Ferdinand | soldguitars

1983 Kramer Pacer Carrera

"Ferdinand"

#B9431

This one took me by surprise a little. I have an eBay "watch" on Kramer stuff ... because ... well you never know what you might see, and this one popped up for sale a 10 minute drive from me. It turned out that the seller was/is an acquaintance of mine (a big Kramer collector) and that I've bought a few guitars from him in the past ("Paris", "Alice" and ... maybe another ... I'm not sure). Anyway, his gear is tremendous, and he's amassed shit-tonnes of rare stuff, graphics, holoflashes, unique one-off builds, as well as a few "holy grail" non-tilt banana headstock Barettas. Awesome.

The story was that he was trying to shed pretty much everything that wasn't a Baretta in order to buy more Barettas. Which works fine for me, as those being sold are generally interesting, old, original guitars with unquestionable pedigree. Like this one.

This one is probably mid-1983, so is from the heyday of Kramer's reign. Although Mr Van Halen (Kramer's poster-boy back then) popularised really simple (one pickup, one volume control) layouts, there was still an obvious market for guitars with a little more maturity ... ones that you could get more than a single rock tone from. The Pacer was Kramer's two-humbucker rocky offering, and most were Floyded ... thankfully. The alternative was the "Rockinger" abomination (a dreadful trem in my experience). Of course, Kramer had an exclusivity deal with Floyd back in those early days, which limited the use of Floyds by other companies ... if you wanted a Floyd on a Charvel (for instance) back then, you had to buy the Floyd yourself and take it to Charvel. I digress.

Despite the "Made in USA" designation, the bodies and necks for Kramers of this era were made by ESP in Japan ... which is absolutely fine by me, those boys make fantastic gear. Pretty much everything else was made by Schaller in Germany ... tuners, pickups, electronics, and the Floyd and lock-nut of course. The result is a hell of a nicely-playing guitar, which sounds bloody glorious.

The neck is a comfortable 'C', not too skinny, with medium frets and decent build quality ... no nasty gaps, paint flaws or shitty fret-ends. The guitar has held up pretty well to over 30 years of play, with a smattering of dings and dents (whatever ...) and the teensiest amount of fret-wear, nowhere near enough to justify the effort of a fret-dress. So, this is a "Carerra", which is Kramer-talk for "none more black". That includes the mightily dark rosewood board (definitely not ebony), which appears not to be stained to make it dark, but is just great quality, near-black, rosewood. Which is awesome. What else. The Floyd looks to be all original, with some wear to the upper surfaces (where your right hand would rest when palm-muting) and an old-school screw-in arm, which works well and has none of the sloppiness that you get with many cheaper Floyds. So we're all good.

Interestingly, the 1983 Kramer catalogue (see below) shows this exact model. The neck plate is the correct "period" stamped style, and the serial ties it in to 1983 and shows its "American" manufacture (read "it was screwed together there"). The Kramer Serial Register around this time is interesting in that there seems to have been another of these made (the exact same guitar) just three serial numbers away, so maybe the factory made "batches" of the same guitar, a couple (or a few) at a time, before moving to a different model. Certainly, from the guitars listed on the Register, it looks like they just rucked up to work and built what the hell they wanted ... there are no obvious patterns to how guitars were made. Happy days.

EDIT - Traded against my Kramer Ripley, "Steve". No disrespect intended towards Ferdinand, by I've ALWAYS wanted a proper Ripley, so it HAD to go.