I seem to recall from the factory videos that Gibson don't use a lot of CNC - more duplicarvers and suchlike.
Anyways, sorry to distract.
Goodness, no problem at all - all of the forums are dying for topical discussion.
You may be more right than I am. At the outset, McCarty decided they'd put a carve top on the LP for perceived quality (i probably said that here already? I don't remember now, posted in more than one place). Gibson had duplicarvers for archtops (Which still got their quality wood - the LPs have iffy wood even in 1959 as the archtop guitars and mandolins were probably higher priced - and much longer running), so they employed them on the guitars. From seeing heritage factory pictures, the tops were done with duplicarver and then combination hand and machine finish (maybe I should say jigged or not jigged). the guitars were less identical because more of the work as done by hand (like the neck profile sanding and the transition at the heel and the peghead to neck - that was done freehand on a belt sander.
Fast forward to now, I believe most of that is gone. I don't know exactly what year, but early 2000s, things started going to CNC - especially for necks, and some of the designs on the lower priced guitars (figure up to like LP studio types and then some of the guitars like the LP sig T (which wasn't inexpensive) give the sense that order of operations have been changed - as in, on some of them, the neck is made and the fingerboard is glued on afterwards - no profiling to match the fingerboard and neck together. I haven't had a standard newer than about 2000 - I'm afraid of what i might get, and gibson went back and forth doing things like putting two piece bodies on standards despite price tags around $3k, and changing woods and then geometry (i think just before they went bankrupt, a new standard was somewhere around $3400 here, before sales tax. It may have gotten to $3699). So, I've had mostly Sig T Les paul or lower guitars, but all have been a bit off in feel since around 2006.
( should say above, too, I'm talking about kalamazoo with the heritage comment, and not after gibson abandoned the factory and it became "heritage". The early bits of quality decline started with flattening the carve on the les paul tops so that they could be linearly sanded quickly, and then for whatever reason, the pickup bobbins and pickups changed so that as far as I know, the early 70s pickups literally couldn't hold enough wind to sound like the PAFs, but before then, the les pauls didn't sell that well, anyway, so it's not like they were abandoning the 59 paul that had sold so well, or the 68 custom when the 69 went to a laminated mahogany neck (that could very well have just been to address stability issues).
(there's follow up later with CNCs more or less drilling and routing the bodies). Surprisingly, there is still a lady rounding the necks of the guitar, but I wonder which guitars those are as some of the necks I've had were sharp on the corner (whereas in the old says, the neck came out of a pin router setup and the profile was pretty much cut and finished at once after that on a belt sander).
I don't know if it's in either of these videos, but in one of the earlier ones, they showed a lady binding les pauls with ABS binding and then scraping. Fantastic, skilled and super fast. I've only used celluloid binding ,and it doesn't go on like that!
There still is a lot of hand handling - (I didn't watch the whole long first video, I"ll admit - just skimmed it to see what gibson is doing now - the issues that my more recent gibsons have had (aside from the lower models feeling devoid of hand shaping and checking, which is probably the case as they're dirt cheap for somnething made in the US) is stability - neck/body differential and fingerboard movement. On the lower end guitars, some were manufactured with a step (the fingerboards narrower than the neck) where you can see glue or bare wood, and as long as it's not too drastic, gibson calls it in spec. They could make these guitars well overseas with lower cost labor, but won't do it I guess for brand reasons.
The plek process improves the mid range guitars, but the one I have now was plekd and the improvement was eliminated pretty quickly by uneven fingerboard drying and body hump.
(I think the CNC roughing, though, has made them all more dimensionally similar, but it also means if there's a problem on a run of lower cost guitars, then the whole run has it. E.g., the SG faded guitars are a shade too thin and the jack touches the back cover on them (since the SG plugs in on the front). I bought one on sale and quickly resold it - when you turn, the jack touches the back plate and jimmies the cord around in the jack and you get loud popping through an amp. The guitar that I got was drop shipped from gibson - 8 months after the reviews were filled with complaints about the problem. Same with the open seam on necks - the faded LPs are a good basic setup to work from (good pickups, OK hardware, good weight, they're actually mahogany) if you're willing to finish profiling the neck yourself - they're so cheap that I've gotten more for one scraping the neck and fixing the problem than reselling them unchanged.
