It is sad but I have bought guitars old and NOS that someone had to sell to pay medical bills,car payments or house payments. You have to do your homework on ebay and if you are smart you can score a great discontinued ax or a NOS guitar and save a fortune. One of the easiest guitars to get a great deal on belive it or not is a Fender, the reason being there are so many of them. So if you want to score say a Strat you have to punch in Fender Stratocaster and also click the little box that says-include title and description which will give you a lot more guitars that are mispelled or whatever the reason. Now you might wind up with 2,500 listings and you systematically have to go through each one, and believe me you will find atleast 8 to 10 great bargains to put into your ebay and then you have to win it or get lucky with it having a buy it now price. Just remember to be patient and even if you dont get it there will be something usually better to take its place in a week. It is much harder to land something like an EBMM EVH or Peavey Wolfgang that is mint for a great price because only a handful come up and everyone plays follow the power seller who is asking top dollar. But even there if you are patient you will land what you are looking for.

As far as guys parting out guitars I say more power to them. To be honest they are not doing anything wrong and are actually helping people out. Does anyone even know of someone that got a replacement neck from Fender. Lets face it customer care is not there strong suit. Anyone remember the girl who almost got killed in the car accident and had the neck on her Strat snapped and Fender would not even give her a new neck. If that does not call for a replacement what the hell does. So atleast you can get a genuine Fender neck or a pup witout having to buy all 3 from a good source. As far as the Custom Shop COAs I am totally against the sale of them and we can split hairs and say nobody is doing anything wrong but there are also guys not doing things right, so that should be taboo. I also would never buy a CS guitar without one.