While at the Dallas Guitar Show, where Gibson has a pretty big presence, I grabbed one of the guys from Gibson Acoustic and nagged him "where are the mandolins??".
He said that not only did the flood wipe out the banjo production, but it also wiped out the Nashville mandolin production as well. He said a few things worth noting that I haven't seen elsewhere, and I thought BHO might be a little interested in hearing them:
1. They've moved all of the equipment over to the Gibson Custom Shop facility, who will now be in charge of producing the lines wiped out in the flood.
2. The first line they're bringing back is the mandolins, and production has just started on them.
3. The rep stated banjo's and dobro's are down the line for getting back into production. He implied that part of the issue was convincing they guys at the Custom Shop to make banjos. Maybe he's talking about the electric custom shop doing all of this? I'm not sure why an acoustic custom shop would have that reaction to building banjo's.
After all of this (and confirming he had no clue about whether they have an old stock of heavy 347 shaped flatpicks somewhere), he tossed me a shirt to get rid of me. Oh Gibson, Gibson, Gibson...
Anyways, this at least seems to me to be some acknowledgement that Gibson is not going to be permanently out of the banjo biz. The bad part is that if production resumes, it'll be done by people who would rather be doing something else...
So if production is moving to the custom shop, to people who are reluctant to make banjo's, what happened to all the employees who were making banjo's pre-flood? Why can't they just make the banjo's at the custom shop facility?