Three:
1) Answered an ad in 1970 for a guy who was selling a gorgeous sunburst Firebird with gold hardware, banjo tuners, 2 mini-hums and a vibrola, for $150. He was in a Stones cover band and since Keef had switched to a Dan Armstrong, he had to as well. I showed up with $80 in my pocket, tried it out, and vowed to come back the next day at noon to buy it...which I did. Unfortunately, another guy had showed up 10 minutes after I left (with all $80 in my pocket) gave the guy a $10 deposit and said he pay him $160 for it. When I showed up, as promised, with all the money in cash, the guy told me the guitar was already spoken for.
2) My first home-made guitar had a pine body traced from a LP Jr., and the neck from my Kent, with a solid brass wraparound bridge-tailpiece that my dad helped me machine. When I finally moved up to a
slightly better home-made guitar (butcher-block maple body traced from a Tele), I went out to the driveway and had my sister take pictures of my smashing it against the ground, Townsend style. Unfortunately, while she was biking over to the drugstore to drop off the film, it slipped out somewhere and was never found. So I have no pictures of that first one.
3) In 1976, I bought a gorgeous blonde Epiphone Windsor in Hamilton, that had a mahogany neck to die for, and gold everywhere. We figure it was around 1959. It was similar to the blonde one you see here:
http://www.provide.net/~cfh/windsor.html except that it had one New Yorker pickup, that I later gave to Mark Knopfler (who I hope did something useful with it). Not being as sensible about vintage stuff as I am now, I installed two home-wound humbuckers, redid the electronics, and made a new pickguard (with creme binding), so that it looked like this:
http://i414.photobucket.com/albums/pp228/Mark_Hammer/old_epi.jpg (avert your eyes, and direct the young ones away) Well, long story short, we had a young child at the time who got into everything and we were living in a modest apartment, so I stuck the guitar in its vinyl gig bag inside our apartment locker. Through the chicken wire I gather it must have looked like a rifle bag from the outside (a thin body) to someone walking through the apartment locker bay. Somebody must have waited until the coast was clear and climbed over the top of the locker to take it, because there was no sign of damage. We had an insurance rider on it, and the insurance company was gracious enough to honour it and give me $500. Unfortunately, even though I had only paid $50 for it at a pawn shop, replacing it was going to take another $1000 on top of the $500.