About a month ago, a close friend of mine asked me if I'd be able to take a look at their Kramer guitar. I agreed to take a look at it and do my best to get it playing correctly. A few weeks went by before the guitar actually showed up due to scheduling conflicts.
When I opened the case of the guitar, most of the hardware was missing. But I could tell this project was going to be fun and special. The guitar was a 1987 Kramer Baretta with factory Dennis Kline art. The particular art is the lips as seen on the Vintage Kramer website. It is just absolutely tacky and represents everything 80's.
The body and neck are supposedly of an era where ESP was making them. The tuners (Schaller M6!) were all there and in tact.
However, that is where the good news ended, the nut locking pads were all missing. The saddle inserts and locking screws were also long gone. The saddles themselves were also completely locked up from rust.
The stock Seymour Duncan JB had been replaced with a DiMarzio of some nature (nothing against DiMarzio, they make a fine pickup as well).
But worse than all of this the bridge system was clearly missing parts. In fact, it was missing all but the tremolo block and plate for the Floyd Rose Tremsetter. Parts for this system are basically not available unless you are willing to search ebay forever.
My mission was to make the guitar a player. If it could be done with original parts, great, and if not, so be it. The other restriction was that it had to be done for cheap.
That ruled out the original tremsetter system. To be honest, it looked unnecessarily complicated. Especially when you look at modern Trem Stopper units.
Additionally, the guitar was banged up quite a bit. So even if it had all of the original parts, it still would never be a museum quality restoration.
With all of this in mind, I set forth to begin replacing parts and making the guitar playable.
My good friend Adam Reiver with FU-Tone provided a lot of guidance in what was necessary to get this guitar running again.
A lot of the parts were just common parts but it was a matter of finding which ones fit correctly. For example, I learned that Floyd Rose saddle inserts come in multiple sizes and the only difference seems to be how wide they are. This of course makes all of the difference as to whether or not they will fit in the saddle.
Before I could really worry about the inserts though, he showed me how to take apart the saddles so that I could clean them and get them freely moving again. Sure buying a new set would have been easier, but sticking with the economical theme of this guitar, I took a hammer a punch (again thank you Adam for your guidance on this!) and knocked out the pin holding the saddle together. One important detail is that one end of the pin is splined. You want to knock it out so that the splined end comes out first and when reassembling, the splined end should go in last and back into the same end where it came out of (you can see the grooves that the spline created in the saddle).
I cleaned each of the saddles with some steel wool or scotch bright. Some were worse than others. All of the pins required cleaning as well. I made sure to put a little bit of machine oil in the saddles so this will never happen again. It wasn't difficult but it was just time consuming enough that I don't want to have to do it again any time soon.
We outright replaced the block on the bridge with a 37mm brass block. It must be 2 or 3 times the size of the original Floyd Rose block.
Another important change to the bridge was replacing the screw in arm to an arm that tightens with a collar. The newer collared arm socket is a bit larger than the old screw in socket. This required the bridge plate to be drilled out.
My Harbor Freight drill press was not really man enough for this job. They really don't make things like they used to. I used some Harbor Freight step drill bits. The titanium nitride coating literally stripped right off of them as soon as they hit the extremely hard steel from the bridge plate.
I was able to seize up the entire drill press trying to get the drill to go through. I decided to try a dremel with a stone. This worked better but eventually this also got VERY hot and the stone broke. I also managed to burn my wrist on the hot metal not being quite as careful as I had planned. Fortunately, I had enough sense to wear hearing and eye protection. It is also VERY important to clamp the bridge plate to the drill and not try and hold the part in your hand. No sense in losing a finger to a spinning bridge plate that the drill caught.
After the stone broke, I was much closer to the correct diameter I needed than the drill was able to get me to. I tried the drill again and this time I was a bit more successful. Hopefully the heat didn't change the temper of the metal...or at least not at the edge that rests on the stud.
I was also warned that the newer collared socket is a bit deeper than the older screw in style. This meant that the bridge route would have to be deepened over the whammy bar socket.
This was a very easy operation. I took my plunge router and put in a bit with a guide bearing and in one pass took care of the extra material. I probably plunged a bit more than one should in one pass, but the results were good and the bit was cheap enough. Plus I was at the shallowest depth I could be with the bearing making good contact with the guitar body.
I also took this time to enlarge the holes for the bridge studs so that I could put anchors in. Since I had to replace them either way and the guitar was never going to be 100% original, I decided the anchor was a better option.
The wood was pretty rough from the string tension pushing on the studs. Ovaling of these holes is a very common problem.
I measured the anchor with a caliper and then matched it up with a good drill bit. I managed not to botch the paint up at this stage. That was a good thing. I drilled the holes only as deep as the anchors.
I don't have an arbor press (yet) so I hammered the anchors in and some of the paint around the anchors cracked. I am just happy that the paint was already screwed up or I would have been REALLY angry with myself. If anybody has a better way of keeping the paint from getting screwed up, I am all ears.
I think next time (if there is a next time), I will make the hole a little large with a countersink at the top and have the anchor dig its splines in below the painted surface so as not to destroy it.
I will also use a press so I can do it with one slow and smooth motion instead of the violent action of a rubber mallet.
I still have to rewire the pickup and fabricate new cavity covers. So the project isn't done yet, but it has come a LONG way in just the week that I have had it.
Meanwhile, I started working on a Floyd Rose guitar with a Speedloader system. Strings are becoming a bit hard to come by for this system as the last manufacturer of them stopped production in 2010.
I was asked to float the bridge and intonate the guitar. The neck also clearly needs to be looked at. Hopefully it uses a 4mm allen key. Whatever size it uses, it requires a stubby allen key to fit into the clearance notch on the body at the neck.
The Speedloader system is pretty unique. The strings get changed almost as a cartridge. As long as you know how to set it up, you basically just replace the string and only minimal fine tuning is required. The headstock of the guitar doesn't even have tuners on it. Both ends of the string as bullet shaped to fit into the special nut and saddle.
It was a good idea that didn't catch on.
I'll update more later. And if I have any sense perhaps with some pictures.
