Cleaning a FILTHY Danelectro Hodad

I recently came across a rather interesting find in a local pawnshop: a 1999 Danelectro Hodad. The guitar was absolutely disgusting, but it felt great in the hand, what I was able to hear on the crappy, rusty strings on the cheap practice amp the shop let me play through hinted at amazing tones, and the shape intrigued me. I do wish this had been a different color other than blue (blue is the primary color in my guitar collection), but when you come across one of these, especially at the price I got it for (read: WAY less than what they go for on Reverb), you can't really pass it up.

In this video, I go through the Hodad and demonstrate how to do a deep clean of a guitar and restore it to as close to new as I am capable of.

During the removal of the knob for the neck tone pot, the shaft of the pot broke and became loose. This caused the neck pickup to drop all signal unless the shaft was pulled upwards to make contact with the resistive material in the potentiometer.

The repair was going to be filmed, but the control plate was so difficult to remove from the cavity and reinstall to the cavity that I scrapped the video after filming a full half hour of struggle. The way these are built, there is an aluminum plate that all of the controls are mounted to underneath the face of the guitar.

To remove the one potentiometer, all four knobs must be removed, the nuts holding them to the face of the guitar must be removed, the nut for the pickup selector switch must be removed, and the output jack must be removed. The back plate then comes off. Next, all of the controls must be removed while attached to the internal aluminum plate, since there is a second nut on the shafts of the potentiometers holding them to the plate. The difficulty is that there is not quite enough room in the cavity to manipulate the control plate well enough to remove it easily. The access hole is also smaller than the control plate is. There is one very specific angle that it can be removed at, and manipulating it into that position is extremely difficult to do without damaging the guitar or the controls. Once the plate was out, it was a simple matter to remove the broken potentiometer and replace it. The tone potentiometers on this guitar are 500k ohms, and I happened to have a 500k CTS potentiometer in my parts bin. Once it was soldered into the circuit, I reinstalled the plate into the guitar (which was just as difficult as removing it), reinstalled the jack, and tested the output by tapping a screwdriver to the pickup. This makes an audible click when hooked up to an amplifier, which verified that the pickup was once again working. I finished the reassembly and resumed filming to do the neck and fret cleaning.

Since the filming for this video, I have played the guitar quite a bit and used it live and I absolutely love it. The lipsticks sound like nothing else I have in my collection, yet are also versatile enough that they can sound good in just about any genre, as I demonstrate at the end of the video.

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