Your greatest guitar boot sale finds or similar.

Winny_Pooh

Never had any luck at car boots

With Cash Converters etc I've been luckier although this is years of scouting:

MIJ 1986 57 RI Strat £100
Sennheiser MD421 £110
70's Tele deluxe copy with actual vintage Fender Widerange humbuckers. £150
Boss RE-20 advertised as faulty £30

Henrytwang

Found an HH combo in a skip a few years ago, it had two 12 inch Sound City speakers in it. I’ve still got it and it’s still working. I used to pick up some great stuff at car boot sales but there are too many people looking for stuff to sell on eBay these days. I can sometimes find something that needs a little work done on it, the dealers are only really interested in buying gear that they can pass straight on.

vale

i've never found anything remotely interesting music-wise at a jumble or boot. not even a pedal. the only musical-ish thing i found that was pretty cool was a plastic beatles guitar exactly like this.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4f/7b/af/4f7bafbe5d3223c55d22ba3708028c7a.jpg

it was my summer holidays between primary and secondary (c1990) and i was having a bit of a major autistic moment about the beatles. the story and legend as much as the music.
it stayed on my wall all through my teenage even though i swapped beatles for the dark stuff when i finally found 'my music' as a teen (80s goth & early electro).

i probably paid a couple of pounds for it (i wouldn't have had more than that to spend). when i finished uni i needed a deposit to rent a flat so had to sell it. it went to a collectors shop in brighton for maybe £30-£50? somewhere between those two. pre ebay that seemed good. certainly better than being homeless.

as HarrySeven said, ebay has totally killed jumbles and boots now. dealers are in there with their sharp elbows and bad attitude and it can create quite a horrible atmosphere. not so much a fun thing to do on a sunday morning anymore, as the trading floor of the stock exchange.

am sure most will have experienced those domineering 'first come' sharks huddled over mobiles checking values of anything interesting before they will let anyone else near the stall.

i hope they all have crashes on the way home.

boogieman

Couple of boot fair finds. A Coloursound Wah Fuzz for a quid and a Boss CE2 for £2. 

My cousin beats me though. He found a 60’s Vox AC30 in a skip. Worked fine as well. 

peteri

Bridgehouse said:

peteri said:

long time ago now - but back in 1986 I got my first valve amplifier, from a disco equipment shop in Northamptonshire, was just passing with my dad and saw it in the window.

Paid £25 for a 1962 Fender Bassman head, in many ways wish I'd kept it - but it was louder than hell, sold it in the 2000s for about a grand or so

I'd love a '62 Bassman head for recording bass.... sigh!

Sold it to Mr Octatonic, back in 2006 - not sure if he still has it

BBBlues

Not car boot, but I got an original silver Klon Centaur off gumtree for £200 back in the day before gumtree was a scam site. He was just round the corner from me too. Sold it when prices got silly for nearly £1k.

Bridgehouse

peteri said:

Bridgehouse said:

peteri said:

long time ago now - but back in 1986 I got my first valve amplifier, from a disco equipment shop in Northamptonshire, was just passing with my dad and saw it in the window.

Paid £25 for a 1962 Fender Bassman head, in many ways wish I'd kept it - but it was louder than hell, sold it in the 2000s for about a grand or so

I'd love a '62 Bassman head for recording bass.... sigh!

Sold it to Mr Octatonic, back in 2006 - not sure if he still has it

Lol it’s probly worth about 2.5k now anyway

KKJale

Pickings are scant these days. My only decent find this year was a rather scarce acoustic soundhole pickup for £25 from the local online ads. 

Never been a boot sale chaser, but I used to live around the corner from a secondhand shop - Cambridge Resale on Mill Road - which was a goldmine in the early/mid '90s, if you checked it constantly. It came with the benefit of a hilariously rude and misanthropic proprietor. 

I had a '70s EH Micro Amp for £10, a Memory Man for £25, a Suzuki Omnichord for £15, an Italian Farfisa tranny combo with an amazing squiggly-pattern grille cloth for £40, a silverface Champ for £45 (still have that), a German-made Solton valve head for dunno how much, and a salmon pink Tokai Goldstar Sound for £85... which I speedily traded for the JV P-bass I still plonk today. 

chrisj1602

I got an early 60s Hofner Verythin for £50.

Koa

A few years back I bought a no name ply bodied MiJ telecaster for £45 from a car boot sale, gigged it the next week, post gig was told by someone who’d been in the audience that it was the best Telecaster tone he’d ever heard....promptly sold my US 52 Reissue Tele!

Branshen

I've posted this story before.

About 5 years ago, I got a vintage boss vb-2 from a shop on Denmark Street for £15.

They sold it as faulty. And I didn't get to test it until I got back to nottingham. It worked fine! They must have been testing it while in bypass mode, which essentially does nothing when the pedal is on! 

telehack

1977 Ibanez MIJ telecaster for £60 at a car boot sale, black - Keef Richards look. Neck was fantastic. Bridge pickup was extremely weedy. Sold it to a guy in Italy.

jonnygreentrees

Nowhere near as good as others here but I managed to snag a Peavey Classic 20 Combo from an auction house for £80.

