Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

Gearjoneser said:
Probably, the dumbest things I've done to gear is simply dropping a tool, or slipping with a miniscrewdriver on a guitar's top. I've even stepped on new tubes when retubing an amp, while yanking the chassis out of it's headshell.

This auction contains the dumbest thing ever done to a nice, expensive Marshall. :22: :saeek:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=38075&item=3735084539&rd=1

Eew that stepping on the new tube made me cringe, just cos of the mess it wouldhave made, but a nice scratch on a guitar top isnt much better!

That marshall is bloody disgusting...lucky its only a dsl ;) (just kidding all those dsl owners, before you start flaming me :D )

Cant say ive really done many silly things to gear, except when first restringing my floyd guitar i only bought a single replacement string and then tightened it way too far first off and it just snapped and i cracked it!

And once i tried rehearsing (with drums) with a roland cube 30...suffice to say it started sounding pretty bad trying to get it up that loud!
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

With my first guitar (Squier Affinity) I cut the bottom off up towards the bridge, like this:
---___
--/----\
-/------\

The ---'s arent suppsoed to be there, only for spacing.

It looked like one of those guitars that I can't remember the name of. Then I smashed it like a rockstar in my backyard! LOL

With my 2nd guitar, the cheapest Ibanez in the world, I tried to do a trem to hardtail conversion, while scalloping frets 12-24. I realized the guitar was way to crappy to play even remotely decent if I did it all perfect. So I smashed it like a rockstar, again.
 
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Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

man ill feel stupid after i say this :smack:

when i first started playing i was taking my 15 watt amp from one room to the next so i unplugged it (without turning the power off) and then to keep my guitar chord from dragging i had one end in the input and one end in the headphone jack. when i got to the other room i forgot to take it out of the headphone jack and plugged it in. it imediatly when bvvvfffzzt and started smoking. :smack:


but its weird because i swear it was destiny that i did that because my dads boss felt sorry for me and sold me his fender ultra chorus for 200 bucks, SCORE! :)
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

DeadSkinSlayer3 said:
With my first guitar (Squier Affinity) I cut the bottom off up towards the bridge, like this:
---___
--/----\
-/------\

The ---'s arent suppsoed to be there, only for spacing.

It looked like one of those guitars that I can't remember the name of. Then I smashed it like a rockstar in my backyard! LOL

With my 2nd guitar, the cheapest Ibanez in the world, I tried to do a trem to hardtail conversion, while scalloping frets 12-24. I realized the guitar was way to crappy to play even remotely decent if I did it all perfect. So I smashed it like a rockstar, again.

Hahaha what a waste!
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

It was fun!! Neither guitar would be worth anything to me right now, unless I got new necks, pickups, and hardware.
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

o yeah and then one time like i had just put some dean markely blue steels on my bass and i tuned it up 2.5 steps because i was curious/retarded and i started wailing on it with a pick and my d string snapped :saeek:
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

The pickups in my Wolfgang mount directly to the wood, and after multiple pickup swaps, a screw hole had stripped. So I fixed it by putting a few drops of superglue in the hole. This took care of the problem, but I didn't notice that some glue continued to ooze out of the tube. I was holding it in my right hand, a few inches off the face of the guitar, and a few drops landed on the finish while I wasn't paying attention. I tried to get them off in a hurry, but it was too late. So I have a nickel-sized mark to the right of the neck pickup where some super glue got on the finish. It's not too bad though, you can't really see it unless you look at the guitar up close in good lighting. The finish looks a little dull in that spot, but it's no big deal. Rather than having it fixed, I decided to leave it as a reminder to be careful when working on my guitars.

Ryan
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

I've done some pretty stupid stuff to a guitar. I ripped the fretboard off a cheapie acoustic ($5 yardsale special) just to see if I could get it to go back on. Stayed on for about 6 months. I've done the usual slips of the screwdriver or dropping of the soldering iron. I think the worse thing I've done is used gap filling polystyrine glue to glue a strat copy together. The neck is solid as a rock now, but it was a bitch to clean up that glue. You cant even remove the neck plate.
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

I dropped my Strat right on the sharp corner of an EXH Small Clone. Now there's a big gouge in the finish one inch above the 24th fret right on the face of the guitar.

