1988 Carvin DC200 Koa

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I probably way overpaid for this one, but something about these late 80s pointy Carvins always appeals to me. This particular guitar came all the way from Alberta Canada and is a 1988 model with gold hardware and a Kahler bridge. It makes for a great counterpart to my more stripped down DC125, since that one has a Floyd and no neck pickup, but is otherwise similar. This one has the works - Koa body, two humbuckers each with their own volume and tone control, coil splitters for both, a phase switch for some funky sounds, stereo outputs, and block inlays on the ebony fretboard.

It’s a glorious instrument and the fit and finish is absolutely superb - easily as good as a Hamer or other high end USA made shredder of this era, but at a substantially lower price. I really don’t understand why they didn’t sell more, but I think it was a time when buying a mail-order guitar without seeing or playing it first was very weird, as opposed to today where most people buy instruments online without ever playing them first. This guitar would’ve been only $719 plus a $50 hard case in 1988 (that’s about $2000 in 2023 dollars). That’s still a good chunk of cash, but considering an equivalent Hamer would’ve been something like $1600 that year ($4200 inflation adjusted) it’s a screaming deal.

And scream it does, with a high output M22SD bridge pickup. The frets look nearly new on this guitar, and are jumbo - well, as jumbo as 80s era guitars got - which makes shredding nearly effortless. The body is lightweight and fairly small on top where your hands are, but has a nice round bottom bout to rest your arm on and it keeps the neck up when you play standing up. It’s very comfortable to play and I wish I could order something like this new. I remember lusting after the Carvin website around 2008 or so but I never ended up ordering one, and I regret it now. The newer Kiesel stuff seems great, but it’s just not my kind of thing, and the prices have gone up quite a bit to be more in line with the rest of the market. They are still amazing deals for custom instruments of course.

A few interesting notes about this one, it has a single piece of maple all the way through the headstock to the bottom. The headstock’s curve downward is further than the piece of wood is in width, so they must’ve cut this single piece out and probably had a good amount of excess afterwards, or maybe they cut two necks facing opposite directions. This is just a single piece, but if you look at the catalog page for the 88 DC200 Koa closely, that one has a 2-piece flamed maple top visible on the body. I wonder if this two piece flamed maple runs the entire length of the neck, or if it’s just a piece for the body top? I suspect it runs the whole length, because by 1990, 2-piece necks were pretty common on Carvins. I missed out on it (and didn’t save the pictures, doh!), but I saw another Koa DC200 from 1991, but the entire guitar was two pieces of Koa joined together in the center (body wings and neck were one piece). Then again, some of these had to be custom options, so maybe someone called or requested those configurations, or they just did a really nice looking one for the catalog page. The 1989 catalog however is back to a single maple piece, just like my example.

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