Official Luthiers Forum!

The video is astonishing. I have read in various places how the electric guitar is on the wane due to the paucity of guitar heroes currently on the scene like Hendrix, Clapton, Jeff Beck, etc. I wonder if a new crop of guitar heroes could have been inspired with a free guitar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW6y9j3_K40

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Stay with the happy people.
--Reynolds Large

Tom, I saw this on another forum and thought the very same as you. I also thought that the instruments could have been donated to luthier schools as well. All Gibson seems to be gaining from this is press.

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jw ( o)===:::

Looks like they only suffered about a 25% headstock failure rate on the first pass...

Here’s an article on the same https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/0 ... w-guitars/

WTF! What a waste...

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

Like just about anyone in business, Gibson is not in the business of making guitars, it's in the business of making money.

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Peter Havriluk

I'm not arguing the stupidity of Gibson's choices here, but this video is old news. Anyone else seen the video of an employee stomping the necks off a large number of ES-335's, ES-275's, and other thinline archtops and then bandsawing the bodies in half? It was made after this one. Incredible waste of manhours and materials - not to mention the opportunity afforded by wiser choices.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

My guess would be: if they give them away or donate them, Gibson cannot write them off as a loss.

Some things are more important than money.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Most definitely, but not those guitars...

Watch, in 10 years, you'll be seeing FirebirdX or whatever they are for sale at premium price that miraculously missed the treads.

In reality that was like what, 100 guitars? Not even a burp in their production schedule. Sometimes stuff needs to be quashed.

What I don't get is why they

1) lined them up for destruction rather than just feeding them to a chipper...

2) filmed it

Terribly wasteful, for sure. What I don’t understand: even if one buys into the company’s logic (which I don’t), why didn’t they harvest some of the parts first? Yes, they said something about some unsafe parts (which sounds like malarkey, but go with it). However, what about the other parts that were not unsafe? Maybe this tells us something about the overall quality of the tuners they use, for instance. They would rather throw the tuners out than take them off a “lemon” guitar and reuse them. Heck, just take the strap buttons off first. You can reuse a strap button. But that takes labor, and minimizing labor costs is probably of utmost importance to the company, not the avoidance of material waste.

It all makes me feel pretty icky.

The filming doesn’t surprise me, by the way. Gibson certainly didn’t choose to do that; an employee (former employee now) filmed it on his phone. Just about anything we do these days is at risk of being captured on a phone. Both good and bad ramifications. A whole other topic.

So what do you do with the guitars you build that don't meet your quality standards? It's easy to bash big G.... but if they left defective instruments out then you would all just whine about poor quality control!

They used to cut them up with a band saw, but people would raid the dumpsters and put them back together.... so this solved that problem.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Brian—

I think there is plenty of complaining about this company’s QC regarding the instruments that DO make it to the retailers. So, destroying these instruments in the name of QC rings hollow to many. Plus, that doesn’t address my concern about the failure to harvest OK parts before destruction.

I understand the company not wanting a defective product out there. I just think there is a more responsible way to deal with the issue, if that really is the issue. And I think there is reason to think that this event was not solely driven by a QC concern. QC is not the only problem that makes a guitar a bad seller.

If that’s whining, then feel free to call me a whiner. But whining implies that this somehow affects me. I have not owned a guitar from this company in a very long time, and when I owned them was long after those guitars had been made. Current practices of this company have no direct effect on me. I’m just noticing that this makes the company look bad in a variety of ways. The company recognizes that, too; they are reacting by starting a guitar giveaway campaign.

What bothers me about this video is that they could have merely tossed them in a bin to be hauled away. I have seen this at another major maker when culling their Asian made instruments.

Instead, they took the time to carry them outside, carefully line them up in rows, then rent a machine to drive over them (at least twice) while doing close-up photography. It is as though they intended to make this video for publicity reasons.

And someone did not know that driving over stuff with treads spreads the load enough that it might not do much damage - a loaded single axle dump truck would have been much more dramatic.

Ed

what a ridiculous thing to do, are they fakes or something and that is why they are being destroyed?
I cant imagine this is even Gibson doing this.....well in this manner...what good would come of it?

As a side note, there are many extraordinary guitar players out there these days that I would consider heros.
ya just have to let the new guard in.... : )

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Wake up and smell the rosewood!

It’s most likely to avoid inventory tax. Common practice and not the first time I’ve seen examples of it.

This is actually a trade secret showing how g*bson set's up new instruments prior to shipping them.

Whoops Hesh just got sued!!! Who wants to donate to my kick-starter defense fund?

Hey Hesh,
What caliber do you use to do the set up on a guitar (or was that someone else)?


Home, home on the range:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43AnWyQAFQA

I find that video more offensive than the other one...

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

You would have all cried alligator tears at my guitar bonfire. My first iteration as a guitar maker went so poorly I burned everything I produced over a 10 year span in one big fire because it was all crap. So I really get what was done and why it needed to be so.

Why did G have to do this? PR? No because when they just cut them up they got put back together.... Like this one was.https://howardguitars.blogspot.com/2015 ... ction.html

It's hell when you can't just throw the stuff out, so what do you do? I remember another guitar company that fed their defective products to a wood chipper. Martin sells the unfit stuff as parts... Is either of those better?

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

"..Martin sells the unfit stuff as parts... Is either of those better?.."

Yes, that is much, much better, when you consider how long it take for a tree to grow, and
what conditions are necessary for that to happen.

The small-production guitar maker I worked for destroyed second-rate product by
crosscutting on a large bandsaw, despite various protests..

Here's a very brief article about it
https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson- ... -heres-why

The whole thing is goofy though, maybe a publicity stunt for who know why? It seems like it would be faster & cost a lot less to just saw them up.

Kevin Looker

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

We have a nice little scotch whiskey and smoke event every few years...this time, we'll be burning a half dozen classical guitars picked up as a result of the liquidation of the Vega shop in Baltimore, a few inexpensive plywood guitars which were not economically repairable so left with us, and some components that revealed fatal defects on milling. All of the instruments have been striped of anything worth recycling, and we get the fire nice and hot before adding the guests of honor so as to ensure very complete combustion.

In an overcrowded marketplace, reducing the number of substandard instruments should be seen as a public service, rather than some egregious act of pique.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

Burn them. Makes an interesting campfire.

Missed Woodies post. Sounds like we think alike.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

I'm fine with bonfires to rid the world of crap. But as Woody and his co-workers do, take the useful stuff off first. Same with bandsawing the wood, or sending it through the wood chipper, or whatever. Get the recyclable stuff off first, then go to town.

As for the Martin nonconforming parts, yes, selling those to the rest of us is much better than destroying the parts that don't meet their manufacturing criteria. I've seen some of those parts in person. People can make some very nice lemonade from those lemons.

Finally, there is a lot to be said for the idea of simply branding (I mean literally branding them, with a hot branding iron) the guitars that don't measure up to the QC standards and giving them away. It's a choice. I understand that there are reasons for a manufacturer to not choose that option, but let's not act like destroying the defective guitars is the only choice, their hands were tied, no other option, etc. Nope. They had a choice, and they chose to crush the guitars rather than brand them and give them away. That choice carries with it the ramification of people thinking the company is not making the best choices.