This guitar started off as a partscaster I bought from the long gone "Hot Lixx Music" in downtown Everett WA in the fall of 2005. The guitar was bought originally as a weekend project (of very many) during my 20's with plans to just build it as a (cheaper) clone of my 1985 Kramer Focus 3000.

Basically what I got was an empty Kramer ST300 body with a Focus 6000 neck on it (off a white Focus 6000), the neck had a LOT of damage and a lot of screw holes on heel that I've had to fill up. There were also various cracks through the headstock as well, and signs it had string trees screwed into it - which the Japanese ESP Built FOCUS Kramers did not have (they had the Floyd Rose German Original bar string guide just like the American mainline Kramers). Of course the body came with no neckplate, but uses the same shape as my other Kramer STriker - a black 100ST that's been decoupaged by the missus.

The body itself came off a candy-apple-red 1986 or later Kramer 300ST - which was the CHinese built (by Samick corp, who also built for Hondo and Charvel (Charvette) et al), plywood bodied version of the Focus 3000. While the Striker series LOOKS idential to the wide-bass-cut side Kramer strat-type bodies, it's actually a very different footprint and one challenge I hit early on, was getting a regular strat-type pickguard to fit it correctly.

Currently as it sits, the purple paint has flaked off a few spots it did not cure right over the gold paint that it had before (she did it while I was at work so it got sanded but hey, it was her first refinish). That said, she did get it really even and it looks good so I MIGHT keep it this color. Problem is, I have too many guitars and I really like the look of the lavendar. But I'm more sentimental and partial to my vintage 1985 Kramer that has the Sustainiac in it than I am to this one.

I did the headstock, which turned out nice, however, the previous owner did so many other colors of paint the paint seeped into the cracks for the headstock and I decided to try my hand at painting the back of the neck black, and masking off the fretboard edges to make sure that the markers and edges of the rosewood board were still visible.....however...that does not look that great...so I might be taking another tact at it. The black was to hide the massive amounts of drill and fill I had to do the neck to repair the screw holes as it had been on SEVERAL Bodies. I think my next plan MIGHT be to do something similiar to what Odyssey guitars does with their neck joints - and put a set of metal inserts in there, and refill with some Maple scrap from the other builds to disguise the damage and prevent it from ever happening again.

So this is where we sit, to have a fully functioning guitar, we just need a Floyd Rose locking tremolo, tuners, and an output jack plate. I have a chrome one, but I cannot decide on paint or hardware yet. See below.

Above we have five different color options I'm playing with based on the colors I have in my garage. First, I can stay lavendar, buy some more lavendar paint, finish the paintjob, clean up any damage with wet sanding, then clearcoat. This might be the easiest process so is most likely what I'm going with. The blue or black are other colors I have excess of after rebuilding/repainting some guitars. I know black would sell the fastest, but blue is a cool color as well. White would be anti-mold paint of all things, weird choice, but it'd be really easy to get good coverage.

Basically, I'm doing a "Budget" version of my typical "Fat STrat" type wiring. The Series Link will be tapped into with a single wire - as I susually do, and that goes to a spst switch to coil split the bridge humbucker in the stereotypical fashion, like an old Kramer Focus 3000 would have. Then the neck pickup can be enabled in ANY position allowing for ALL on or neck+bridge as well as the typical 5 settings you get with stratocaster wiring. Paired with the coil tap, this gives a lot of control. I'm not doing my typical Stratocaster tone-knob jumper though for the bridge pickup because we don't need it. I'm also adding a Treble bypass cap to the master volume. The idea here, is to make a nice, inexpensive, BUDGET guitar that plays and sounds good. I'm going to try and keep this one under $300 when I sell it.

Proposed Switching Options

To start, I finally fixed that goddamn broken headstock for good now. This was actually a few days before. The Kramer Focus headstocks of this variety are kind of prone to cracks because they are smaller and there's not as much "mass" there to hold things together. They are pretty, and ahead of their time, but they are not necessarily the strongest headstocks on the planet - not "Les Paul weak", but you don't want to go slamming what I call the "Stinger" headstock around - I already broke my focus 3000 at school in high school that way. I used Titebond II, Maple toothpicks, and C.A. Glue (shitty dollar store C.A. glue but it works great). The repairs are a bit visible, but I'm not so sure that's going to matter much now. Also, the back was sanded back down to the bare wood, and I'm using water-based clearcoat (Brush-on) on the back of the neck. I clamped it with one of my clamps and let it set for about 2-3 days and used the C.A. Glue to fill any gaps or cracks.

