What are you Yanks whinning on about...Look what we Limeys can pay....LOL

[phil47uk]

If the price wasn't quite so damaging it could nearly be funny.
Here's a pic of a 59 Historic from a well known UK dealer.
And you wonder why us Brits get pissed off...
According to them. The best flame they have ever seen on a Les Paul... :toobad

You Yanks should seriously get yourselves over here for a vacation armed with a couple of Historics under each arm.... Another with the wife and a couple more with the kids...Hell! Just tell the British customs you are members the Carter family on tour... They probably won't stop you anyway..Most of them will be asleep. :wha
Sell em here and it will pay for your vacation ( including a trip to the Tower Of London)

The price by the way.....£4,850 ( $9,287 U.S ).. Oh! and you actualy get a case with it. :salude

Phil. =(

 

[sixstringrazor]

You'll get a better deal if you come over here and buy with your Euros...

 

[Yelly]

Here is joke of the week. A black Les Paul Custom priced at £3500. No sign of it being an Historic either!

 

[Rains]

phil and yelly....you surely have heard about this guy in the uk who is selling new gibsons for ridiculous low prices?

 

[kerryboy]

phil and yelly....you surely have heard about this guy in the uk who is selling new gibsons for ridiculous low prices?

So who's that then Rains

 

[Gold Tone]

What a HORRIBLE fingerboard!

 

[phil47uk]

Rains,
Yeah I heard about this guy.
Mind you whether you can try them out or not I don't know.
Duncan at Angel is giving very good deals on Lesters, maybe not quite as cheap as this guy, but they are selected for tone and you can have them for a 24 hour free trial and they are set up by Robbie Gladwell.

The idea of flying over to the States and grabbing a bunch sounds all very well, but you can run into all sorts of problems. Great if you are just getting in one for yourself, but if you bring in a bunch, firstly you'll more likely get hit by the Customs and secondly you have to shift them and take off the cost of the journey.
Shifting Strat's ect at the lower end of the market is easy. Most people can come up with that kind of cash, but when you are talking about handing over say £,2,800 ( which is still very cheap for an R9) People don't come across with that type of cash easily. If you don't take credit cards, basicaly forget it. Most punters don't mind spending on plastic because you can pay it off, but cash...That's a different ball game.
Then you've got to be prepared to have them hanging around for a while which means your initial outlay is tied up.
Ones best bet is to have ready customers who are prepared to lay down a deposit and get someone to ship them over. Obviously one would have to weigh up all the costs and off course the customer wouldn't be able to try it out first, so you'd have to have someone in the States that knew his stuff and select the pick of the crop so to speak.
Difficult though and not quite as easy as it seems.

But Nearly five grand for that guitar in the pic....Even with store overheads. That's getting into the realms of the ridiculous.

I'd be interested to know what sort of average price say an R9 would cost in other countries throughout the world, so we could compare.
What about you Canadians. Do you get good price deals compared to the U.S? And how about other European countries and say the middle east..Africa etc.
A lot of my relatives are Swiss.... Jesus!, I'd hate to think how much a Swiss Lester would cost, when they charge about £3.00 ($5.74 U.S ) for a cup of coffee. Perhaps they give mortgages on them. I'm probably going there this summer, so I'll check out some shops. I don't hold out too much hope of seeing many though. I think they only read about them over there.. :spin

Phil

 

[skyeking69]

You'll get a better deal if you come over here and buy with your Euros...

The Brits still have the British pound.....

phil47uk
We have the same problem in Canada ( well not quite that high)
but we are taxed to death...15%
Ever guitar I own except one I inherited...came from the US because of this....

 

[phil47uk]

The Brits still have the British pound.....

phil47uk
We have the same problem in Canada ( well not quite that high)
but we are taxed to death...15%
Ever guitar I own except one I inherited...came from the US because of this....

sixstringrazor,
Yeah. As skyeking69 said, we still have our old British pounds . They don't take too kindly to Euros over here. Any resistance to any change and you'll find an Englishman lurking somewhere in the vicinity. :salude

Skyeking,
seeing as you only have to cross the border by car to get in the U.S. Are the Customs hot. Do they look in your trunk etc from time to time, or do they mostly turn a blind eye to a guitar case sitting on the back seat?

Phil.

 

[skyeking69]

sixstringrazor,
Yeah. As skyeking69 said, we still have our old British pounds . They don't take too kindly to Euros over here. Any resistance to any change and you'll find an Englishman lurking somewhere in the vicinity. :salude

Skyeking,
seeing as you only have to cross the border by car to get in the U.S. Are the Customs hot. Do they look in your trunk etc from time to time, or do they mostly turn a blind eye to a guitar case sitting on the back seat?

Phil.

phil47uk

As a Canadian I knew you still had the pound...and not to mention the Euro!! hahha
As for customs...there are lot's of ways to get them over the border..even shipping them over...no problem...you just have to knew what to do..
I have never had a tax problem doing this..

 

[lpnv59]

This is giving me ideas! :hmm

I may be flying over to Europe in the early fall to play some dates in and around France. If it happens, I was going to need to bring 2 guitars with me anyway. One will be an '04 CR9 that was bought recently because of this tour. I could very well pick up another R9 to bring with me, instead of using my parts Tele as planned for my 2nd guitar. Use them for the gigs and sell them both after the last gig. Would I get snagged up with declarations and duties, etc. on my way back home?? :q

 

[kerryboy]

You guys still haven't said who it is in the UK that is selling Gibsons cheap. Who is it!!!!!

Spill the beans guys.

 

[Rains]

i emailed you kerryboy, its not allowed here

 

[goldtop0]

I'll chime in,excessive prices here also in fact they cost more than that quoted in phil's 1st post.............I bought my gats off ebay and a forum dealer......and that's the way it will stay.

