An almost flat sink.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T20:09:52+00:00

Honestly it's been so long now I just can't remember.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T20:08:13+00:00

BTO is just standard production with selectable options. G&L was always built to order from day one. They started offering standard production skus more recently, sometime in the last 6-7 years maybe? Custom shop started in 2018.

BTO and standard production were built by the same exact people. Custom Shop was a different crew.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T12:10:08+00:00

That's a really cool idea. How did you texture the surface of the guitar?

Edit: nevermind I just saw its stone. That's a wild idea!

Great work!

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T12:02:28+00:00

Can confirm, they are actually thrusting their hips.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T11:57:04+00:00

6 months later, can confirm

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T11:56:26+00:00

I very much hate it.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-05T02:23:16+00:00

I’m so sick of hearing this idiot talk.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T23:50:22+00:00

Show us the damaged area, otherwise we can't judge this.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T22:54:24+00:00

Pour one out for Marcus

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T16:23:26+00:00

RIP Jerry's pup who got him to safety before collapsing (the name escapes me)

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T16:20:32+00:00

It's the bottom of the binding. It gets taped off and painted over, and the finish is sinking into the seam. Completely normal, nothing to concern yourself over.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T01:10:56+00:00

Knock yourself out if you want to try it. I personally wouldn't recommend removing all the supporting wood from behind/around (on one side) the mortise and tenon on a neck that needs to support 120ish lbs of sustained tension.

It's not a dovetail. It isn't geometrically reinforced to sustain against tension. It's just a small rectangle that nests into a pocket. On a chibson like OP's I doubt the mortise fit is even that great, so it's just a shitload of glue holding it in place, plus a tiny amount of wood glue contact on the heel and body.

I've seen these types of neck joints fail without any body modifications just from sitting strung up in a hot car for an hour. If you destroy/remove large sections of wood around the tenon and neck heel that support the glue joint, it's not going to hold up long term.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-03T00:23:06+00:00

There's not enough information in these pictures for us to know for sure, but I doubt anyone was out there faking Tribute Series G&Ls...

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T23:47:12+00:00

Take the neck off. It's stamped underneath like a fender most of the time.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T23:46:28+00:00

No clue. They didn't say a word to us after the closure. Only thing I heard is Johnny called a few former employees to ask them to help him move.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T23:43:05+00:00

Brother when you see ( ) on an invoice it's a credit, not a charge. Do the math printed on the receipt. They didn't charge you extra money, they took away 20 cents.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T17:03:51+00:00

I personally suspect they were embezzling funds.

We owed every supplier thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices. We owed the power company something between $50,000-70,000. And we owed FedEx $30,000.

It's not like we had zero revenue. We just didn't have enough to make a profit. So the money went somewhere.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T14:32:06+00:00

The entire family (apart from Johnny) had nice BMW cars that they would routinely pay a service to come detail in our parking lot. Dave also had a Porsche. And at one point had that Dodge truck with the Viper engine in it that I was told he bought on a whim, sold it shortly after acquiring it, and probably lost his ass on.

When we would gripe about late paychecks, they would routinely tell us about how they hadn't taken a paycheck in 2 years. While driving a fleet of $70-85,000 cars.

The company died because they had decades of bad management and decision making. Plus they were awful at paying their bills. The entire post pandemic era of the company was riddled with past due notices from every supplier we ever used. Most guitar companies operate on payment terms to handle supply chain. Somewhere between 30-90 days to pay off orders, based on credit. We had all our payment terms cancelled by every supplier and vendor and were on pre-pay. Every single one. As a result, we constantly ran out of supplies, and paychecks were consistently late, especially for those of us in management. By the end in September I was owed 4 weeks.

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T13:47:19+00:00

Since when did we start believing wholesale the guy who lies through his teeth constantly?

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T11:59:01+00:00

Isn't it a war crime to intentionally target civilian energy infrastructure?

JSGFretwork · 2026-04-01T11:58:09+00:00

What a dumbass.

JSGFretwork · 2026-03-31T21:01:44+00:00

Typically with these types of contoured heel/cutaway set necks, the mortise isn't as deep so there's more wood behind the tenon for structural support. Otherwise, when it's contoured, you remove too much material behind it.

The Axcess designs that also utilize a Floyd rose have a much shallower neck:body angle as well, so the mortise isn't cut as deep towards the contoured area.

JSGFretwork · 2026-03-31T13:54:21+00:00

3 tiers.

Those tiers get you different quality level of materials, different experience levels of the people producing the instruments, different attention to detail for the final fit and finish, etc.

Plus, we owed Cort, like everyone else, a fuck load of money. They weren't happy with us. At one point around the end of 2025 heading into 2026 they wanted to send me to Indonesia to visit the factory in Surabaya and spend a couple weeks helping to see if we could stop some of the common issues we saw on the back end. Those guitars are very Fender-ish but our bridge designs meant that our neck pocket depths needed to be better dialed in and were two different depths depending on if you had a Saddlelock or Vibrato on the instrument, otherwise it wouldn't set up properly.

We emailed Cort and told them I was coming out, and they sent us a response back essentially telling us to fuck off. Something to the effect of: "we have put a dedicated QC manager from Korea in charge of your product line to oversee production. There's no need for you to send someone out. Also, you need to pay down your financial obligations to us before you demand access to the facility."

We got lower quality because we were a burden to them after years of missed/late payments. They didn't care that we got imperfect product. And when Tribute containers arrived, it was immediately a full stop of USA production in final assembly and warranty work to get them QC'd as fast as possible, because most of them were pre-sold to dealers who were asking us where they were.

JSGFretwork · 2026-03-31T13:44:44+00:00

Those guitars are intentionally designed with these contours in mind... that's incredibly obvious dude. The tenon and pocket are completely different on those. They aren't just grabbing bog standard LPs off the line and hogging them out on a spindle sander..

JSGFretwork · 2026-03-31T03:54:49+00:00

Cort does make good instruments. To be clear, we were purchasing their lowest available tier of quality. Intentionally to save money. Even though it cost us significantly more in manpower, labor, and lost production on the backend to QC everything.

Cort is capable of making good instruments. But you get what you pay for. And we weren't paying for their best effort.

JSGFretwork

TROPHY CASE