Then I decided to use up the rest of the Rustoleum paint from the H804. I had one can of Gloss Navy Blue, and one can of Gloss Royal Blue. I used the Navy Blue First, then the royal blue, and it's turning out even nicer than my wife's Lavendar job, to thie point I think it will polish out and look good one the paint finishes flashing off. So now I have 2 royal blue guitars.....maybe I should "burst" the other one, or repaint that one the Robin's Egg Blue color....or maybe Pac-Man Yellow....I dunno, it might be time to play with Halo's guitar builder again to see what colors to use. I might need to order some more black (or even some white) haircell plastic anyway.

But yeah, we can't call it the "Purple Kramer" anymore, now it's blue. In between coats, I did the electronics - so now that's going to be plug & play.

So the pickguard I bought for this was a cheap, chinese, prewired, HSS Pickguard. No frills, just basic regular 5-way Strat wiring. So I decided to bump it up a little. In the neck we have a 6.0K Single coil, middle is 5.91K, the bridge is 10.88K Humbucker - 2-conductor of course. But while poking around in there, I found the Series link on the humbucker EASILY accessible and put together with decent wire.....so you can guess what I did! Added a Yellow wire to it, and ran that to a SPST toggle for the "Coil Split" - coil split is 5.91K.

The second piece is the "Elliot Easton" mod as I call it. Because I basically lifted it from when EE went on tour with The Cars in 1980. He had a couple or a few Stratocasters with a 2-position switch wired up to get the Telecaster options so he did not need ot take a Tele on tour (Panorama was a Stratocaster heavy album) - so I did that to this. So a second SPST switch was wired in near the tone controls to allow for positions 4 and 5 to grant all three pickups, or neck+bridge if the switch is on by adding in the neck pickup. THis is also kinda' how my Memphis and DiMarzio strats are wired up.

With the wiring done, I used the multimeter to test and make sure everything is there, and as a cherry on top, a 471 (470pf) capacitor was added for Treble Bypass on the master volume knob. If not already obvious here, I'm basically adapting the pickguard to be more like an O.G. late eighties Kramer Striker/Focus 3000, but with some special sauce with that additional switch. TBH, the red Focus 3000 might have gotten this setup had I actually learned how a 5-way selector worked back in 1996 - but hey, no decent internet sites existed for guitar electronics at the time, so I had to struggle. Nobody really knew how those wafer switches worked, they just knew if they copied Fender's wiring diagrams - written in abstract by Seymour Duncan usually - it would work as a Strat or Tele usually worked. Fun stuff.

The neck was brought back in first, the day being in the seventies, low humidity, and having the midday sun straignt down on my garage doorstep meant the body was drying and flashing off really freakin' fast. I could literally touch and lift it without getting paint on my fingers! Soon the cracks and other issues were fully covered, and I was becoming quite happy with the results. I used a razor blade and some sandpaper to clean up the edges of the neck and headstock and make it look nice. I also had to clean off gunk because I had to use packing tape for masking tape, worked really well. I also used the razor blade to clean up the rosewood between the frets.

The body sat on it's support screws lazy susan style drying some more in between coats of the lighter "Royal Blue" color.

The neck was later re-attached to the body with one neck screw I had laying around now to dry for about 48-156 hours (basically put, at least a few days). One mistake I see a lot on home rattle-can guitar paintjobs is that the eager musician putting the thing together starts to screw stuff to the body at the first sign of "dryness" - this is a very bad idea, because it "Glues" the components to the guitar - think of the paint as a weak, slow acting adhesive. Anyone whose dug through a Yuban coffee can full of guitar parts in the back tombs of a local guitar shop has seen this calamity all over the place - bottoms of pickguards with 4-5 colors of paint stuck to them, wannabe-Van-Halen ex-bodies with the ghost of a home-made disaster embosed into the finish! Funky stuff. My attitude that I've learned, going forward since some previous projects with paint, is if you think it's dry, think again, and if you think it's dry again - then think again....the rattle-can LIES! Probably because it's assuming you're rattling some small object in thin coats that won't matter so much in the optimum environment - like dad's old rusty garden hoe. But an electric guitar needs a TON of paint to go over it. Because during painting, essentially what you're doing, is covering it in a coat of synthetic plastic, and then wiping off the excess plastic (buffing and wet sanding) to remove any "coarseness" in the finish to make it look all shiny and glossy like a brand new car in the end. This is why "thinskin" finishes are so expensive, you really need to have your science and expert understanding of using finishing products on point when you plan to do 2 coats of nitrocellulose and then carefully buff it to make it look and age like a 1960's era guitar. But this is polyurethane....that's what all rattle cans are. So it's plastic. And those days it sits drying, it flashes off INTO a HARD plastic, which then you can run over with a buffer and make it look like you had the thing injection molded from a high quality mold.

