Dan Armstrong Replica Part 3

There’s no sense delaying the inevitable. Let’s cut this body out.

In a rare fit of intelligence, I realized (like I did with the Les Paul Jr. build) that I would be better off doing the neck pocket before cutting out the body outline.

That said, I would need to cut out the general area of the neck pocket because of the way it was situated between the horns.

Knowing as I do the limitations of the tools I have (not to mention the limitations of the operator), I used the drill press:

to remove as much material as I could near the line to be cut:

Then I used a jigsaw to cut between the holes.

Once this was done, I needed to finish this part of the body before doing the neck pocket. So I got out the body template and the flush-cut router bit:

That looks much better!

It was now time to cut the neck pocket. As usual, I first used a Forstner bit to remove as much stock as I could from the area to be routed:

Then, using the same template I made for the Les Paul Junior,

I routed out the neck pocket :

I used a lot of passes in an attempt to minimize heat buildup. Eventually, I did get the pocket to its final, smooth dimensions:

 Once that was done, I went back to the drill press to continue the process of cutting out the body. After the jigsaw did its part, we have a free-standing body:

 Bringing back the template, I began smoothing the edges:

Again going slowly to avoid heat buildup as much as I could.

 Until I eventually had the body smooth all the way around:

Working with Plexiglas is messy:

Really messy: 

Believe it or not, that’s the easy part. 

Now I need to bevel the body. The bevel is asymmetrical; it ‘runs out’ sooner on the bottom than on the top.

I didn’t have a router bit for it, so that meant I needed elbow grease. Luckily, I had the rasp that I bought in Japan (though you can get them elsewhere)

I marked out what I guessed were the dimensions on the top of the body:

and the sides,

paying particular attention to the areas where the bevels ‘ran out’ near the horns.

Then I rasped away everything that was outside of those lines.

I rasped…

and rasped…

and rasped.

When I got close to the lines, I used a scraper to remove scratches and to try and get the bevels as flat as I could.

One thing I did, but failed to document with photos, was to rout the pickup, bridge, and control cavities.  

They came out okay, but the templates I made weren’t perfect and the router bits need to be sharpened. 

This is also where I learned the hard way that clear acrylic doesn’t allow your mistakes to be hidden. They are painfully self-obvious.

If you’re wondering why I need a ‘bridge cavity,’ it’s because I decided to use a production bridge rather than make my own. 

It’s rather similar to the original design, and I already owned one. The string ends require a small recess in the face of the body, so I made one.

With a mistake. Hey, it’s what I do.

One particular detail I paid special attention to was the roundovers on the back of the guitar. They’re kind of hard to see because it’s clear, but they’re important.

Photo courtesy of Matt Umanov.

The back of the lower horn has a more pronounced curve than the upper horn: 

Photo courtesy of Matt Umanov.

Firing up the router, I used a 1/2″ roundover bit on the lower horn and a 1/4″ roundover on the upper. The original guitars only had a roundover on the lower horn, but I decided to do the upper one as well just for comfort. 

Once the body was reduced to its correct size and shape, I needed to buff it out. This was actually nowhere near as bad a process as I feared it would be. First, I sanded the entire body (even the parts that were still factory-fresh) to 320 grit. This way I made sure that every part of the body was the same.

The Iceman dumbeth.

 Then it was the old “sand your way up through the grits,” using wet sandpaper and slightly soapy water. I have to say that for wet sanding, the soap makes all the difference. 

I didn’t use anything but elbow grease, and after a surprisingly short amount of time managed to produce this:

It’s not perfect, and I may still sub it out to a professional buffer, but we’ll see. 

I’m just shocked that I managed to produce something that looks so nice.