Dan Armstrong (London) Refinish

The revival of my 1974 Dan Armstrong (London) continues apace (if you're not sure what I'm talking about see my last post - Dan Armstrong (London) serial numbers).

You can see in the photo where I previously sanded away a comfort contour on the back.

All in all, the refinish is going fairly well, with grain filling being the most recent step. However, a couple of things concern me a little.

Uh Oh

Well, to be frank, a lot of things concern me a lottle, but that's not the point of this post. Sometime in 1979 my Dan Armstrong got knocked over during a rehearsal and to my horror, the neck fell off.

It was a clean break, meaning the neck tenon fell out of the body pocket, so no wood was broken, only the glue joint. But the guitar tech who repaired it told me that the fit was loose and that he'd had to shim the pocket with veneer before glueing the neck back in.

Stripping away the twenty something coats of household polyurethane I'd previously applied in my innocence has exposed just how big a gap there is. At the moment it's full of slowly drying grain filler which obscures it a little, but it looks to be around 1mm.

More worrying, and much harder to photograph, is what looks to be a hairline crack on either side of the neck just behind the nut. There's always been a crack in the epoxy resin finish there, which I put down to brittle resin, and when I stripped it away put down to the effect of 30 years of sunlight through the cracked finish, but when I run my fingers over it... hmmmm.

Anyway, I've sanded it smooth, grain filled it and when it's got a few coats of white nitrocellulose. I'll probably never notice it again.