Guitar Screw Hole Fills on Daddy-O Yellow Danelectro DC-2

You may recall I mentioned 2 screw holes on the Daddy-O Yellow DC-2 where a synth pickup had been installed by a previous owner. Call me crazy, but I wanted to take a stab at filling the holes. I considered just putting a couple of screws in the holes, thus making it appear they belonged there, but nah, what fun would that be?

I used Stew-Mac thin CA to fill the holes.

I taped off the area around the holes to try and prevent CA from getting on the finish. I probably should have mixed the CA with sawdust to make a thicker mix of sorts - it took about 4 passes to fill the holes all the way up to the top with just thin CA alone.

But it (eventually) did work.

I realized I was going to need to scrape and sand the holes so I decided to take the pickguard off to make some more room to work.

Not to mention that I'm going to do some electronic mods and attempt to make a different pickguard. So it would have to come off sooner or later.

The knobs for the famous Danelectro concentric tone and volume controls pull right off.

Is it just me or does it seem unusual that a company that was trying to save production costs would use a more expensive component such as concentric pots rather than standard ones?

With the knobs off, we can undo the nuts for the selectror switch and the pots themselves.

Had to throw in this shot of the mismatched pickguard screws. Which one do you think is not original? Sometimes you find goofy stuff like this on instruments.

I'll remedy this when I put it back together.

There's some double-stick tape under the pickguard near the front pickup. I carefully pried up the guard using my famous screwdriver, Destructo.

Well, I was careful, but the thin masonite (!) pickguard still cracked a bit on the bottom - see the green arrow. It doesn't go though to the top side fortunately, so it still looks fine. But I did repair it anyway.

Some Titebond, two cauls and a big spring clamp and the crack was fixed. Not that I'm planning on reusing the pickguard.

Here's what the controls look like. Mounted to a panel, which is a nice touch. You can see I put the mounting nuts back on the switch, pots, and jack so I don't lose them.

The bottom of the control panel. I think the first numbers on that sticker are a date code - November 1998. I'd think.

Maybe the whole thing is a serial number.

I took a razor blade to the CA fills to level them. Note how I have Scotch tape wrapped around the ends - just exposing a small bit of blade in the middle to control how much area can be scraped.

Cut some narrow strips of sandpaper - 120, 220 and 320 grits - to sand the fills.

You can hold a finger down on the paper over the area you're working on, and pull the paper through with your other hand. If you're careful, you pretty much just sand a small spot.

With the spots levelled to the surface of the guitar, I feathered the area around the fills with 400 up to about 8000 grit paper.

Then polished the repairs with my small orbital machine and medium compound.

Looks shiny now, but of course it needs to be touched up. I decided to polish the whole area first since I thought I might be using acrylic paint which doesn't polish well.

If this was on an acoustic instrument and it was a shallow fill, the wood would show, you'd be done, and the repair would be almost invisible. But since these were screw holes and the body is painted a solid color, just filling and levelling them was not enough.

Long story short on how I touched them up.

First I tried yellow water-base acrylic craft paint mixed with white and a touch of green to try and match the color. I wasn't happy with the color match, so I took it off, and started with a medium yellow enamel as a base. That's what you see here.

Then I used a mix of white and yellow acrylic on top of the yellow enamel to get as close as I could. I actually searched the interwebs to find if the "Daddy-O Yellow" shade had a standard value in somebody's paint code, but it apparently does not.

It took me numerous attempts (as in dozens...), but I finally got as close as I could. It's hard to see the repairs in this shot, I think.

From six feet away you can't tell. From a couple feet, it's not bad. Not perfect, but far better than the ugly holes I started with. (Which is why I really refrain from drilling holes in places where they may cause a repair headache later...but I digress).

If you're right on top of the guitar, you can see the touchups, but they're not awful. And they're as close as I can get.

Now let's do some upgrades!