ebay nonsense

[godofthunder]

 I just came across this, unbelieveable. A MIK Hamer Standard bass with one crappy pic. 4k BIN for a bass that is worth maybe $400 bucks.http://cgi.ebay.com/Hamer-Bass-/160463128395?cmd=ViewItem&pt=Guitar&hash=item255c59074b

[dadagoboi]

There's no IQ test required to list on Ebay...or to bid.  So who knows, the idiot might get lucky.   The odds are probably better than playing the lottery and the cost is about the same.

I get more upset with fewer real auctions on the site and brand new stuff that rotates over and over that you can find cheaper elsewhere.  I try to look at Ebay like it's TV, at least 99% is crap.

[fealach]

Perhaps the "custom mae pick gaurd" is made from mammoth ivory?  It's white, so it probably isn't gold.  It DOES have new Earnie Ball strings, that must raise the price.

Ebay is like TV, and the lottery analogy applies to buyers as well.  Buying something is always a risk, but it can cost you quite a bit more than $1.  Everybody should watch this item, and if it sells run down to the local used guitar store and buy up all the Korean Hamers they have.  Mark them up to a mere $3000, a big savings over the "going rate" on Ebay, and make a bundle.

[Dave W]

A 1980 Hamer Standard was Made In USA back when Hamer was a small company in Illinois. They didn't make anything in Korea until after Kaman bought them in the late 1980s.

IIRC these were about $1200 new. A 1980 Hamer Standard flametop guitar might fetch $2000 but a black bass wouldn't be in that league.

[dadagoboi]

Perhaps the "custom mae pick gaurd" is made from mammoth ivory?  It's white, so it probably isn't gold.  It DOES have new Earnie Ball strings, that must raise the price.

Ebay is like TV, and the lottery analogy applies to buyers as well.  Buying something is always a risk, but it can cost you quite a bit more than $1.  Everybody should watch this item, and if it sells run down to the local used guitar store and buy up all the Korean Hamers they have.  Mark them up to a mere $3000, a big savings over the "going rate" on Ebay, and make a bundle.

Re the Ebay "going rate": A Git player friend of mine had this crazy idea to combine 6 Fender Deluxes into a wall of sound and he proceeded to buy them up on Ebay.  The last one cost A LOT more than the first.

It was always his intent to sell of 5 of the 6 after he was done with the experiment.  Ended up losing a lot of money.  He had driven up the price way past what they were worth and once he was no longer bidding it dropped to what it should have been with normal demand.

[godofthunder]

A 1980 Hamer Standard was Made In USA back when Hamer was a small company in Illinois. They didn't make anything in Korea until after Kaman bought them in the late 1980s.

IIRC these were about $1200 new. A 1980 Hamer Standard flametop guitar might fetch $2000 but a black bass wouldn't be in that league.

This looks MIK to me not USA. I had one, same cheap soap bar pups, it's only flaw really.

[Hornisse]

http://elderly.com/vintage/items/55U-4418.htm

This one is $3550 cheaper!   

[dadagoboi]

http://elderly.com/vintage/items/55U-4418.htm

This one is $3550 cheaper!  

Uwe needs to buy it and Make it Fungy.

[Dave W]

This looks MIK to me not USA. I had one, same cheap soap bar pups, it's only flaw really.

If it's really a 1980 Hamer Standard, it's not Korean.

He says it has the Seymour Duncan SSB-5S Passive Bassline Pickup set. Those are also plastic covered soapbars.

He says it has the Schaller roller bridge, which was standard on the USA Hamer basses well into the 90s. Its low profile was great for low action with the set neck.

Now, if I were interested there's no way I would bid on it without a number of clear pics. But the typical scammer just puts something out there and says nothing about details. Why would anyone selling a later Korean Hamer go to the trouble of calling it a 1980 and listing all the specific better quality hardware and electronics?

[Hornisse]

It could be a 1980 bass if the bass in the photo is not the actual bass for sale.  Hamer bass headstocks never looked like that back then.  Plus the only early Hamer basses that had pickguards were the early Cruise basses but they too were removed later in the 1980's.

Here is an example of my old '82 Cruise Bass headstock.

[Dave W]

Well, I don't want to belabor the point but he doesn't claim it originally had a pickguard. And Hamer prior to about 1982 was really a small custom shop with no more than a dozen employees, there were several headstock variations.

Who knows, the guy may be a scammer, and even if it's legit, he's dreaming if he thinks anyone would buy it at half the price based on that pic. I just don't see why a scammer would go to the trouble of claiming specific upgrades like that.

[uwe]

It certainly looks nothing like Martin Turner's Hamer Explorer which he had as early as 1978




and which was custom built for him by Hamer with sixties TB pups. You'd think that only two years later Hamer would not stray that far from the design of an Explorer bass which in the late seventies must have been the 2nd famous one to Entwistle's Alembic Spyder. This thing here looks closer to today's Epis with the sharp headstock angle than it does to Martin Turner's Explorer (who was probably a blueprint in looks for the eighties Explorers of Gibson which had a similar headstock).

I don't even think that Martin's Explorer which is now on display in England with some rock'n'roll museum fetched that much.