empty71
New member
The above guitar is a regular production Gibson Les Paul while the guitar below is a Custom Shop Historic Les Paul model.
The strength of the neck joint is dependent on the area of the mating surfaces and there is very little mating surface on the top model. The good news is if you happen to drop a production Les Paul, chances are the neck will snap off cleanly and could be a straight ahead but still pricey fix but if you drop a Historic, the neck will most probably break at the 16th fret where the neck joins the body. Now that's factoring in the possibility that the headstock doesn't snap first on both accounts.
Gibson had these posted on their own Custom Shop website and the point for the photo was to illustrate how much better the custom shop Historic's build quality was compared to the production models :roll:
As mentioned in another thread, one of my pet peeve about Gibson is their frets are usually dressed too much and not crowned properly. Matter of fact, the frets on the production models are not crowned at all. They just dressed the frets and sandpaper them to remove the sharp edges. I've seen some decent fret work on the Historic models but they're few and far between. Most of them suck. The Japanese and Korean copies have better fret work than most Gibsons although uneven frets are pretty common on the import models.
