Dan Armstrong Replica Part 2

Apologies to anyone reading this for my previous inadvertent posting of Parts 5 and 6 (as you saw, they were just blank entries awaiting fulfillment, so to speak).

The first part of this (or any other) project is research. The Internet has made it very easy to find out almost anything, and for this project it was no different.

There are lots of photos of Dan Armstrong guitars, interviews with people who designed and built them, and even an entire website dedicated to the guitars!

So I want to take a moment here and sincerely thank two people. One is Mark Schnoor, whose website www.danarmstrong.org has been a great resource. In addition, he has been kind enough to answer some of my questions directly and even provided me with photos and measurements.

The other person who has helped me immensely is Matt Umanov, who owns Matt Umanov Guitars.  He has been kind enough to correspond with me, also sharing valuable information. I never expected a response from him since

A) he has a guitar store to run,

B) I figured he’s got a lot better things to do than answer weird emails about a 40 year old guitar design,

but most importantly

C) He is, after all, one of the people who not only had input in the design of the original guitar but also built the prototypes!

So thank you very much to Mark Schnoor and Matt Umanov. I just hope I can do justice to their kindness.

This guitar is going to be very different from anything I’ve done before, because Plexiglas (or Lucite or acrylic or Perspex or whatever they call it in your country) isn’t wood.

It’s also clear. So there’s no hiding mistakes.

I have found as I get older that I am not only more willing, but more eager to do a lot of the preparatory research and thinking.

I try (as much as I can) to think a problem through before trying to solve it. I don’t always manage to, but I’m getting better at it.

So let’s look at some of the challenges.

First, the body.

The originals were 32mm or 1 1/8″ thick. They were also heavy. I can get 30mm acrylic, so that’s close enough for me as well as a little bit of weight reduction.

You can see the neck pocket area with four screws to join the neck to the body. It goes right into the pickup cavity, which has some interesting things.

On the left side, you can see a ‘scoop’, and on the right two metal pins. The guitars were designed to have pickups that you could change without taking off the strings (s croll to the bottom of the page and watch the animated GIF)  or heating up a soldering iron.

This was a pretty revolutionary system, but to be honest I don’t want or need to do it like that. It’s also pretty much beyond me to make that scoop.

I tried to think it through and all I got was a headache.

The other detail to consider is the way the body is beveled around the edges. The bevels are not symmetrical, and the back of the lower horn has a pronounced roundover. Matt told me he did the originals by hand, and so I guess I will too.

But that’s later on in the process.

At this point,   I need some templates.

Again, thanks to Matt (who drew it in 1969)  and Mark (who put it on his site), I could use a life-sized copy of the original template:

I downloaded the image, and then, using dimensions Matt gave me, blew it up to exactly the right size, printed it and taped the pieces together:

Then I glued the template to some MDF, cut out the shape and sanded to the line. Presto!

I would also need a neck. The originals used a 3-piece quartersawn maple neck back with a rosewood fretboard. The headstocks were angled.

I found some maple that I could use, and decided to add dark veneer between the maple for two reasons.

One, I thought it would look nice and two, it made it easier to compensate for any variation in the flatness of the maple pieces.

Considering they sat in a rack in a hardware store in Hong Kong for God knows how long, they were pretty flat, but not totally so. That’s what clamps and Mongo Power are for anyway.

I think the veneers look nice, and add a personal touch to the replica.

I needed to cut the headstock angle and also cut out the neck from the blank.

The headstock angle was easy, using a jig I made up for the miter saw. It’s not perfect, but it does the job.

I cleaned up the upper right corner with a flush-cut saw and some files. Only took me a few minutes.

But cutting the neck loose from the blank was not going to be so easy.

The maple was about 6″ wide, and I needed to cut the neck from the narrow side (remember, it’s quartersawn).

Maple is tough wood, so I decided to take a non-confrontational approach. I drilled a series of holes along the line that would be the back of the headstock:

Then I carefully cut between the holes with a jigsaw. It took a while, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

For the back of the neck, I made a series of passes with my (woefully underpowered) table saw, and finished with a hand saw until the blank was free:

The only part of the back of the neck I had to worry about was the tenon where it attached to the body.

What I mean is that most of that burnt stuff would come off when I carved the shape of the neck. So I cleaned up only about 6″ of it.

**I’ll need to make a pickguard for this build, as well as a headstock face plate and truss rod cover.

The originals were made of Formica, and from what I could tell it was probably color #6211 Elegant Rosewood.**

Naturally, you can’t buy small pieces of Formica. It’s made for counter tops and cabinets, so there’s no real market for little pieces.

You have to buy 4′x8′ sheets.

I now have a three-lifetime supply of pickguard material:

  But at least I could buy it in Fo Tan, less than three blocks from my workshop. So I had that going for me.

And finding an image of the Dan Armstrong pickguard (on a website trying to sell me a pickguard) was a bonus:

So that image got the Template Treatment; print to correct size, glue to MDF, cut and sand to shape.

Now we have all the parts you see in the photo below: wooden neck blank, Formica pickguard blank,  acrylic body blank, body template, and other assorted bits:

I’m using a different truss rod than the one pictured above; I decided to use a standard Gibson-type with the acorn nut,

You can also see the headstock template that I will use (in modified form) as well as the rosewood fretboard.

Up next: cutting out the body.