And so here's were we begin with why my intro is what is is to this section. So I go upstairs to go BBQ some dinner and talk to the wife...and uh....well, we talk about selling the guitar for a bit, and she does not want me buying cases for it and whatever. Then to add to it, she sees the picture and say "now I don't want to get rid of it, why can't you make ugly guitars we don't want to keep!?!?" - the nutty thing is I was TRYING not to make a keeper here, by using paint we already had on hand, and leftover parts, and lo and behold, now she wants to keep this one too. I'm more than fine with it, but christ, I've got one hell of a guitar collection in my life. One of the most difficult things for me is that I can't make anything that ever sounded bad, played bad enough to not be fixable, or looked bad enough I did not like it. Actually, the only guitars I've sold or given away - were ones that were made in factories. Go figure.

The photo that really told the tale, was THIS one - me holding the pickguard up to the drying body as sort of a "mockup" to see what hte finished guitar will look like a little bit and uh....well...yeah, it looks DAAAAMN good. I'm kind of getting sort of some cool "Dragon Quest III at night" vibes from the looks of the whiteish maple over the blue paintjob with the pearloid pickguard. Anyway, the next thing is let the paint dry, polish the body, then comes the hard part...I need the following left on this guitar to finish building it...

• 1 1/4" Phono Output Jack
• Chrome Floyd Rose Locking Trem, Preferrably a FRII type
• 2 Pivot Posts with bushings for the FLoyd ROse
• 2 Tremolo Springs
• Black Pearloid Back Cover
• *And a O.G. Floyd ROse R2 Locking nut that is attached THROUGH the neck

This seems simple enough.....but it's actually tough. First off, I would be using one of those cheap, Chinese import floyds on this, it's not a Focus or better. Problem is, most of the typical $25-50 Import Floyd Rose trems you find now, are modeled after an Ibanez Product, and even when they are not, they come with the newer "screw-into the top" style Locking Nuts that everyone uses now. Anyone ever noticed how when they go to Guitar Center or wherever, almost no new Floyd Rose guitars come with two hex bolts in the back of the neck under the nut? This makes working on Kramers in 2024 a real pain in the rear because finding a through-neck Floyd nut means sourcing an actual O.G. Floyd Rose part....so I'm going to have my work cutout for me and a little more expensive. I'm thinking what I'll do is use an OFR posts and locking nut and string guide, and then use a licenced FRII style Floyd. Because christ, have you seen what an old Floyd Rose II costs!?!? $167-ish on e-bay. Why? Nobody liked them, but apparently, they have some desirability now.

I've got some money coming in soon, so some of that will be budgeted to getting this one put together the rest of the way. What needs done is Kramer Logo (block Logo), Bridge (Floyd Rose II style), locking nut, and tuners. I'm thinking I'll pull a quality vibrato from E-bay, get the pivot posts from Floyd Rose (ones that look like the old school Kramer wood-screw type but with sleeves - ie flathead), and then an R2 through-neck locking nut, and some cheap Sealed gear machine heads, I may even go to *gasp* guitar center for those (the ones on the H804 out of the shot looks great). Basically, pick-n-pull style build. Remember, the goal here is to make a quality player while using up excess parts.

The headstock logo will be a Kramer block-logo in Gold, and that's it. After all ,the body and neck are the only "Kramer" parts of the guitar (the chassis basically), but the neck is a Focus 6000, and the body is a Striker 300ST (>1987 I found out recently, explaining why it's been so bloody hard to find any other bodies routed like this one). We'll see if I keep it. I also need to get an output jack for it so I can wire it up.

Floyd Rose has several Locking Nuts on a chart of theirs going from R1 through R10. The two most common are R2 (which is what all of my guitars use), and R3 (Gibson Guitars). This is something I'll expand on more in the "Floyd Rose" Tech section, but basically, these came with the R3 gibson style Locking Nut, which is made to fit a wider neck with a deeper nut mounting shelf (Basically, the default one for most Locking Nuts). One great thing to note though, is that the friggin locking nuts Floyd still makes can both be screwed in from the top OR mounted through the back like an old Kramer guitar like this would have. So the R3 fit on there fine - it's just too tall and too wide for the neck. I will keep it and see if it fits the Explorer Build I'm doing.....might be able to save a few bucks and install a Floyd Special on that one as well - maybe in Black. Though I think that too may be R2 since it's a 24 fret 25.5" scale neck.

