There was a guitar on ebay...

[Deke]

Left handed, 7 string, custom built, archtop jazz guitar. Starting price $1,200.00.

I ignore ads with that many digits in them. Since I was made redundant what I would once have considered to be bargains are now rich man's playthings. Trouble was, I really liked that guitar, and I kept going back and looking at it, and the dollar kept sliding down against the pound, and suddenly it occured to me that I could almost afford the little beauty.

It was one of those 'almosts' that really means 'the heck with it, I'll do without food for a week or two', and I went back to the site to put in my bid, at which point I realised that I was also going to have to pay the shipping and insurance to get the guitar over here. Dang. About an hour later I'd pretty much decided to eat raw food and bath in cold water for the rest of the year, and I went back to the site again.

It was at this point I realised just one more thing.

Something this big and expensive wasn't going to sneak into the country un-noticed. I was going to have to pay tax on it. After several abortive attempts to find the information on the web I telephoned the customs and excise people, who were amazingly human and friendly, and they told me it goes like this. Add the cost of shipping, but not the insurance, to the cost of the guitar. Add 3.7% import duty. Take the new total and add seventeen and a half percent Value Added Tax to it...

Tax on tax? I worked out that that was going to add almost a quarter of the original price to the guitar. Reluctantly I gave up, and watched the guitar leave ebay, unsold. But I couldn't stay away. I kept going back to see if it had been re-advertised at a lower first bid price, and it was on one of these return visits that I noticed an email address for the guitar maker. I immediately wrote and asked if it was actually him selling the guitar.

He wrote straight back to say yes, did I have any questions about it? I wrote replying that I just had one question, was it going to be relisted cheaper? I explained my situation, and I closed by saying that basically I could just about afford the guitar if the $1,200 included the cost of shipping and insurance. What I hoped would happen at that point was that he would work out how much he was going to have to pay ebay and Paypal to sell though them, and offer to sell me the guitar at the price I'd offered. He would, in fact, have made more on the deal, but I didn't mention any of this as it's against the rules of ebay, and I don't want blackballing.

It's been 5 days and the guy's not even written back to say "Forget it!"

You see. The reason custom guitar builders are so poor has nothing to do with them slaving away at their craft for love instead of money.

It's 'cause they're crap at sums...

[Lenny D.Guitarist]

Dekedude, if you're not happy with this guy, drop him, and move on. Good luck.