Yank
Bulbous Also Tapered
Here’s Gibson driving up the second hand value of the hitherto unlovable Firebird X to get them off the corporate books. Ben Crowe (Crimson) was justifiably highly upset/annoyed by the fact they didn’t even strip the hardware and donate it to schools, charities etc, or even donate the whole instruments (I only heard about this from his weekly ‘On the bench’ feature). Just utterly dumb anti-environmental thuggery and further evidence Gibson have totally jumped the shark. The pickups, bridges, stop bars, knobs, pots etc are all clearly perfectly salvageable and usable even if they felt the guitars and the crazy ‘robot’ tuners were unsellable.
Apparently everything on this guitar - hardware, pickups, electronics - was proprietary to this model. Even donating them to a school or charity would have been problematic, the extensive internal electronics are based on an obsolete operating system that can't be updated. And the labor to part them out would likely have exceeded the value of the parts. Just having these things out there with the "Gibson" logo on the headstock would have been bad publicity, destroying them was their best option. Making a show of it, on the other hand, was a poor decision, and probably meant to be a dig at Henry J. The heavy machinery was on hand from decommissioning the factory. The part that offends me is the wasteful labor to lay them out like that, and then to clean up the pieces when the cameras and machines were gone.