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My wife asks me that quite often

If memory serves, previous models had a banner inlay in the headstock.

Cleaning house I suppose. There were a few for sale on Reverb.

of course, they had to use a PICKUP truck to get them to the dump! 😃

At a minimum, they could have had a 40th Anniversary truss rod cover to set them apart...

Thanks ElNumero, I'll look forward to seeing what's available.

I totally agree huge mistake on their part. They could’ve put 40 on the 12th fret or something to commemorate it and to set it apart, other than the fact that you have to look at the serial number to know it’s a 2025 Guitar.I

Sorry Rich you keep lamenting about that and I’m sitting here with two of them in my closet!! no you can’t have one

Why would they sell off the templates and to whom?? Makes no sense

Built 40 years after the plant opened in 85.

FYI- I purchased a 2016 new old stock H155M in vintage wine burst last year at the plant. It was hanging in the showroom and I couldn’t resist. They made me a very sweet deal. They buffed it, gave it a PLEK job, and a setup before shipping it out to me. Heritage takes care of their HOC constituents.

Thanks DetroitBlues. I think I have my wife convinced to go; she enjoyed Kalamazoo the last time we were there.

You can buy direct from the factory show room, usually at a discount too, so you'll save some money there. I bought my H150 that way 2 years ago. Plus, you may find some unique one-off's you will not find in any store too. Back to the original point, rough cutting of solid bodies and necks are all that CNC work does. The CNC's are heavily used for the Harmony guitars, so you'll see a lot of them on the machines.

I promised my wife a trip Marty. Bribery always works with her. Thanks Rich. I will see what I can do about attending PSP. From what I've read it sounds like a good time.

While the Ascent and Ascent+ lines are good entry levels, they aren't made in the same factory as the standard and Custom Core ranges. Len, you should join us for this year's PSP, and see the way things have changed. While many things are still being done "old school", there are some improvements, like the spray booth where the air is filtered (no dust to get on the finish, and safer) and the PLEK machine to make sure the guitars have consistent setups. Heck, you might just find the exact guitar you want while you're there!

I have a H-530 that is just great. Part of it is how it feels. It's very light. Acoustically it's louder with resonance I can literally feel. Mine has humbuckers, which is fine with me. The H-576 is a very nice model. They tend to be stunning and have a nice feel to them.

Thanks so much for the answer, Rich. I purchased their Ascent+ model earlier this year, and the playability of that guitar, especially considering the price, is so good, I now want to upgrade to a Standard as a Christmas present to myself. You sound like me. My wife would say that since I like the Ascent+ so much, I should stick with it and shut up!

Thanks so much for the answer, Rich. I purchased their Ascent+ model earlier this year, and the playability of that guitar, especially considering the price, is so good, I now want to upgrade to a Standard as a Christmas present to myself. Since I'd prefer to buy new, mostly because I like the idea of helping a great company, l just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be making a mistake buying new instead of something prior to the Bandlab ownership. I took the tour in 2017 and was so impressed by the guys building the guitars, that I've wanted one ever since. So again, thanks so much for the answer.

The guitars that I have played at the factory were every bit as good as my 2005 535. I don't think you'll find CNC robots making the H535s. I believe that they might be rough carving the necks (not sure if this is absolutely true), but putting together a semihollow body is a multistep process that doesn't lend itself to CNC manufacturing. The top and back are a 3 piece laminated sandwich that is then steam pressed in a form that gives it the arch. The center block is a solid block with the pickup areas cut out, and there is a piece that matches up to fill the gap between the top and block. Then you have kerfing that is applied to the rim before the top and bottom are glued. The pieces are then assembled by hand to form the body. Rough cutting the neck profile means that the starting shape should be more consistent in terms of thickness and curvature, but there is still a lot of handiwork to finalize things. If you've ever watched someone hand rolling a neck, there can be a lot of variation. It doesn't take a lot of sanding to go from a fat to a thin neck. In the past it was all done freehand, checking it with a pattern every so often. If you think about it, the old duplicarver was a primitive "cnc" machine, minus the computer. It's akin to the patterns that someone like Hillerich & Bradsby uses when carving baseball bats. A CNC just follows a computerized form to cut the wood.

