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I’m hoping to do some repair work on acoustic or electric guitars for practice and have heard there are sites that sell damaged stuff that’s not super expensive. Is this true?

I’ve looked on eBay etc but usually the stuff I see is pretty pricey for being broken. Like a Córdoba guitar with a neck broken in the middle was selling for $200 and it would cost $499 to buy new. Is that really FMV for a broken guitar or am I looking in the wrong place?

Under normal times , call your local shops as we usually come across junk not worth repairing for profit on a regular basis. Put an ad up on craigslist WTB.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

What Brian said. We get instruments donated to us because we have been known to repair them and give them to Vets and Homeless Folks. Of course these days we are ordered closed but as Brian said in normal times most guitar repair shops have a dead guitar storage area that would be perfect for this.

eBay is a constant source of massive misrepresentation and ripping folks off in my view. When we were open to the public a week didn't go by that someone came in proclaiming all happy "look at what I WON.... on eBay..." Then of course we are the ones to tell them that it's beyond economically feasible repair or toast in some other major way.

Craig's list look for what we call "project guitars" and that's how we advise folks who we pronounce their guitar DOA to list their offerings and they should be free or very little money.

Good on you too Keith for wanting to learn repair.

Garage sales.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Never thought to try shops. I’ll give that a shot when control of the earth is returned to us from the undead.

I have looked at garage sales but so far no luck there, either. Maybe my neighbors are all Philistines that don’t play or they’re all great people, busy taking good care of their instruments.

It sounds like you’re saying there’s no international repository of defunct but repairable guitars, which is both surprising and disappointing. I was hoping there was a big pile of them somewhere like those places where it says “free wood” and you can cherry pick from any one of 100 or so eucalyptus stumps and random thick branches.

I have a reputation with my shop of trying to fix instruments that no one else will touch. Sometimes I'm successful. I also have an agreement with the mariachi music program at our local high school that I will fix their damaged instruments pro bono. Many of these are very poorly built, the kids are hard on them and I get lots of practice.

The flip side of that, however, is that you can dump hours into something that truly is not worth fixing - its a hard call.

I saw a broken Gibson J200, and when I say broken I mean completely smashed up to pieces. Still went for over 1000 dollars. Seriously you could buy a used one for not much more.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Yeah I’m not sure I saw one that extreme but I’ve seen several acoustics that look like the neck is broken in such a place that I’m guessing the body is split and the neck would take a serious craftsman to rebuild and it would lose all its value and probably not sound that great once fixed and it’s maybe 15% lower than a used playable one.

So far so haven’t found any to experiment on.

Shops are mostly covid-closed near me but I might try one or two that know me when the opportunity is there.

Thanks for the info.

Just so you know (I forgot to mention this), I saw that on ebay. I don't know why someone would pay that much for smashed up guitars.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Yeah I agree. I’ve purchased a couple that needed some work (that was unexpected) and learn a lot from fixing them but otherwise would prefer to make a new one from scratch rather than glue together a bunch of little fragments to make one whole again