Haha, I figured as much. I still had to ask.
My guess was around $2500. Shows what I know. I wonder how long it has been since the last one came up for auction? I assume given the nice price that this one fetched, we will be seeing another one shortly..
That's pretty close to what I ended up paying, but mine was never on the open market for bidding, so it may have gone higher if it had been. I expected this one to make it to at least $2500, but I never thought it would be so close to $3500. Course, I've only heard of one other being on ebay and that had to have been about 4 or 5 years ago.
I'm not sure if I expect to see another one pop up or not. Seems that items like this sell in waves, but this may be rare enough that nobody else wants to get rid of one. According to the seller of this one, he was given the item through a friend of someone that had passed away. He wasn't a collector trying to make some cash. I can't imagine there are too many left out there that aren't in collector's hands, but I'd love to be proven wrong!