Easy Danelectro Pickup Height Adjustment Mod

Taking a bit of a break from the drill press project on this post.

You may recall my yellow Danelectro DC-2 I wrote about a while back. On thing that has been bugging me on that guitar is the fact that with neck shimmed, the pickups can't be adjusted very high up. Actually, even a stock Dano has this issue.

So I'm going to address the problem. It's a simple solution I put into place.

We'll need to pop the pickups out of the body, so it's necessary to loosen or remove the strings. I was (still) fussing with the shim height on mine, so I had loosened the strings to take the neck off (again, good thing I put those screw inserts on!).

The pickups actually can be adjusted up pretty high in the guitar's stock form.

The problem is that there is no spring to hold them up. so they fall down, and the adjustment screws fall down and stick out the back as you see here.

Ironically, vintage/original Danos don't have this issue. There was a piece of bent steel bolted to the center of the pickup mount which put tension the the mount and held the pickup up.

There is a means in place for the pickup to be pushed up on the reissue guitars, but as we'll see in a minute, the height is limited.

Remove the adjustment screws from the back, and the pickup can be pulled up from the guitar.

You can see the 'spring' the reissues use to hold the pickup up - it's a piece of foam rubber. The problem is the rubber isn't tall enough to raise the pickup up really close to the strings.

I suppose one could add another piece of rubber on top of this, but I simply decided to go with the traditional way of putting tension on the adjustment screws.

I just slipped a spring over the adjustment screw(s). Get a box of them at your local hardware store; you'll find a few that are perfect.

This is the sort of mount you'll see on Gibsons, Fenders, Gretsches, you name it. You could also use rubber tubing which you'll see on some Telecaster bridge pickups. Pretty much anything in that vein will work.

Run the screw into the body, then slip the spring down over it. I put a piece of masking tape over the screw on the backside (ha ha) of the guitar to hold it in place.

Then remount the pickup. You should be able to see at least one of the screw holes in the pickup bracket enough to get it lined up. Lining up the screws is probably the hardest part of this job...and it's not that hard.

Now you'll be able to adjust the pickups way up as you can see here. (This isn't where I left them, it's just to show how far you can jack 'em up).

This is a really easy mod that will let you dial in the pickup height for best tone and volume.

I don't know why the reissues won't adjust up this high, but it's an easy fix.