I can't hide that one. :smack:
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

About the dumbest thing I ever did was mod my 95 MIM strat - I wanted an HSS and the hole didn't line up with the new pickguard I got so I chipped some of the body out and did the guitarnuts thing - spray painted the inside with nickel paint, did star wiring, the whole nine yards... When I brought it to the guitar tech for a setup one time he just about flipped his lid - to me it was good fun but to him I'd ruined the resale value of a guitar... lol - whatever, right? :D
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

UCSDBoy said:
When I brought it to the guitar tech for a setup one time he just about flipped his lid - to me it was good fun but to him I'd ruined the resale value of a guitar... lol - whatever, right? :D

Because we all know that all stock MIM Stratocasters will one day become collectors items. :D :D
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

The dumbest thing I've done is sell it -- ugh, when I think of what I've let go: an eighties PRS, a marshall head, a Twin Reverb (probably seventies since i bought it used in like 80 or 81), a 70's or early eighties USA schecter strat that I loved maybe more than any guitar I can remember - pauses to weep like child with colic -, a candy apple red gibson Les Paul Standard (traded it for the PRS mentioned above), and a Mesa Boogie 50 caliber that I would love to have now as a compact amp for the size room I practice in. Sheesh where were my friends, why didn't someone stop the maddness....
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

screamingdaisy said:
Because we all know that all stock MIM Stratocasters will one day become collectors items. :D :D
lol - that's what I said - but the guy really took that personally... dunno why. Maybe he's not a stratophile or something and couldn't rate it. After all, with those sweet APS-1s in it, it sounds a hell of a lot better than your average MIM... lol
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

Actually, now that I think about it, I really have to thank the folks at Seymour Duncan - whenever I've taken one of my beaters in I've always gotten comments on how well they sound... I've even had guys who've ran shops for 20 years ask me over and over, dude, what did you put in this thing? And I'm like, Seymour Duncans, dude! :D
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

I had purchased my first guitar the night before, i had been playing a squire (rented) for a while before i got it and spent out what was big money to get my perfect guitar. (RG570ex -about £700-800 i think), made sure i got myself a fairly chunky padlock in order to keep this baby safe. Day after i had got it i took it to school for my lesson, opened its case that morning and instantly dropped the padlock. Basswood doesnt stand a chance against a falling lump of metal :smack: , i was pretty mad at myself, but now ive grown to accept it and wouldn't swap my guitar for one the same but without the dent, i'm sure others have done worse, but doing this the day after i got my first guitar was quite a bummer.
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

This is pretty bad-- I took a router to to my beloved 1983 Les Paul Standard and installed a Kahler trem bar. You don't see many LPs with a Kahler and there is a reason. It really killed the sustain and changed the tone. This guitar had also had an ugly Dimarzio X2-N in the bridge (this was 1985/86 and I was heavily into Vai).

I traded that guitar for a mid-70s Strat that promptly got routed for a SD Invader (I had one laying around), I modified the pickguard with a hunting knife. Traded that guitar for a Nintendo while I was in college....
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

Painted a '56 Gold Top Les Paul polka dot once! :smack:

The biggest blunder I ever made was sending my '59 Les Paul Standard to Gibson back around 1970 to have it refretted and refinished. They hacked it and the guitar came back with the neck narrower than it was originally.

So they offered to fix it with a new fingerboard.

When I got the guitar back the second time Gibson had put a ebony Les Paul Custom fingerboard on my original '59 Les Paul!

I sold the guitar for about $800... :smack:

If I hadn't been so stupid, I'd have a $50,000 to $100,000 guitar right now...tho I'd planned on keeping it for the rest of my life.

I hated the Norlin/Gibson company for a long time after that... :saeek:

Lew
 
Re: Dumbest Thing You've Done to Gear?

Ouch Lew....

After reading that I don't feel nearly as bad about the slip of the mini screwdriver onto the top of my Hardtail while installing new HB rings. I'm reading the 50 Years Of Gibson Les Pauls right now, and I am developing the same feelings about the Norlin era of Gibson as you have. They really screwed up a great guitar company for a long time.
 
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