Even though they were at the peak of the bad manufacturing, seeing the proud ‘Union made’ sticker inside those old Gibsons meant you knew the workers were paid a living wage. The same thing happened with Fender over the last few years.

Just need to look for the broken headstock.

​@@drgearaustraliathat hockey stick looks like it would snap if you signaled your bandmates too emphatically to end a number...

Cheaper and easier for production. They can just pick up whatever body they need for order fulfillment. In the days of pin routers it was cheaper to not have to do the extra route. Today though, it’s easier and cheaper to let the CNC cut the extra hole in 25 seconds. Also means people like it because you can upgrade the guitar to a two pickup model easily.

@@drgearaustralia easier and cheaper shouldn’t cost $1200 for what they call a student guitar. The guy in the video was showing a $4,000 with cheaper and easier. I guess I’m bummed because I wanted one for so long and was very disappointed in the quality.

@@bbass5711 it shouldn’t, but it does with brands like Gibson because they know people will buy them for the brand name. Same is true of Harley’s and Mesas. Lifestyle brands with an image attached.

That’s why I say there are amps I will do work on like the Hot Rod Deluxe and Blues Jr Series of amps as when you do the usual upgrades and repairs to them, they’re solid. They all have the same issues so any secondhand one will have the same issues.

Him and Knopfler.

Everything is repairable with infinite time and money. The problem is when the cost is beyond that of a decent used replacement due to how cheap the items can be new.

Truer words there are not. We aren’t charities and have lives to live ourselves. I don’t care if someone else down the road can do it cheaper, they’re not us. We have the overheads we do.

I mean, you didn't actually watch the video, did you? The customer was informed when it was brought in that it wasn't worth repairing due to the nature of the fault and the cost of these on the secondhand market so they just left it with us to do whatever with in lieu of paying the full bench fee. The amount of work that will go into this amp to make it worthy of being sold will exceed what I can sell it for, but it's a good piece of kit to test some tweaks on and do more trouble shooting practice. So you're spewing some random shit here that I 'stole' a customers amp. Put down the pipe and get off the internet for a while.

It’s still not fully operational so I can’t really say how much it would cost. Just based on the time I’ve spent on it thus far and a new set of output tubes, we’re at $375 on a head that’s sold for about $400 on the used market. I probably hazard a guess there’s another hour of labour in this as I was able to get signal up to the end of the preamp, so that may take it as high as $525.

The inrush limiters on them are notorious for having troubles - causes intermittent loss of audio especially after warm-up

Yeah they are a very cut rate amp. Sound great but repair is a nightmare on them. Nothing like the phenomenal LC15 amps. I had two of them for a mini stereo rig for small gigs years back. Picked them up for $200 each.

In that instance, a used amp wouldn’t have had the same recap done so would need it regardless. That’s the other consideration, if you buy another secondhand unit, has it had that work done? It’s why I still do plenty of Hot Rod and Blues Jr amps, once the repair work is done they become super reliable and won’t need work for another decade.