Dan Armstrong 1970

Where to begin on this one? Maybe at the very beginning, which was in 1967-8 when Danny Armstrong came to me and asked if I could turn a rough drawing into an entire solidbody electric guitar with a clear Plexiglas body. "Piece of cake" I said, with all the assurance of the 20-yr-old hotshot NYC guitar repair/restoration kid I was at the time. I hand-built the prototype for Danny and he went on to have them manufactured for him by Ampeg. Later versions were farmed out to a group in St. Louis, then to others overseas. This guitar is one of the originals, still can't be touched by the later versions. It’s one of those rare early examples with a genuine ivory nut, obviously overkill but one of the few ways I could get some extra money by selling the nut blanks to Ampeg. It's also got real American-made Grover Rotomatic tuning machines, not the later Asian-made copies, and all this on a beautifully quarter-sawn maple neck, a quality rarely seen anywhere in the electric guitar world. The unique and very special Armstrong pickups were designed for Danny by the famed Bill Lawrence; the volume and tone pots in this guitar have date codes from 1969. Has a non-original hard shell case, a bit tatty. Brings back memories; who knew? $2995 w/hsc