Danelectro shielding and stuff

Hello,

in my first article on this page, I shielded my Danelectro DC59 using an aluminum foil. It was better than nothing, but it had its flaws. One of that flaw was the bad contact between a pickguard shielding and shielding in the control cavity. Then there was the issue of shielding the cavity itself, since this guitar is hollow, and you just can't reach with the tape everywhere on the insides, because in order to do that, you would need to take the body apart. And of course, the aluminum foil looks kind of cheap and not pretty. 

But then my friend wanted me to shield two if his bass guitars, and at that time I found a good deal for a copper tape on Ebay, so I bought a lot of it and shielded these bass guitars with it. It worked great so I decided to give my Danelectro the same treatment. But this would just solve the material, but not the actual flaws I mentioned earlier. Then I found an article, where the author described his original production Danelectro from the 50's, and how he wanted to make it playable again. Anyway, there was a picture that he took of the controls shielding, which was really cool looking.

Here is the article

As you can see, there is no need to shield the body itself. This pocket or enclosure that completely covers the controls is fixed to the pickguard, so everything has solid connections and it also cuts the material used and so on ... it is simply a perfect solution. Of course, this is only usable if you have the jack mounted right next to the potentiometers, if you have a reissue Danelectro with jack on the side of the body (or if you put it there), then you need to come up with a different solution.

As you can see, I removed the aluminum foil completely and put the copper tape just near the controls because there is no need to shield the entire pickguard. Next, I needed something that would form the actual enclosure around the controls, because the tape itself is very thin and would not hold shape. I decided to use cardboard (from pizza box). The pictures are quite self-explanatory here, I really documented the whole process thoroughly so you can see the steps. No rocket science there, just making a box from a piece of cardboard which I covered in the copper tape after it was finished.

Done :)

I also reworked the wires coming from the neck pickup, as you can see, I used two shielded wires (one of them has its shield connected only on the pickup side to not cause ground loops) instead of the fat stereo one, which was really inflexible and hard to work with inside the cavity (yes I accidentally switched the green and black wire, because I'm used to the standard "black is ground" coloring).

So that covers the shielding. But there was another quite important thing I did to this guitar. As you can see in the pictures, I added a new selector switch. On the next picture, there is an original switch (the chrome one), which was very noisy, there was cracking sound when selecting and overall it wasn't very comfortable to use. I bought a similar one (the black one), but it was way worse.

The idea for this particular switch also came from my friend's bass guitar, which had this one and it was super comfortable to switch and also it is very simple and easy to work with. The bass is a Jolana D-bass, a Czechoslovakian made bass guitar that strongly resembles the Rickenbacker bass guitar. It is basically a Les Paul switch which has its bowels bent 90°. After some research, I found that this is a standard switch on the Jazzmaster guitars, so I was ready to buy it. Of course, there is always a catch, and with this switch, it's a big one.

The standard Danelectro switch is an ON/OFF/ON configuration, meaning that the pins are connected to nothing when in middle position and then in the outer position the middle pin and one of the outer pins are connected. The standard Les Paul switch is ON/ON/ON configuration, the outer positions function the same, but in the middle position all the pins are connected to each other. And this type of configuration is impossible to use when you want your middle position to be both pickups in series and one pickup alone in the outer positions. The Les Paul configuration (which is just me saying it is a "parallel in middle" configuration) is shown in the next pictures. As you can see, the switch is mechanically very simple, the plastic thing connected to the knob just moves the outer steel sheets away from the inner ones and breaking contact.

When I was searching for this Jazzmaster switch, I looked if they have it on StewMac, and they did (I bought it on Ebay eventually, this was just me looking for more information). And also, someone in the comments section for this product said, that it is possible to modify it for series pickup configuration by just taking it apart and change the place of the sheets. It is kind of not easy to explain in words, so I'll just post more pictures.

Switch dismantled

As you can see, the switch is very simple. In order to make it work like I wanted to, I needed to use longer screws, because I will be adding new layers (steel washers) to make space for the new configuration. But there is some plastic insulating cover on the screws that also hold the layers properly. The screws are M3, the holes are something over 4mm in diameter (it fits M4 screws, but they are somewhat loose).

So I took longer M3 screws, and tried to make them thick enough to tightly fit the layers. At first, I just used an electrical tape as shown in the picture above (the new ones are on the left, steel washers that will be used as another layers also shown). But the tape was impossible to fit, because when it was tight, it tended to curl up, and when I removed some of it, it was loose. So I used heatshrink tubing on the screws, two layers which made exactly the right diameter. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of that. Here is the modified switch finished, as you can see, it makes connection in the outer positions instead of breaking it.

Oh and I got rid of the piezo pickup, which I didn't like anyway, it picks everything you do with the guitar, every touch, every scratch since it's hollow. And the sound was rather meh.

And here is the Danelectro in its full glory :) Very nice guitar. When I bought it, there was a sticker on the head which said "totally shielded". Well it was far from it, but now it finally is. With a new smooth and comfortable switch.