of edgy and classic, and since Kerry King and Chuck Schuldiner each used them on albums I grew up worshipping, it made sense (and would make a nice companion piece to my P-Bass, my SG, and my Strat - each of which I own for the same reasons…).
All of the new Mockingbirds you can get now have those quilt-top finishes with the wood grain - pretty, on its own, but not right for such a metal-looking guitar I think. I wanted a vintage, flat-black metal monster. With a Floyd Rose. Anyone who’s heard my music knows how integral a Floyd is to my ‘style’, such as it is, and all of the current budget-model Mockingbirds are fixed bridge. So, new instruments were out and the used shops in my area were dry of anything even remotely metal.
That left eBay.
Now, I’d bought a guitar on eBay before - my SG, in fact. However, that one was lucky enough to be a local pickup, so I haven’t ever dealt with shipping on a guitar through eBay. Still, TONS of guitars sell that way, and they’re not all ripoffs, so in my naivete I thought it couldn’t be that bad. So, I searched, and found a great-looking NJ series Mockingbird - jet black, with a Floyd, and better yet it INCLUDED the case. The price was right, and I was even luckier that the guy dropped the price right before I bid. So, I managed to get it for right at my budget, including the shipping. The guy had 100% feedback with a 500+ rating, so I figured I couldn’t lose.
Silly me.
I paid for the guitar in mid-November, and then proceeded to wait. And wait. The projected shipping window came and went and still no guitar - and, worse, no email from the seller about when or even whether he shipped it. I had no idea if it was lost or what. And, having been burned on eBay before, and knowing how short their timeframe for payment return is, I decided to open a case.
Finally the seller started contacting me, telling me he sent it, but he couldn’t tell me when or by what method and wouldn’t provide tracking or a receipt scan. So, knowing it’s a pain but preferring to be out a guitar rather than out a few hundred bucks I escalated the case. And got my refund. Just the day before Xmas Eve. The seller emailed me again, asking about the refund and whether or not I still wanted the guitar - an odd question for someone who told me he sent it already. I told him that if he hadn’t shipped it, don’t bother - I didn’t trust that it would arrive.
So xmas came and went, and then a few days afterward - AFTER the refund came through, mind you, and AFTER I told the guy not to send it - guess what arrives in the mail. Yes, my guitar. Postmarked AFTER I told him not to bother. I guess he trusted I’d pay him again for it after all. As I suspected I would, I would forgive the jerking around the second I had my dirty little hands on the guitar itself. But boy did it need some work - new strings, and the bridge needed to be blocked.
So, I set to work on taking off the strings, cleaning it, blocking the bridge, and then changing the strings - when one of the little string-clamp blocks in the bridge broke. Damn - now I need to replace that little block. I kept stringing it, and then was tightening another string-clamp block and SNAP! The entire saddle assembly just broke, right in two. On the plus side, I pulled the clamp block from that saddle and fixed the other one, so I only need one saddle assembly now. But NOBODY in town has one. So, it’s back to eBay, to fix this goddamn white elephant of a mess I’ve gotten myself into.
So, when you hear some story about me dying in a car wreck on the way from some music shop, you’ll know why.
(Well, it ended up working out well - after local shops ended up not working out, I found a saddle assembly on eBay. I didn’t want to have to wait on shipping, but I did anyway. However, this ended up being much less painful since the part is smaller than a box of paper clips and only about the weight of the envelope. I also ended up having to block the bridge and then shim the neck, and one of the pots in it is detached and still needs to be fixed. It’s been my first fixer-upper guitar, but it is at least operational now. I even used it on the Death Beast live album - tracks 7-12 in the Vic-side guitar track, i.e. the one with the wah guitar solos. I can’t wait to use it for the next Death Beast album.)