The Electra Forums

Just saw this and thought you guys might get a kick out of it. I think this is a crazy price, someone here might disagree.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ELECTRA-LADY-XVI-EL ... dZViewItem

Hope you all are well!

Matthew

Well, that's plenty crazy. The Lady is easily the weirdest and least popular of any Electra or Westone guitar. I remember playing one when I was shopping for my original X185, and I handed it back immediately- on the basis of ergonomics as well as style.

I would be very hesitant about claims about how many were made, that's information we jsut don't have about any model, unless perhaps that were inside info from some Electra employee.

So is the Lady Electra's Superbird, like the winged cars which attracted people to showrooms where they went home with Valiants? Unwanted at the time, and now become ultra-rare exotics?

Well, maybe. And I'd be the last to say it's impossible. It's not impossible that those production figures are accurate, and it's certainly possible that the crazed collector community could run the price up to astronomical heights.... well, ok, I guess I had myself going up till that point. Frankly, the real answer is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it. If a Lady is suddenly worth all that, well, I guess the one in my closet is worth more than I thought.

But I doubt it. They aren't that rare, a couple appear on ebay every year. I've seen them priced under $150 and end with zero bids.

And even if it were that rare, that doesn't make it valuable. In my driveway I've got a 1936 Nash Lafayette, now that's a rare car. less than a thousand originally made, and only a few dozen still survive that we know about. Rare? Yes! Valuable? Not particualrly- any Ford or Dodge or jsut about anything of the same vintage is worth more jsut because more people care about them.(In the end it'll cost me many times the value of the car to get it back on teh road, but hey, that's entertainment!)

So... good luck to the seller. It would certainly be interesting to see it sell for that price, but I'd certainly not encourage other sellers to think they've found a goldmine.