Had an 80s Guyatone MD2 delay stuck to the speaker cone when I got it home which I sold for £50

prowla

I bought an original pressing Led Zep I (cyan writing) at a car boot for £15; I later sold it for £450.

More recently I picked up a vintage Vox bass in need of stripping back and restoring, for a fiver - it was never a great instrument and it's not worth huge money, but I kind of like it.

Iamnobody

HarrySeven said:

I’ve stopped going now - too many scutters and ebay resellers clambering into cars before they’ve even parked up, fights, that sort of thing. CBA.

That’s been my experience going back a couple of decades. I’ve done a couple as as seller and people don’t even let you get the stuff out the car. I did tell them to fuck off and come back later...

Also we were just trying to declutter so had loads of low value items priced rediculosy low. Baby clothes for 20p etc and you still get people haggling I’ll give you 15p or whatever. It’s like mentally they need the win!

If I never sell at a car boot again it will be too soon. Far to much hassle for the £20 or £30 we ‘made’. I’d rather give stuff to charity shops...

HarrySeven

Iamnobody said:

HarrySeven said:

I’ve stopped going now - too many scutters and ebay resellers clambering into cars before they’ve even parked up, fights, that sort of thing. CBA.

That’s been my experience going back a couple of decades. I’ve done a couple as as seller and people don’t even let you get the stuff out the car. I did tell them to fuck off and come back later...

Also we were just trying to declutter so had loads of low value items priced rediculosy low. Baby clothes for 20p etc and you still get people haggling I’ll give you 15p or whatever. It’s like mentally they need the win!

If I never sell at a car boot again it will be too soon. Far to much hassle for the £20 or £30 we ‘made’. I’d rather give stuff to charity shops...

Yup.

The bootsales near me are stitched up by brassneck twats who knock on the windows of the cars as they’re driving in/parking up asking if they’ve got x, y or z. 

Theres one ebay reseller in particular who deploys this^ tactic - he has absolutely zero idea re. what he’s buying guitar-wise, but buys anything and everything. They then immediately reappear on eBay in the same condition (missing strings, knackered, whatever) with a large markup.

57Deluxe

Freecycle

http://i59.tinypic.com/2r3j97l.jpg

JezWynd

Had a Laney Klipp 100 head out of a junk shop in Aldershot for 50 quid in the 80's. Might have been near the asking in those days but they seem to get a lot of love now.

bbill335

HarrySeven said:

I’ve posted stuff like this before...jeez, can’t remember all of it.

Loads over the years - Laney Supergroup heads, WEM Dominators, Binson Echorecs, Marshall 1974, Sound City heads, that sort of thing. I remember buying a Tascam 244 (when they were current and expensive) for £15, a Vox Continental for £20, Farfisa Super Compact for £15, a huge Tascam 388 1/4” 8-track for a tenner, Tascam 34’s, Tascam 38’s, stacks of pedals, etc, etc.

In more recent times, it’s been stuff like a Westone Thunder 1A for £5, boxed Line 6 Pod XT Live for £5, a (red) Roland SH-101 with Mod Grip for £25, Marshall AS50D’s for £10 each (picked up a few of those), a USA Fender Pro Jnr for £4, a Watkins Rapier for a fiver, blahblahblah...

Time was when I’d go to 3/4 boots over a weekend and do pretty well. These days, really interesting stuff is few and far between. I’ve stopped going now - too many scutters and ebay resellers clambering into cars before they’ve even parked up, fights, that sort of thing. CBA.

Where are these things now? I would love a ProJr but can't justify 300 for one when they're so noisy.

Fuengi

bbill335 said:

HarrySeven said:

I’ve posted stuff like this before...jeez, can’t remember all of it.

Loads over the years - Laney Supergroup heads, WEM Dominators, Binson Echorecs, Marshall 1974, Sound City heads, that sort of thing. I remember buying a Tascam 244 (when they were current and expensive) for £15, a Vox Continental for £20, Farfisa Super Compact for £15, a huge Tascam 388 1/4” 8-track for a tenner, Tascam 34’s, Tascam 38’s, stacks of pedals, etc, etc.

In more recent times, it’s been stuff like a Westone Thunder 1A for £5, boxed Line 6 Pod XT Live for £5, a (red) Roland SH-101 with Mod Grip for £25, Marshall AS50D’s for £10 each (picked up a few of those), a USA Fender Pro Jnr for £4, a Watkins Rapier for a fiver, blahblahblah...

Time was when I’d go to 3/4 boots over a weekend and do pretty well. These days, really interesting stuff is few and far between. I’ve stopped going now - too many scutters and ebay resellers clambering into cars before they’ve even parked up, fights, that sort of thing. CBA.

Where are these things now? I would love a ProJr but can't justify 300 for one when they're so noisy.

Buy a Yerasov GTA15. Better made copy with quality components and dead quiet.