You can't collect more than a few guitars and NOT have a broke guitar story.
Share some!
I have three:
1) Had a 90's Ernie Ball MusicMan Axis Sport that was candy apple red. Cracked just looking at the finish. So I got the bright idea to strip it back to wood and shellac it.
While I was doing this, it rained. I had the parts in a big black bag, neck wrapped in t-shirt. Neck took the rain and held it against the neck. Axis Sport necks are "unfinished". Oops.
Swelled up like a puffer fish. 2 years in a Kiln and the frets popped and I still had to hammer it onto the body. Only good for slide. So after 5 years I decided to have the neck fixed.
MusicMan took the old neck, replaced it with a new Super Sport neck (lefty even though the guitar was a righty) and put on a compensated nut. The only lefty compensated nut on a 90s Axis Sport!
Not as good as the original, sadly, but good enough (9/10) The body? It was a right-handed body and I carved that naked baby up for lefty reach up the neck.
I now have a totally unsellable guitar (unless Van Halen signs it) but it plays fantastic and sounds even better. Like a 60's casino P90! I pimped the body up with rock-history stickers. Looks like a Pinnate.
2) Had a Parker PM20 Pro. Leaned against a wall. It slid 1 foot along the wall into a table. The headstock must have had weak grain and cracked at a tuner and sent a piece of wood across the room.
Took me an hour to find it! Had a local luthier fix it with a wooden peg stacked through it like a vampire. Ugly. I didn't pay for cosmetics. Too cheap a guitar to be worth the price.
3) Traded a GIbson SG for an Akai DPS24 (man, that was a bad deal, I miss that unit) and since it was a righty, gave it to my brother in NYC. He had it, probably knocked it over. It's a Gibson, so the neck broke of course.
My brother, being an egg-head about guitars, and too ashamed to admit to me he "broke" the guitar, didn't know you can fix guitars and threw it away. Somewhere, in the Canarsie dump in Queens long island, is a Gibson SG that can be fixed. Along with 50+ years of NYC garbage and innumerable mob hits. Being a right-handed guitar, and a bad swap, I think it got what was coming to in, no?
Seeing I've probably had about 30 or so guitars in the 20 years I've been spending on electric guitars (acoustic before that) that's about a 10% break rate. I now treat guitars much, much better.
People who buy my used guitars are amazed at the great shape. So an old dog has learned a trick!