 

[59Vampire]

Phil, whats a Punter? Secondly, Im dying to come to England. How can I find out the real deal on how many guitars I can bring etc. I figure I can carry 2 R9s at US prices. How would I go about selling them?

 

[V!N]

I say .. Phil ! You really get them for little money feller !


There´s a horrible store in the Netherlands and it´s making a killing out of selling used historics.

When I got interested in historics, that store treated me like crap:

"No, we can't help you getting a historic with wild flames, the originals didn't have that, don't you know ? No thick necks for you ! That's terrible for tone and unhealthy for your hand, arm and wrist."

So I think you can guess how many historics I bought from them !



http://www.britam.nl


Here´s a bit of what they did in the past twelve months (or something around that)


'02 R8, sold for 3.750 Euro / 2.680 Pounds / 5.120 US$

'01 R8, sold before it even arrived for 3.750 Euro / 2.680 Pounds / 5.120 US$



'99 R9, sold for Euro 4.750 Euro / 3.400 Pounds / 6.485 US$

'99 R9, coming soon for 4.595 Euro / 3.283 Pounds / 6.275 US$



'00 R9, Murphy aged, still for sale for 7.995 Euro / 5.715 Pounds / 10.915 US$

Murphy BOTB Replica of 9_0910, sold for 8.500 Euro / 6.075 Pounds / 11.605 US$
Murphy BOTB Replica of 9_0663, still for sale for the same price

Murphy Jimmy Page #23, NOT signed by Mr. Page, still for sale for 11.500 Euro / 8.215 Pounds / 15.700 US$
Garry Rossington #002 is for sale there as well, don't know the price, don't care ..



So I think you KNOW how many historics I bought from them !

 

[Red Baron]

We have the same ridiculously high prices for American made guitars here in Australia with R9's retailing from between $10-$15k (our dollar is about the same value as Canada's).
But buying directly through the forum dealers is a smart move when you live in this part of the world... I bought an R9 from Mark for US$4200, with the exchange rate, shipping and import duty/taxes the whole deal ended up at just over AU$6k which is very appealing when compared to that $10-$15k that I wouldn't have spent here.

Hey Phil, lots of ways to get around those high import taxes, how about you take a guitar (any old beat up piece of wood) out of the country with you and swap it at the other end for a historic... I doubt customs would record more than the name on the headstock if that.
Even better, ship a beat-up guitar to the States for a complete refurbishment and have it return as a lovely new historic ...I might try that one next time

 

[Martin_UK]

The thing is we have choice also. True, new Historics can go for the stupid prices mentioned. Used ones (including a '03 dark burst R9), that I've seen on ebay with pretty nice tops have gone for under £1900, which is a great price. There is also currently a '05 R8 on ebay and it looks like it's going to go for a very decent amount.

 

[silent-strat]

Buy british then, there are plenty of homegrown builders doing great things at affordable prices.

 

[phil47uk]

Some really entertaining stories guys..Love em!

59 Vampire.. A punter is slang for a customer.

What is intersting about all these posts, is that it seems that ever since the advent of the internet and it's growth over the past decade, the high street shop (store) is being used less and less for high end of the market stuff.

I have watched the trends over here in the UK and most high street dealers are now basicaly catering for the beginner and low end of the market stuff.
The shops are stuffed full of all sorts of whacky eastern made guitars which come and go out of season like consigments of bannanas.

The world is now a much smaller market place.
Many dealers over here don't stock the big name brands for the simple reason that they are not getting any good deals on them from the importers.
You either take a whole wall full of them, or nothing at all.
I have recently spoken to two locals dealers I know well and both have said the same thing. The smaller companies on the other hand bend over backwards to do give away package deals.
I said to one dealer. For heavens sake put a couple of Historics in your window, OK, you might not sell them straight away, but it draws customers in.
While they are in there noodling away at Stairway To Heaven on the R9, you can flog ( sell) them a couple of packs of strings. But at the moment, all you are drawing in with your display stock is young kids. There is nothing there for the seasoned player to drool over.

Some of the mega high street boys, do use this tactic and it works, but now there is a change of wind in the air.
Quite a few smaller dealers are now by-passing the importers and shipping directly over from the States. I would imagine most of the decent priced Les Paul's you see over here are brought in that way.

Off course the importers don't like this at all, and threaten to withdraw sales to the dealer. But as one dealer said to me. "Why should I have to buy an extra £16,000 worth of this companies stock which is going to sit there for two years, just to get a half decent deal on two high end of the range instruments". "Even buying at U.S retail, with the strength of the pound against the dollar I can still come out ahead".

There are some good deals to be had on Flea-Bay now and again, but it's a bit of a chuck and chance it affair with private sales. I have bought and sold some great stuff and have been lucky, but I also know of some people who have ended up with a pile of crap. You just gotta know how to play that market and also have some luck on your side as well.

Vin..... That shop you mentioned in Holland sound like a right pain in the arse.
Lucky I didn't go in with you. I have never been known for my political correctness.....We could have had some real fun in there.... :tfiend

I'm OK at the moment. Thanks to DesertDawg I managed to get a scorcher of an R0 in over here for about the same price I would have paid for it in the States without even leaving my living room.

Vampire... Bringing guitars into the UK is a real chuck and chance it affair.
You may get stopped. You may not.
A pupil of mine just returned from Miami last week and walked straight through 'Nothing to declare' at customs with an electro acoustic in a brand new shiney case. He reckoned the customs officers just watched him walk through and said nothing. On the other hand another guy I know got stung for taxes with an R9 under his arm. I really am begining to believe it's all according to whether your face fits or not.

Phil.