I'm sure you could find some engineering bolts with the correct thread and cut them down to size, they would be a very good quality steel. You could maybe use stainless steel which of the right grade is much harder than brass and won't rust. Gibson wood over the years has been all over the place. I was at the Frankfurt music fair a few years ago and overheard a funny conversation with some Gibson guys trying buy ebony from an Indian supplier. They kept trying to pay the guy for the wood with les paul guitars and the Indian chap kept explaining that he needs money to feed his family and run his buisness not electric guitars. The Gibson guys seemed so indoctrinated with the company that they didn't seem to understand what the chap was trying to explain!!
Cheers
Andrew
gibson and their wood supply over the years is an interesting topic. In the late 70s, they started to laminate mahogany necks (which probably makes for a better neck, even in mahogany - as I look across everything I've bought, I can't recall any laminated necks that have had a significant issue, but body hump and dips and S shaped stuff on the surface of decades old mahogany neck guitars aplenty - I have one right now that needs to be fixed and then refretted just to be sold (I'll have to plane it) - a yamaha SG700 - too bad, it's a good guitar otherwise.
But as far as the mahogany goes, I don't follow too much of what went on in the early days as they were still willing to try things (with korina, etc, but gibson calls korina difficult to handle and work - I'm sure just because you can't throw it in jigs and carelessly cut and shape and edge treat it with no problem like you can mahogany).
I had a 76 les paul that was pancake, but it was only 10 pounds even and I have to admit, it was pretty nice (laminated maple, of course - neck had no relief but was perfectly straight and stable - if I'd have kept it, I'd have shaped just a bit of relief into the fingerboard. It was fine plugged in. And then after that, a 90s guitar with neck stability that didn't even survive retail (sold to me as an unknowing teenager and gibson wouldn't have anything to do with it when I went to a guitar tech that wasn't at the dealer that sold it a couple of years later).
And then the weight relief variations make it harder to tell what the wood is until around ...something like 2006? when gibson set up an agreement to get their wood from fiji. The second growth wood has nice characteristics and looks nice (usually not super dense, though they've made some boat anchors in the lower cost lines in the last half dozen years - the ones made as store specials like the "les paul player plus" or some other such thing made for guitar center - some of those were 12 pounds). But, they're still missing stability - I like to think I've only had 8 gibsons - but I just counted - 13 of them.
3 of those had so much wood movement that they had dead areas on the fingerboard, who had enough movement that the lacquer checked end to end before they were 10 years old (I'm sure that's two factors - the lacquer not having enough plasticizer and the wood moving too much - looks great on an old guitar, but hindrance if trying to dump a newer guitar). Another two guitars needed to have the frets leveled to reasonably sell them. So five had playability issues, 2 of the 3 that were dead needed significant fret leveling, and the third was unfixable (I sold it as salvage - which just because it's gibson wasn't lovely, but yielded a surprising return (still was 60-70% of "good" used guitar cost - the guy who bought it said he just liked the way it looked and he wouldn't play past the 8th fret where it was dead as a doornail).
Everything has some level of needing periodic work - tokai's regular line stuff seems about the same. The older yamaha guitars that were gibson copies and actually mahogany, same, but the ones with mahogany body and maple neck - haven't had anything with an issue.
The other thing that's irked me with gibson is their desire in some cases to save $3 on a $2800 guitar. Like getting rid of indian rosewood for a while on a les paul standard and using a lighter colored central american rosewood, as well as a reddish granadillo that looks like bubinga on some of the slightly lower cost models. And things like making the "slash" les paul (I'm not the customer for that, anyway) and putting in their own pickups to not buy an (at the time) retail pair of duncan alnico II pros for $160, which was probably wholesale to gibson at $100. And then trying to turn around claiming their own pickups should retail at $180 each.
Could be worse, but if they were satisfied to make good guitars only and just live with whatever size the market would be, they could be a whole lot more like fender, who manages to make a very good US guitar in 7 hours of labor, and a very good mex guitar in about the same for 1/2 to 2/3ds the cost.
I think the wood stability issues in the last 15 years are due to second growth wood of a uniform source and unwillingness to develop a specialty drying process or hold the wood for a couple of years before using it. And the trouble extends to the fingerboard wood (the instability).
