Starting a new build... Danelectro style

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
Well, it's been on my mind for a while but I just came back from the Home Depot with the essentials to get started.

If you are not familiar with Danelectro guitars, they were built to be mass produced at low cost. A little like Leo Fender designed his guitar to be cheaply manufactured, but taken to the next level. They mostly sold through Sears and Montgomery Ward.

The bodies are hollow. The frame is made of plywood (the earlier models used pine or poplar scraps as in the picture below) and the front and back are hardboard (aka Masonite).

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Pickups are lipstick style, due to their being housed in metal lipstick containers.

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They use a screw-on aluminum nut

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The bridge is intonable by angling the piece of rosewood. Oh and did I mention the necks use a steel rod to keep them straight without the need for an adjustable truss rod? :)

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How can I not be inspired by that, being the king of cheap :)

Dano had lots of interesting out of the box models (the coolest being th longhorn bass in my opinion). They made a number of baritone guitars, and I think I'm going to make mine a baritone too.
 
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TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I already have lipstick pickups from GFS from a previous sale (told you I have been thinking about it for while). GFS has "retrofit" lipstick pickups for strats and release, and they are wound to values that matxh that use.
What I got was the Dano correct ones with a large mounting bracket and they are longer than regular pickups, so you mount them at a slant. The are the vintage correct 4.6.k and the neck and bridge pickup are identical, the sound difference is due to their position.


I'm going to do a truss rod. Without one, you need to give the neck some relief (curve) by sanding it into the fretboard, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

I've always wanted to try to build a laminated neck, and it's a good idea here to make it stiffer to help withstand the higher string pull from baritone strings.
I happened to have some 1/2" poplar remnants but not enough, so I got a piece of red oak for the center piece. Poplar can be sort of ugly (greenish tinge), but I plan on painting this neck, although it's a bit of a rehearsal for a mutilwood laminate after neck for a future project.

I also have a piece of 1/4" red oak I plan to use fo the fret board (likely stained ebony) when I get to it.

I think I'll go with 28 5/8 scale because I already have the fret positions calculated but can also use a fender neck as a reference (it's like adding 2 more frets beyond the nut)

Most baritones have a rather long neck because they body, including pickup and bridge placement is made for a regular guitar, and you simply add a longer neck.
I kinda like the look of the long neck, but it can be a little more awkward to play (like on an SG, one gets the feel the neck is shifted to the left) and can cause neck dive issues.
All this is really an excuse for me to customize the design by moving the bridge and pickups and shortening the neck rather than go with a design I could buy off the shelf :)
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
AllParts makes a Dano bridge that has saddles much like a strat hardtail bridge, so I'm going to make that concession to modern advances in technology.

I'm still going to make my own Dano style nut.

OK, enough teasing you guys, time to go glue some neck would together.


Oh, one more teaser: my plan is to have the body matte black with red sparkle top :)


Of course plans are meant to be ignored, so I'll post here wehn it's finished (will be a while, I don't have a lot of free time)
 

PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
Do you have a particular Dano body style in mind or are you going outside the box?

Just for clarification, the Danelectro re-issues from China and Korea for the last 20 or so years have an adjustable truss rod in the neck. It was the old Neptune, New Jersey Danos from the 60's and early 70's that had the metal rod.

I think that going to the U3, fully intonatable bridge is a good idea. The price difference between the rosewood slab and the 6 saddle bridge isn't all that much. My Guitarlin, Longhorn and Longhorn Bass all have the fully intonatable bridges. My U2 has the rosewood slab. When I first got the U2, I was planning on replacing the bridge with the U3 version, (it's a 15 minute swap), but I was very impressed with the intonation on the rosewood slab, so I never did upgrade it. I have a Dano Convertible, but that has a floating bridge that appears to use a piece of fret wire in the rosewood bridge, so intonation on that one is iffy at best.

Good luck on this project! I'll be watching as you progress.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I'm sort of making it up as I go, not really going for accuracy, just inspiration. The shorter neck with the bridge moved back about 2 inches will make it look less like a baritone and more like a regular guitar. Just because (I think) I can.

