Serendipity
The PRS Custom 22 Soapbar I tried to buy back in April ‘07 is now mine, after nearly a year and a half. The world has a funny way of working out sometimes.
Back in April 2007, I tried to buy a PRS Custom 22 Soapbar that was posted on Birds and Moons. To make a long story short, the seller was trying to arrange for a local sale and I wasn’t able to make arrangements with him to get the guitar quickly enough, so it was sold to someone else.
I was pretty bummed out at the time and looked around for another Soapie that I liked as much. Keep in mind that there weren’t that many Custom 22 Soapbars made by PRS from ‘98 through 2004, and they don’t seem to show up on the used market all that often. I looked in all the usual places, but none of the ones that were offered for sale really thrilled me. There was always some problem with the guitar—usually due to cost, color or the top.
This year PRS produced a limited run of new Custom 22 Soapbars featuring mahogany necks and new birds, but otherwise similar to the original run. I looked at these as well, at least the few I could find. I missed the memo when they first came out earlier this year, and when I started looking in earnest over the summer I wasn’t able to find one that made me want to part with nearly $3000 of my hard-earned cash. (There was one for sale in Japan that was perfect—Blue Matteo, stunning one-piece 10 top, the whole works—but the price was nearly $1500 over what a similar instrument would cost in the US and I just couldn’t bring myself to pay that kind of a premium.) But I kept looking and was just about ready to pull the trigger on a nice looking amber Soapie when I read that one of the original ones was up for sale on The Gear Page. I usually don’t track the for sale ads on TGP because there’s just too much, but when I read the description and looked at the picture I realized that it was the same one I missed out on nearly a year and a half ago! A few emails back and forth with the seller confirmed the fact. We agreed on a price and I payed for it with the proceeds from the sale of my amber Weddington Custom last week. Funny how that worked out… if I hadn’t sold the Weddington I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull the trigger on the Soapie and would have missed it again.
Anyway, here’s one of the seller’s pictures:
I will post more pictures when it arrives, hopefully next week!