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Isn't this Gibson made from laminate back and sides?


onewilyfool

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Posted

Laminated as far as I know.

 

I had a near pristine '68 a year ago. Gorgeous wood, supposedly Brazilian. Dates vary; I guess you just have to call it the way you see it. It was definitely wildass grained like the CL link where the newer Heritages with alleged Indian RW were more low key and plain.

 

I bought mine for $700 and flipped it for $900. Boring, dull sounding and weighed a ton.

Posted

Buck & KS Daddy

 

The same kind of misrepresentation just occurred on a Korean reissue Excellente-First from the dealer

who sold it and then from the reseller who didn't believe the true facts concerning this

guitar.

 

Moose

Posted

Should be laminate.

 

But curiously, looking into the sound hole, the inside surface of the back looks pretty dark for laminate (in comparison to the bracing wood). I would expected laminate to have a lighter colored inside surface layer.

 

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Posted

I have never seen a Heritage that was not made with laminate. I know the Blue Ridge which came in in the late 1960s was made with laminate.

 

Going price for a Heritage in this neck of the woods, pretty much what KSdaddy let his go for - in the $750 to $800 range.

Posted

If Gibson used a good quality laminate it would just be even layers of the same wood glued together. No problem with that - the J-200s were made with laminate back and sides starting in the 1950s. You don't see many folks throwing a 50s J-200 out of bed. These double sided guitars are far cry from the junk they use on cheaper guitars today which has a nice veneer over layers of some real cheap filler stuff.

Posted

Here's the one I had. Upon looking for the pics I realized it was a '69, not '68. Very pretty, very heavy, not very Gibsony.

 

My own take on the whole Heritage/Blue Ridge/J40 thing: I bought a dozen old issues of Sing Out! from '65-'69 or so. Seems like the ONLY guitar ever mentioned in the text was the D-28. There were ads for Goya, Harmony, Guild, some awful Martin ads, and mentioned more than once in the classified ads (for dealers) were blurbs like "We have D-28s in stock!" Face it, D-28 was king then. Makes me wonder how much of Gibsons' style trend was dictated by that fact. Not comparing a Heritage to a Martin other than from 50 feet away but you gotta admit there is some resemblance.

 

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Posted

I'm no expert, but I've seen a lot of plywood in my day. The figure of the back wood on KSDADDY's and the Craigslist linked above have a plywoody look to them.

 

It's hard to describe. But to make plywood they don't cut planks from a log. They take a log and lay it in a spindle like a wood lathe. They they lay a knife along the entire length of it, then rotate the log, peeling off a thin, continuous sheet of wood, sort of like a cheep, hand-held pencil sharpener peels off bits of wood to sharpen a pencil. This gives a randomness, you might say a splotchyness to the 'grain'. Instead of seeing even striations, you uneven striations and islands of lighter wood surrounded by darker bands of wood.

 

This is what I am seeing in the backs of these two guit tars.

 

The top appears to be straight grained like my, most definitely, laminated Epiphone, but this is a 'special' kind of laminate where they take a quartersawn plank and re-saw or cleave it into many thin sheets to sandwich on top of 'normal' plywood layers to give the illusion of a quartersawn, solid top. I cannot say that these examples are laminated topped or not. Only a close hands on inspection would reveal that.

Posted
If Gibson used a good quality laminate it would just be even layers of the same wood glued together. ... These double sided guitars are far cry from the junk they use on cheaper guitars today which has a nice veneer over layers of some real cheap filler stuff.

 

Interesting. All the laminate layers are the same wood. I was expecting to see the cheaper laminate, which of course is easier to notice.

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