Recently I was selling a Grass Roots Tetsuya Bass IV. I had bought a couple of cheaper basses via ZenMarket and set them up to ship in separate packages so that they didn't trigger our Australian import rules (if package total value > $A1000 they have to be assessed for import duty), and ZenMarket accepted the money and packaged them up to send on the same day. What I later found buried in their Shipping Help page, and they failed to advise me of at the time, was that shipping both at once would be treated as one item. That triggered a lengthy, painful process of arbitrary fee, conflicting advice from Australian Customs, hours of paperwork before realising I couldn't do the importation because it required a multi-hundred dollar registration and security clearance. Then the guitars had to be inspected at a flat rate per box (double because it was in two cartons) and having to pay our GST again despite it already being paid. In the end I had to pay over $800 on top of the shipping fee. This whole process completely soured me on the basses and I will never try this kind of thing again. Anyway, they had to go, and the Grass Roots was dead to me. I had it priced to try to cover some of the money I'd lost but it was hard to shift.
Anyway last week someone local listed a Squier VI and I floated the Grass Roots as a trade - a loss in value terms, but he made up some of the difference and now I am rid of the bad feeling.
But now I have two VIs and
one on the workbench (which I will never finish of course). The problem is I might just prefer the neck on the Squier to the 2012 Fender Japan. I had a black pickguard kicking around so I've put the tort aside, but I might even bring it back since it looked pretty good.
The guy who traded it was pretty buzzed about the Grass Roots - when I got the VI the high two strings were somehow reversed on the tuners so it can't have been a lot of fun to play!
