One of the reason that Gibson’s are so flippin’ expensive is that they use huge pieces of wood to construct one guitar. On the Chinese copy you can see from the side that the guitar is constructed from several pieces of wood – the grain is non – continuous. The back is actually covered in a thin single piece of veneer – so from the rear it looks like a real guitar!
A lot of these guitars also do not have a maple cap as a real les paul does. I have seen examples where the “Flamed Maple Cap is actually a photograph of a flamed maple cap hiden under several layers of varnish, polyurethane, lacquer and shellac ect….