"There's a lot of Danelectro in 'em" said Dan Armstrong in one of his interviews when he was asked about the design of the clear acrylic guitars. Truer words were never spoken - for not only was the body shape of the clear guitars based on a Danelectro model, much of the hardware found its way onto the clear instruments as well. In addition to the deep double cut-away body style, the combination bridge/tailpiece which employs a rosewood bridge is immediately recognizable. Also, many Danelectro models feature a single pickup, volume & tone control along with a tone shaping switch, and output jack. Some Danelectro's have all this on the scratchplate just like a Dan Armstrong guitar. Many Danelectro basses feature a recognizable thumb rest that the acrylic basses use.

But the truth is the Danelectro^® instruments served as far more than merely inspiration for the clear guitars and basses, as Dan virtually built his business on these guitars practically from day one. When Dan opened up his shop on 48^th Street he almost immediately began taking Danelectro instruments and stabilizing them to make them play better. According to the book Electric Rock^© by Richard Robinson - Jesse Colin Young used a Danelectro bass in the Youngbloods^® that Dan had modified.

In the same book Dan went on to say "I was in the repair business in '65. I had a repair shop and wanted something to sell and due to all the stiff competition on 48^th Street I couldn't sell Fenders^® and Gibsons^®, there was no way to do it. I could improve the ones that people brought to me but there was no way to buy them new." The problem here was the fact that the large musical stores already held the franchise on these instruments.

Still Dan wanted something to sell, and later said "Danelectros were so doggone cheap. I could buy them new and they were basically pretty doggone good. Most of the good parts on those things were engineered in the design which I always appreciated, and with some finishing up they could have been really done well, even out of the factory. But they just didn't have time, it was an economy instrument. I've always been an improver anyway. I enjoy that kind of thing, to find something that's made almost well and try to fix it up. It was all basically right so I just took them apart and cleaned them up a little bit."

Well.... not quite. While Dan did indeed take them apart, much more was done than merely 'cleaning them up a bit' for when I interviewed Carl Thompson^® he mentioned learning guitar repair at Dan's shop apprenticing under Eddie Diehl stating "I cut my teeth re-fretting Danelectros - that's where Eddie taught me fret work. We would often remove the frets and install new ones. We did all kinds of work to those guitars and then Dan would turn around and sell them. In fact, to this day - if I get behind in things I sometimes have Eddie help me out by doing fret work and such."

Eddie Diehl also remembers more serious work done to Danelectro instruments as he stated "they were made close by, in New Jersey I believe - so getting them was pretty easy, but some of them needed stabilizing so that they could stay in tune better. Much of this was in the neck set, and often we would run an additional screw from the body into the neck. We would run the screw underneath the metal plate so that it was hidden when everything was put back together but then the neck wouldn't be moving all around like it did before. Sometimes we also had to change out the tuners."

Eddie also spoke of a Danelectro repair that was a bit more serious, stating "I remember one time we had a Danelectro in the shop where we had to remove the frets, then plane down the fingerboard as it wasn't level - it had a raised area in it. It wasn't much but just enough that it made for poor string action. Once the fingerboard was levelled we installed the frets, cleaned & polished them all up and the guitar played like a dream afterwards."

Typical luthier work some might say - but hardly a case of "taking them apart and cleaning them up a little bit." Looking back and reading it once again - I feel Dan was just being brief in his interview - as he wanted to make his point without becoming boring by discussing details - and his point was - that he stabilized a lot of Danelectro instruments then turned around and sold them. While Dan also worked on, and sold many other types of guitars, it was these improved Danelectro instruments that were his bread & butter line. So much so, that in 1969 he got more involved with Danelectro.

The Danelectro name - stemming from 'Daniel-Electric' was started in 1947 by Nathan Daniel, a former amplifier builder who got into the guitar business and built his company up by producing fairly decent, yet inexpensive guitars for Sears & Roebuck^® under the Silvertone^® name. By 1966 Daniel sold Danelectro to the Musical Corporation of America^® (MCA), but he remained with the company which soon began making changes to the marketing strategies that had worked so well all those years. Now Danelectro instruments were now going to be available to virtually anyone who wanted them.

Unfortunately, MCA's strategy didn't pay off. For as stated on almost any Danelectro page on the Internet, by 1969 MCA had closed down the Danelectro plant. This was blamed on MCA's shift to selling instruments to individual guitar stores instead of jobbers (such as Sears).

Rumor has it that at about this same point in time Ampeg was having problems getting Dan's clear acrylic instruments out of the prototype stages and into full scale production. In brief, they were falling behind schedule. In order to bridge the gap at Ampeg, and as Dan once said in an article "in order to help them" (Danelectro) "out" he decided to purchase most, if not all of the remaining bodies and necks and continued manufacturing Danelectros. Some of the instruments were sold through Ampeg, while others were sold over the counter at Dan's shop. They would suffice until Dan's new acrylic models were available.