I had to re-drill the sleeve holes for the trem itself, and drill longer holes for the tremolo claw (which uses screws about 2" Long) - but once I did, the guitar went together very smoothly and the tremolo action is VERY smooth. Also, the bar string guide is on the guitar too....so we're good to go. Next is logo and tuners, and maybe some paint touch-ups. It sits pretty high, so it's going to be a "Floating" setup like my other Kramer. I'm toying with the aluminum "reinforcement plate" Idea I used on my other Kramer as well.

Here's a little bit of a struggle for me with local brick & mortar stores, and what explains WHY we no longer visit those places very much.....

So I went to the local Guitar Center to see if they had another set of those brand new tuners in stock, and they did not. They only had Fender Locking tuners for $100. Now, this guitar has a Floyd Rose special - so it has a Locking Nut, Locking Saddles - there's no damn reason for a Floyd Rose double-locking tremolo equipped guitar to have locking tuners, all you're doing is generating the kind of redaundancy that's absolutley un-necessary. And I'm not paying $100 for Fenders when I can buy a new set of Gotohs or Klusons online for far far less - like half that.

So I went to my *new* local shop - Music Fuse - this place is a little local shop that I've been to about twice, once for nut/bridge blanks for a Harmony classical guitar I got from a co-worker, and the other time to replace the high E on my acoustic when I put Gotoh Pearl key tuners on it after one got busted. While there, we pieced together a set of sealed-gear machine heads to the tune of $10 - though I had one little problem - no "grommets" that go around the bolt-mounts. Well...this turned out pretty good TBH....

I went to Home Depot and for about $8 got a bunch of hardware for this and the other rebuild (Warlock). what I bought was a set of 1/4" Washers in Brass. now, these would not fit as/is, and I knew it, but I have one thing most punk-rock DIY type guitar techs do - metal-working skills (and a sharp Christmas Tree Bit for my Drill) - so I put the washers in my ancient 1970's chinese pliars sideways, and drilled the hole one notch wider, and they fit perfectly, and it fits the silver/gold theme of the rest of the build. So there's a new luthiery trick up my sleeve.

Then it was time to wire up the ground and output jack. Of course, I'll spare you the boring details on that one. Jack is a little tight though, so I might do some custom milling later to fix some fitment.

Then came time to string it up. Also boring and pretty straightforward. I restring my Floyds this way usually...first, I remove all of the locking nut clamps, then I turn the machine heads so that the holes are straight to the string's string path, run the strings through the holes in reverse, up and over the nut. While doing setup first time on a Floyd build, I make sure the locking nut string guide (if equipped) is pulling the strings FLAT against the locking nut all the way across - they should go over in a mild arc. This makes sure it does not go flat or sharp when you clamp the nut down. Then I run the string to the saddles, open the clamp, clamp it in - should be about 1/4" of the string that goes into the saddle - clamp tight, then wrap, 2-3 wraps for the low E and A, 3-5 wraps for the D, 5-8 wraps for the G, 8-11 wraps for the B, and the high E I use all but about an inch of string. When "testing/intonating" on a new build, I keep the extra string sticking out, because if I a break one, or the clamp fails to hold (like the first time this time) while making electronics tweaks, I can let a little more string out for testing purposes.

Next was intonation, just about every string needed roughly 1/16" or less of saddle movement back toward the bottom of the guitar - got it dead on. Took me about fifteen minutes, I just use a hex wrench and my fingers, and loosen the string enough using the machine heads to move the saddle far enough back. I start with it roughed out like this - Low E firthest back hole, A and D on the 2nd hole, G on the 2nd hole, and B and E on the frontmost hole (closest to bridge pickup). I usually pull the A and B strings back by another 1/32nd of an inch - then go from there.

Once the intonation was perfect I realized how resonant this one is, VERY resonant, with VERY long sustain. That's when I found the electronics were not quite right. See - I found a problem in switching...the neck pickup was out of phase with the middle pickup, and thusly out of phase with the bridge, so n+m sounded thin and hollow, also, n+b ALSO sounded thin and hollow.

So I took the pickguard off and swapped the leads on the neck pickup. That fixed it, but I notice the guitar is still VERY microphonic, and has a 60 cycle hum I can't seem to get rid of. Seems what might be wrong is the neck pickup was wired properly, and the bridge and middle were wired in backwards. I noticed all of the hot wires now were black - so I plan to swap those around eventually....I will do that when I wax pot the pickups though, which is also in the plans. I get all my guitars "stage ready".

