1987 Kramer Pacer Deluxe

Details

I acquired this NOS Pacer Deluxe body from someone on the Kramer forum, and originally used it with a spare Claw neck I had. It was a great guitar in that configuration, but Pacer Deluxes were never available from factory with claw necks and that thought always bugged me, and since I’d always intended to use that Claw neck on another late-89/90 body I had, I built this one instead.

I used a maple fretboard pointy neck that was re-logoed by a previous owner. This neck was originally an E5xxx series neck with a block logo, and would’ve had 90° Gotoh tuners. I have another neck like this, a Pacer Imperial E5213 with a painted red headstock. This sort of thing is common with Kramer, someone probably found a hundred boxes of black Gotohs and they had to use them on something. Of course, by the time I got this neck those tuners were long gone, and since the logo was redone to be a pyramid style one, I went with some 90° Schallers. While they are technically period correct, with the “W. Germany” stamp, these tuners would never have been stock on any Kramer.

The body is also identifiable as a later Deluxe body by looking at the pickguard and the internal cavity, which extends very close to the edge of the body. If you look closely at the contour of most Pacer Deluxes, the pickguard does not follow the body closely, and it’s clearly visible below the controls. However the later bodies like this had a slightly different, larger, pickguard shape that actually matches the contour of the body more closely. These bodies are not compatible with earlier pickguards either, since those would leave a small opening and you’d be able to see into the electronics cavity.

Pickups were the expected Seymour Duncan single coils and a SH-4 JBJ, but for the time being I’ve removed the JBJ and put in this pink SH-8 Invader. I’ve had this pickup for a while, and picked it up as a store return on the cheap - especially for a custom color. For a while it lived in a black Pacer Custom II, but I really love the way it matches this Flip Flop Red body color, and it’s a great pickup for some in-your-face power chord riffs.

I had to make a compromise on the neck plate - since the neck is mid E’s, and the body late F’s, I went with F0960, which is right in the middle of the two, to bring it all together. That makes sense to me at least, but either way, it’s a mutt so it’s not all that important.