Because I mean it. I really didn't want more guitars. I've been working to pare down the collection to the point where every guitar I own is inspiring and perfect in its own way.
But I'm not made of stone. I tuck away the money from gear sales so that, if I ever come across the right deal, I'm able to jump on it. This was one of those. Someone local posted a really nice guitar for sale for a "run, don't walk" price. The kind of price where I knew, if I didn't bond with it, I'd have less than zero trouble getting my money back out of it, probably with a healthy profit to put toward the next deal. I don't consider myself a flipper, but I do flip a couple of guitars every year. I try to stick to local deals on "desirable" guitars (i.e. not partscasters or obscure things that nobody outside OSG would have heard of). It's a nice way to broaden my horizons, and to slowly accumulate some money for the "gear budget" over time.
This particular guitar was not old (2016), but looked like the seller kept it sitting on a stand in a basement its whole life. It also started fretting out anywhere north of the cowboy chords, and the neck had a stupid amount of relief. I think the action started wandering, and he started monkeying with it with zero knowledge of setups. Then, with it being borderline unplayable, decided to dump it for a low price. He was a nice guy and we shot the shit for half an hour - we have similar taste in guitars and music.
I could tell it had good bones. It just needed a little TLC. I spent a week or two progressively tightening the truss rod until the neck straightened, then took off the ancient strings (which were so corroded and dead they sounded like thumpy flatwounds, but weren't), gave the whole thing a thorough cleaning with some proper elbow grease, then raised the brings and BAM - it's flawless.
I thought I really might have found a "forever" guitar. It's unlike anything I currently own, and it's a model I'd never be willing to spend the money on to buy a new one, or even a used one at "market value." I thought this was my one shot to have one at a price I could live with.
So, I decided to list a Flying V for sale to recoup the money. It was a lovely one, but redundant. It wasn't as pristine as my white one with binding, and I wasn't sentimentally attached to it like my black one. I got it during the height of my excitement over discovering Flying Vs, and it took me some time to figure out that it was the odd man out.
I got lots of weird trade offers (including one guy who offered me a motorcycle every single time I reposted the local ad), and a couple of lowball cash offers. I was happy to sit tight until it sold, it just meant I was out of dry powder if another crazy deal came up.
Then, before I was even done finalizing the setup on the first guitar, I got an interesting trade offer. It was for a guitar whose brand I had heard of, but I didn't know the model. I looked it up, and the specs and demos raised an eyebrow. Pretty cool, but probably harder to sell than my Flying V if I didn't love it, and I primarily wanted to do a "one in, one out" move here.
The conversation with the guy took a pretty funny turn, though. He had a good sense of humour, and told me he was browsing Kijiji because he was stuck at a wedding for his wife's coworker that she doesn't even like. I talked him into adding a decent amount of cash to the deal, enough to make me feel good about taking the chance on it.
We met the next day, and agreed it was a win/win. My initial impression of the guitar was way more positive than I expected, and he loved the V. He said he joined a "Gen X dad cover band," but was surprised to learn that they had much heavier taste than he assumed. It was mostly Tool and other prog/metal type stuff, and he felt this guitar was a little too mild-mannered to fit in. The V fit that vibe much better.
The only problem? I'm pretty sure these two guitars are too similar for me to justify keeping them both. They're both outside my typical wheelhouse, so I know I'll just end up reaching for one instead of the other when I want that vibe. And what's "worse" is that I like the second one even more than the first, and it was an even better deal.
It's a first world problem to be sure, for my honeymoon period with my nice new guitar that was a very good deal to be immediately ruined by my nicer newer guitar that was an even better deal.
So, if you read through all that (or just skipped to this part), here are the clues that were hidden among all that rambling:
-Both guitars have similar(ish) construction and tones
-Both guitars are outside my usual (bright Offset) wheelhouse
-Both guitars (or extremely similar variants) are still available new in guitar stores
-They're from different brands
-One guitar is significantly more expensive than the other
-One guitar is a model I've known about my whole life, but the other is a name I had to look up
-One guitar would be very easy to sell, but the other would have much less broad appeal
And a final hint: The names on the two headstocks start with adjacent letters in the alphabet.
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HONDO