Leaderboard

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.

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

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.

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.