Once back together, I noticed it's able to do the whole "Brad Gillis" trem flutter/gargle thing...really well. So I think that's going to be this guitar's intended purpose. After all the tweakery, which went on till 8pm, I ordered an old-style Silver Kramer headstock logo, and the backplate for the trem cavity. I should have those by the weekend, and we can button this project up.

First is that they got a dip in the parrafin wax bath. I use one of those Revlon things people dip their hands into to make them smooth and creamy or whatever.....not me though....now, my PICKUPS get a bath (and a deep cleaning as well...hehe, cleaning the wax off the outside removes a lot of dirt and makes them look brand new). Both single coils and the humbucker were bubbling a good bit at first, but not as much as usual, which let me know that whoever made this prewired assembly DOES do SOME Wax potting, but not a very good job. When I'm done, the guitar could be run through a Mesa on the Lead channel on 12 and not squeal within a foot of the amp. This meant I had to desolder all of the pickups.

Putting the pickups back in, I had to replace the toggle for the coil split because the lugs melted off. The humbucker is wired in with a white lead wire, so I decided to base the rest of the guitar's wiring off that. It's oddly similiar to my Memphis 302HB in that way (I reversed the polarity of the neck and middle pickups to match the crazy bridge humbucker for proper in-phase operation). The black leads for both single coils were used as the hot. That's something I noticed working on this pickguard, all of the hot leads are black - which clued me in on why this thing was so noisy and squealy......

I took a look at the output jack wires, and I remembered I'd wired it red=hot black=ground - well, it turns out, RED goes to the pot casing and BLACK was going to the ouput lug on the volume pot....oops....my bad. So I reinstalled the pickguard, and reinstalled the tremolo, put the guitar back together, and then took off the input jack and reversed the wires.

Bringing the guitar upstairs, I tested it for just a few minutes, now everything is perfect, it's very quiet, very loud, the wax potting put some low-end back into the signal it sounds like, and the guitar in general, sounds really really good. So next coming up will be some recordings and testing.

I bought the Headstock logo from someone in Canada and honestly, it turned out not to be a waterslide, but a CRICUT label. Now, I've been looking at cricut stuff at the hobby shop for quite awhile now, and maybe, this is what I'll do for headstock logos for awhile on my own. Since you can buy big sheets of the stuff. It looks really good with this guitar and I had to line up all the letters on my own, but it looks really good. As for why I went for the < 1984 Kramer logo, was to make sure people are aware this is a parts mutt Kramer and not a full-blown Kramer guitar from the factory. The chassis is 100% Kramer (Striker 300ST body and a Focus 6000 neck), but the electronics, tremolo, and tuners are all a mix of inexpensive Chinese parts (fitting for a striker), but upgraded to a Japanese level build quality (by me).

Tonally, it sounds a lot like my old Focus 3000 when it was stock. Which is little surprise because the electronics are pretty similar to a stock Focus 3000 or Striker 300ST, except the pickups are chinese, but in the ballpark (about 5.91K in the neck and middle position, and a 10.5K Ohm bridge pickup - which are pretty darned close to the original Seymour Duncan "JAM" Pickups they put in the Focus guitars in the 80's), and there's an additional switch to get all three pickups or neck+bridge from the bridge position setting like I like - basically my version of Stratocaster style wiring. I was tempted to try one of those new FreeWay 10-way switches on this, but I decided budget was in best interest.

However, where this Kramer REALLY shines is the Floyd Rose Special. The extremely tight mounting of the vibrato (aided by baking soda and superglue into the wood - making it really hardcore mounted to the body), plus a flawless installation, and floating setup means I could go REALLY crazy with this one. It does all that wacky Brad-Gillis style trem-flutter stuff really well, so I think some Night Ranger covers on this thing are in order. Also, seems I might need to invite this one into some "rave/EDM/dance" tracks on BandLab as well because it seems to have that "club bass" sound throught the bridge pickup when using highly compressed distortion settings by fluttering the whammy bar...which is AWESOME. Maybe a full guitar EDM/Dance/Rave track that's 75% Electric Guitar or more is in order, lol.

While the original intent was to sell, my wife has claimed this one as hers. She was a bit upset with the H802 build I did, felt I did not do my best on that one...so that one is being redone eventually (which is fine, I might reuse the Memphis neck on it for a Flying V inspired prototype I'm working on right now). I'm holding off on starting that one for awhile though since I like it and plan to use it so I consider it a full exchange.