I apologize if this has been asked already, but I could not find a post that related to my question. I am considering purchasing a Standard H-535 and I'm wondering if the new H-535s, especially those made in 2025, that are built with CNC are as good as the old ones where human beings did that work. Again, apologies if this has already been covered

Yeah, tone is in the fingers. I have a 1962 Casino with the 330 style headstock. It is a remarkable screaming rock guitar (ala' Beatles white album sound) guitar but I could never get a nice jazz tone out of it like I can with my L5 or H-576. The same goes for my old tele. If you listen to Canadian jazz guitarist Ed Bickert, he makes a tele sound like an L5. In my hands it sounds like Don Rich.

That's not uncommon in business. In 5S methodology, there is a idea that if you don't use materials within a period of time, then it can be disposed. Since Gibson had a new, improved version of the humbucker, why keep a bunch of old obsolete equipment laying around taking up space? Send them to the dump and write off the value.

Time can alter memories. I do remember Pete telling me about the buried PAFs. He said it was a matter of them taking up space, along with some other stuff. The PAF was no longer put on Gibsons. They advertised an improved pickup on their models. There were also a lot of other things discarded. For example, Charlie Christian pickups were tossed. The high volume discards were wood in various stages of evolution into guitars. I remember the conversation pretty well because the military buried a ton of leather flight jackets at the time. This was in the news. They dug a crater, dropped in a large number of jackets, and bulldozed dirt over them. The news article said there was a reason not to flood the Army surplus market. I told Pete that new old stock PAFs could fetch $500 each at the time. He told me that McCarty wanted them taken to the dump. Gibson had a pickup truck that Pete put a couple of heavy boxes filled with them into the truck along with other stuff and disposed of them. No one thought the PAFs were particularly special, and they were of no use to Gibson. I heard from a few sources that those who worked assembling guitars were expected to bring anything with a flaw on it to the shift supervisor. There were spring loaded stamps that would imprint the back of the headstock with a 2 for second or BGN for bargain. If the employee wanted a particular guitar, they would not retract the spring and would leave a very shallow impression of 2 or BGN that didn't go into the wood. The employee had to show the supervisor the headstock stamp. If approved, the guitar could be acquired by the employee for a very low price. The 2 or BGN could easily be sanded and touched up once taken home. This came up in my discussion with Pete Moreno because a friend of mine had a LP Custom with a very light 2 on the back of the headstock. I showed him. He said that there was probably a small ding somewhere that happened in the factory, possibly intentionally. The guitar being quite old at the time I showed Pete, there were a number of dings and scratches. The guitar was white. He said with the yellowing now it would be hard to match. Later, Aaron Cowles confirmed what Pete told me. It all depended on the supervisor and the employee as to how that worked. Whether Pete took the PAFs to the dump or not, he told me that McCarty asked him to do that. Dump runs were common for Pete. Pete picked up wood discards from Gibson and Heritage for many years and fueled his shed heating stove with them.

I should add that the Faber posts came with a metal tube that fits over the thread so you can use a hammer to (gently!) tap them in. Also there was a fine-tuning version of the Schaller tailpiece...

I've changed a few Schaller bridges/tailpieces and I can confirm that both the Schaller and Nashville bridge posts are 5mm thread, so you don't need to change the inserts if you're replacing the Schaller bridge with a Nashville bridge. Same with the tailpiece studs, thought the thread is 5/16" rather than metric. On my H150 VSB I'd replaced the Schaller with a Nashville setup, and decided to replace the Nashville with the Faber ABR-1 conversion. This involved using a 5mm bolt to gently extract the bushings. I needed to make the hole slightly deeper, but aside from that the process was pretty straightforward. Some photos of the procedure...