Heritage 535, how are the new heritage guitars compared to the originals?

[jzucker]

wondering what's different other than the obvious visual...

[Marty Grass]

Price is up a bit. The custom core is significantly more expensive and has their locally wound pickups and larger inlays. The woods tend to be fancier.

The quality is more consistent overall in the standard and custom core lines. Still, most of the old ones were very good. I don't know if they PLEK anymore. This is from 2020.

“Thanks for writing in. For our Standard H-150s, we PLEK in whitewood (before paint). This helps us in a couple of ways. One major benefit is quality control for the necks/neck pitch/frets. The PLEK catches flaws and we can act quickly if something is found, which helps us not waste time or lumber. There are always exceptions.
After PLEK and during paint we do more work on the frets and then again in final setup. A PLEK is never enough since the frets still need to be polished and looked over to make sure the machine didn't make an error.
Finally, we don't batch PLEK. We do them individually. That may be a difference but I'm not sure what others do.”

[jzucker]

plek was a band-aid anyway. The necks should be planed flat prior to fretting. This was always an issue with heritage. Installing frets prior to planing and then pleking is not the best workflow. Still, it's better than the previous situation. I just wondered about the quality in general. Looks like some of the designs might have changed. Perhaps it's my imagination but the 535 cutaways look more like gibson now.

[deacon Mark]

No one installs frets prior to planing the fingerboard, standard procedure is to radius the fingerboard to specs. Then then the frets are installed obviously they cut the slots before the fingerboard is radius but does not have to be. Then the neck and fingerboard are set to make sure it is completely flat. Frets are then installed and if done well very little material has to be removed from the frets. Depending on the manufacture the truss rod is taken into consideration for getting the proper relief. Ideally very little tension on truss rod when frets installed, they can actually cause a back bow. This is not problem as once guitar is brought up to pitch the relief is then introduced into the neck.

There is a whole other topic on compression fretting for guitars without adjustable truss rods. No manufacture of any worth would install frets prior to planing the fingerboard, logically in could not ever be done. Heritage to my knowledge does what Gibson does when they fret guitars, binding and the nubs. Pleking is ok but expensive I used to say no better than a good tech but possible. The learning curve is high, the software upgrades and expense, I will stick with traditional stuff and simply attempt to be accurate.