Dan Armstrong - Man & Guitars

While shopping at that ever-famous online auction site, I managed to acquire a non-functioning Dan Armstrong pickup. As can be seen at upper left this pickup sported the letters CB indicating it's a Country Bass pickup. It was advertized as a bad pickup and I purchased it with the intent of tearing it apart. As seen at upper right, when hooked to my volt-ohm meter, there was no reading across the coil at all. To put it bluntly, she was a goner.

I'm not sure why, because after getting no reading across the coil I knew better. Still, I felt compelled to slide the pickup into one of my Armstrong guitars. Naturally it didn't work, but what I discovered next had me even more perplexed. When I was trying to slide the pickup onto my guitars banana jacks, I was shocked to discover that the pickup slid on and off the guitar's male banana plugs without even so much as touching them!

Upon closer examination, it soon became apparent as to why - and this particular pickup revealed that it had a few interesting twists to it. As can be seen here, the reason the pickup slid on and off my guitar so easily, without even touching anything is because it had been altered, and this alteration pretty much explains why the pickup went bad in the first place.

As can be seen in the above photos, the outside 'nuts' normally seen on Dan Armstrong pickups were both missing, as though someone had taken a 5/16" socket and tried to unscrew them. Since these are not nuts at all, but rather the receptacle end of the female banana jacks on the pickup, their removal would most certainly spell disaster to the pickup as it had to have severed the connections to the coil itself - there and then.

On one of the jacks, even the black plastic washer that isolates the female receptacle jack from the brass plate had been removed. Worse yet, it soon became apparent that both of the female jacks, for whatever reason, had been drilled, or bored out to a much larger diameter. It was all very confusing.

Although both of these pictures are of the same jack, I noticed that on both jacks the black plastic washer on the 'inside' of the pickup were still seated in place behind the up bent brass plate, (though they too, were enlarged), while behind the plastic washers, lie the last remains of the female banana jack that attached the jacks to the coil wires. Upon being twisted off, drilled & enlarged, these metal parts most likely became overheated or just plain moved - and the internal coil wiring to the jacks was either dislodged from the heat, or torn away altogether from the movements. Either way it resulted in a dead pickup.

Because the pickups are encased in resin, thus sealed, once they go bad there is no other recourse other than to tear the pickup apart for it to be rebuilt. This gave me a great opportunity to investigate one of these pickups first hand and share my findings. As can be seen above left, the epoxy type resin is not easy to remove at all. I began by using a pair of nippers, taking small bites out of it. But it didn't take very long and I soon lost my patience with that, and took the pickup over to my bench grinder where I made much faster progress (as well as a huge pile of resin dust). The bottom side was the quickest & easiest side to grind the resin away from, as I knew from past conversations with Dan that nothing was down there other than the bottom half of the pole piece.

As seen upper left, and with the pickup again viewed upsidedown, the bar type pole piece is clearly seen as the bottom half of the pickup is nearly devoid of resin. At the upper right one can see the few remains of the female banana type input jacks to the pickup. The jack on the right still shows its plastic insulating washer, whereas the one on the left had its insulating washer stripped away along with the input jacks.

As seen upper left, the bottom plate. Dan had told me that "The Country pickups use a brass plate and have two magnets placed on the outside of the coil - and closer to the strings, making the field eminate from outside the coil toward the center - which is just the opposite of most other pickups." Later on Dan talked about the use of a brass plate for the coil to set on. Although he was referring to the Jazz pickup in this particular conversation, he stated "using a brass plate for the pickup coil to rest on does not allow any conducting through the plate" which Dan felt gave these pickups their unique sound.

Notice how the brass plate has oxidized and turned green in some areas. Since the resin potting process makes the pickup both air & water-tight, it's apparent that Dan was not too concerned with any oxidization of the brass as he produced pickups that utilized a brass plate. Probably because he knew that once sealed, any such processes would cease.

At upper right, and with the bottom now completely devoid of resin, it was time to grind away the top. Here one had to be extra careful, for as Dan mentioned there are two magnets lying just outside the coil bobbin, somewhere. I felt the time had come to no longer use my bench grinder, and instead I relied on a Dremel Tool^® to slowly grind away smaller pieces of the resin, taking care not to hit anything too severely.

With much of the top resin stripped away, you can see the two magnets placed just where Dan said they were, on the outside of the coil bobbin. The bobbin itself is like most others on the market, a piece of plastic that is molded to allow the coil windings to go around it. But unlike other bobbins, this one is also molded to allow it to slide over the full length pole piece in the center.

Notice the resin still surrounding the one female banana jack at upper left. When it came time to remove the resin from these areas, special care was given as I wanted to try to understand what exactly might have gone wrong.

At the right, and with the pickup turned for a different photo shot, one can see resin still surrounding the magnet seen on the left. Notice the coil wire around the bobbin. As careful as I was my Dremel tool barely touched it, which was still enough to totally sever the coil windings. On the other end of the bobbin, the brown resin can still be seen.