Not planning on doing a full build thread here, but I started making sawdust and gluing the rough cut neck together. You can see the piece of oak in the middle.

IMG_20181120_222758-800x600.jpg

I'll be adding "wings" to the side of the headstock tomorrow. I wanted a straight pull headstock where the strings exit the nut straight like on fenders rather than at a side angle like on a Gibson. I originally thought about doing a Dano "dolphin" headstock but modified to be straight pull. But since my "signature" is two-tones headstock that are not flat, I'm planning on doing something similar to the batwings carve of the Wilshire Pro.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I'm thinking going '59 body shape, because I don't think Danelectro made '56 baritones and I love the "seal" pickguard

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The picture above is a re-issue and has the jack on the front, which I want to do too. I'm pretty sure the originals had the jack on the side.
I want simple electronics though, the one above has concentric volume and tone pots for each pickup. I think I want a single tone and volume.
The normal way for wire a Dano guitar is to wire the pickups in series and shunt one off with the selector switch. So Unlike say, a tele, were the 2 pickups are in parallel in the middle position, the pickups are actually in series, and I want to keep that in my build (and use a flip switch rather than a blade switch like a tele. Note that it's not an LP switch, it's an on/off/on switch instead)

I might tweak the horns slightly, to make the shape my own.

My second choice would be a variation on the '63 body shape, I always liked its butt :)
Img5443_WEB.jpg
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
another interesting thing about Danelectros is the tape covering the sides. Since it's either a sandwich of masonite/pine/masonite, or masonie/plywood/masonite the edges are not pretty and hard to get smooth. Mr Daniel found a cheap way to hide the side: wrap it in vinyl tape!
You can see the cream tape in the guitar below. It's been known to fall off in places, and it's pretty easy to get new tape. I haven't decided if I want to use Dano tape or something else yet.

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you can also see the neck mounting: screwed in with no plates

Also, the screws in the back are to adjust the pickup height
lipstick mounting.jpg
 
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TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I really should go to bed but I have the day off tomorrow (well today) and it's just too much fun to design a guitar. This is what I have so far if I decide to go with the '59 body. If you compare to earlier pictures you can see that the bridge has been moved back so the neck doesn't extend as much.
I think I will do the control cavity like I drew it in pink, with the controls attached to the pickguard. I think some Dano models have an additional access panel in the back, but I don't think that's necessary here. I also just realized I drew the concentric pots even though I decided I wasn't going to do it :)
Quick colored version to see if I like it. I think I do. I need an "easy" idea for the fret markers, not sure I want to go with the usual dots.

my design relocating bridge.jpg color concept.png
 
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MarkDyson

Blues Hound Wannabe
With the hollow-frame body, is there potential for some f-hole fun, or would that spoil the theme?
 

PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
With the hollow-frame body, is there potential for some f-hole fun, or would that spoil the theme?

The original 59s did not have any F-holes. The most recent design for the DC-12 (12 string with the 59 body style Chris is working from) have a variant that has one F-hole, placed on the side opposite the pickguard. The 59 designation for this body design came from the fact that the body style (also called the shorthorn) was introduced in 1959 as a replacement for the original 56 or U series, which used a body style similar to the Les Paul.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
Yup Lloyd is correct as always.
I have thought about an f-hole on the side opposite the pickguard but not sure what it will do to the baritone sound. I haven't ruled it out because I'm a sucker for f-hole, especially if not shaped like an f.

I even toyed with the idea of putting a round hole below the neck pickup. Dano had a model called the convertible. It was also shortborn shaped and you could buy it without a pickup but add a pickup later:

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Either way I am planning on having minimal wood in the center of the guitar (unlike the exploded wiew in my first post that shows the entire center section filled with wood, like a 339. The section between the neck pocket and the bridge support will be void.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
@paparaptor do you know the pots and caps values for the electronics in your Danos?
There is lots of bad information out there in the DIY world.
My understanding is that the stacked pots are 100k for the volume and 1M for the tone. No idea about caps.

