I will never buy a Gibson again. I have an SG I All American from 1994 that the Gibson logo is separating from the headstock and they want over $500 to fix it.
I wanted a nice gibson les paul for a while- it took me a good 3-4 years of shopping...
The only time a craigslist deal turned "ugly" is this...
Found a nice maybe 2000 Standard- Ice Tea or Cherry Burst whatever- I was paying full top retail- I think the lowest I could get him to was $1550- relatively it was a 1300-1400 guitar but 1550 was still fair and really hard to find what I was looking for
I live in Phx- I had some business to do in Tucson 2 hours away- met the guy- was looking over the guitar- the logo was like completely shredded... there was like- clearcoat shreeded all over the logo and the logo was like bursting out and like the dot was like barely hanging in there in the 'i' in gibson-
and he was like 'oh they're all like that' (later I did some forum searches- a lot of them are like that)
I told him- I'm buying this just because it says GIBSON here and not any other reason- and if the logo is that messed up he should have told me-
He wouldn't go lower and got pissed when I told him it was a deal breaker-
A little earlier in the conversation I said I'd pay him $20 for his time but let me think about it- (he had a prs for sale too he didn't bring) and then he demanded the $20 immediately- and I mentioned that he was wasting my time and I drove 2 hours to see his jacked up logo guitar... he started cursing me out- so I ran to my car cursing him out a long the way and got the hell out of there.
Anyway- about a year later for my 30th birthday I went to vegas and found a perfect 2004 Standard/Ice tea that I wanted and got it for $1200
But the only reason I wanted that guitar is because of the stupid name gibson on it- and it wasn't even visible almost- it's not too much to ask for.