Kramer Focus 1000 Project

Sometimes, Guitar Center can have some screaming deals. A little over a year ago, I walked into my local Guitar Center without the intent of actually buying anything. However, as I perused past the used section, I noticed an interesting, iridescent blue Kramer on the wall, priced at a mere $175. With such a low price, I naturally thought that it was just some poorly-built, budget model at first. I pulled it off the wall to get a closer look.

After a few moments of glancing over the guitar and test driving it in the amp room, I realized that it was no junk guitar. This Kramer had a nice sounding alder body, a rosewood fretboard, a three humbucker configuration (with three mini toggle switches), and a real Floyd Rose (not one of the often-inferior licensed ones). In fact, a new Floyd Rose would have cost more than the price of the guitar itself. This fact alone made it worth buying the guitar. I had to have it.

When I brought it home, I logged onto the Vintage Kramer website to learn more about my new guitar. The site is home to some very informative articles, as well as a catalog database for several years. Anyways, the guitar's truss rod cover said "F1000," which I learned stood for Focus 1000. The Focus series were the Japanese-made equivalents of the USA Kramers. Specifically, the Focus 1000 is supposed to be the Japanese Kramer Baretta (like Eddie Van Halen used to play in the mid-80s). Anyone who has played Japanese instruments knows that their quality often equals that of American-made instruments. The F1000 is no exception.

However, after looking through several catalogs in the catalog database, I couldn't find an F1000 model with three humbuckers and three mini toggle switches. They all had just one humbucker with no switch. So I signed up on the Kramer Forum to ask the experts for help. It turns out that the previous owner had routed the F1000 for two extra humbuckers and had installed three mini toggle switches to control them. With that info, I dated this guitar to be a 1988 model with the "Flip Flop Blue" finish.

For a while, I played the guitar in this configuration. The bridge pickup was an old PJ Marx rail model (similar to the one used by Vivan Campbell), and the neck pickup was a really old DiMarzio Super Distortion. I went ahead and removed the middle "Duncan Designed" pickup (which I never used), leaving a rather large cavity in the center. At the time, I thought this was somewhat cool, as it has that unfinished EVH "Frankenstrat" vibe going on. After a while though, my bridge pickup died, so I bought a Seymour Duncan JB as a replacement. After installing the JB, I noticed that the guitar was buzzing/humming very badly when plugged in. I finally pinned the problem to the lack of shielding within the guitar's electronics cavity. So I ordered a shielding kit from Guitar Electronics, which contains a sheet of adhesive-backed copper tape and some shielded wire. Installation was a breeze: you simply stick the foil around the cavity and solder it to ground (in this case, the back of the volume potentiometer). Problem solved.

I continued to play with this setup for months, but eventually, I grew tired of the cumbersome switching system, as well as the gaping hole in the middle of my guitar. Furthermore, the Super Distortion (normally a bridge pickup) was a tad too hot for the neck position. The guitar was back on the workbench again.

While it was under repair, I decided to go ahead and give it my usual Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil and Gunstock Wax finish treatment for the back of the neck (see Ibanez RG550 Restoration Project post below). Next, I replaced the neck pickup with a Seymour Duncan '59 Neck model. Then, finding no use for them, I removed the three mini toggle switches. The top two I replaced with some anchored screws to fill the holes. The bottom hole I used to install a Switchcraft three-way toggle switch. I even added the Les Paul "poker" chip to indicate the treble and rhythm pickups. This was a unique touch that I thought would add to the personality of the guitar. Finally, to cover that big hole, I cut out a section of a black, plastic Office Depot trashcan (the material is almost identical to the guitar's backplate material) and screwed it into where the old pickup ring was. This added more of finished look to the guitar.

I then treated the dried out board to some Formby's lemon oil and polished the frets with my Micro Mesh pads. Finally, I strung the guitar up with some D'Addario 10s, tuned it to Eb (for the 80s metal), intonated it, and polished it. And it's ready to go!



And here's a video I did to demo the beast. Here, I'm running straight into my Splawn Quick Rod (on Gear 2, OD2) and into the Splawn 4x12 (Big Block speakers). Cable into the amp is a Lava ELC. Speaker cable is a Kimber 4VS.