I have a while to go till I have to worry about electronics, but it's never too early to inquire.

And then I'll tell you all about the Dano "totally shielded" method to eliminate hum.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I'm already questioning. The color scheme. Not the red sparkle, but the black back and neck. I was thinking some ivory type color would look great, the I remembered Backlund's guitars and now I'm really thinking about it:

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By the way, if there is any builder who's guitar looks give me a hard on, it would be Backlund's. I love his stuff!

If I go cream I'll want black side tape, looks like it is available on eBay in custom sizes so I think I know where I'm getting my tape :)
 
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PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
@paparaptor do you know the pots and caps values for the electronics in your Danos?
There is lots of bad information out there in the DIY world.
My understanding is that the stacked pots are 100k for the volume and 1M for the tone. No idea about caps.

I have a while to go till I have to worry about electronics, but it's never too early to inquire.

And then I'll tell you all about the Dano "totally shielded" method to eliminate hum.
Your information is correct. I just opened up my U2 and futzed around with it. After lifting the pickup lead from the volume control, I got 1 meg for tone and 100k for volume. The caps in this one are .1uf mylar (greenies). Nothing vintage to see here!

It's the first time I have opened one of my Danos. Most of mine are Korean reissues and I have to say the wiring job is excellent.
 

MikeR

Guitar Challenged
Staff member
Great stuff here! Looks like a very cool project. Keep us posted Chris! :thumbup:
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I played for hours with inkscape, tweaking the shape this and that way. I tried with asymmetrical horns (like the Brian May Red Special, but I wanted the longer horn on the right. I tried giving it "butt cheeks" like the Dano '63, etc... Polled the wife and son a dozen times about what they thought and in the end we all agreed that the original '59 shape is just cool and I should go with it.

So I started on the body. Kind of a point of no return for the body shape :)

My printer decided to quit working and I didn't feel like going to Kinko's today, so some progress is now going to be impeded until I can print a couple 1:1 paper templates. I hate transferring measurements manually :)

I need to order an on/off/on toggle switch. AllParts sells a "real" Dano one, but at over $13 before shipping, that's highway robbery!

I thought I had 6-inline tuners in a drawer, but it turns out I'm wrong. So I may have to order some from GFS although I heard there is a cheap brand on eBay that makes a decent product, so I may have to look into that.

Funny how there is always one more thing to buy with those projects. It's also the part that kills you on expenses. Don't ever think it's cheaper than buying a premade instrument. It's all about the fun of making things and making it yours (if I bought it, its neck would be too long to fit in my Mono M80 gigbag for example)


I may get another day to work on this project this weekend, but after that I'll probably too busy till the Christmas vacation.
 

PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
Let me look through my junk drawer. I may have a Gibson 3-way switch around here that will fit, unless you're looking for a real bat handle toggle. I had a really old Peavey switch that would have been perfect, but I snapped the top off of it while installing it on Flamingo One. Also, I have a brand new Dano aluminum nut that I ordered and then realized I didn't need. If you want the switch and the nut, they're yours for a five finger discount. I'm not sure i still have the switch, but I saw the nut today and set it aside, knowing that you need one.

For tuning keys, you might check this out. https://www.cbgitty.com/6-in-a-line-sets/
They sell a lot of really cheap guitar parts. I bought some cheapo 3 on a side tuners from them a year or so ago. In fact, i bought two sets, because the guitar I was working on was a 4+2 and it was still cheaper buying two 3+3 sets than I could find anywhere else.
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
Cool!
I have a Gibson switch (maybe even 2) but they're on/on/on so not compatible with the Danelectro circuit.
After I posted above, I did a bit of research and the on/off/on is very common in the automotive and boating industry, so I should be able to find something about the right size for cheap (I just need to be careful about the size, those 20 amp switches can be huge!)

I was going to make my nut but I wouldn't say no to the real thing.

I never thought of CBG as a source of hardware. The prices are definitely right.

Funny I toyed with the idea of doing a 4+2 headstock on this build but decided I didn't want to have to buy 2 sets of tuners.
 
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