I spotted this one for a fair price, and I’m a sucker for a maple fretboard especially attached to the very cool “flip flop blue” body. Pacer Deluxes are my favorite Kramer model, and I’ve owned more Pacer Deluxes than any other type of 80s Kramer (this is my 18th at the time of writing). There’s something special to me about the more innocuous look of a Stratocaster-type guitar, with a pickguard, but ramped up a notch with the pointy headstock and floyd rose. The black single-ply pickguard seals the look for me, a lot cooler looking than a white guard.
Of course, by modern standards it’s not a “metal” guitar, but it certainly was for the time - 1986 in this case. The finish is very bright, almost sky blue, in most direct light (such as my pictures with camera flash), but has a nice purple sheen at angles and the occasional bit of pink or maybe a pale green depending on how you hold it. This lighter color is accentuated by the maple fretboard, even though this one has aged into a nice deep yellow, and contrasts nicely with the black hardware.
You’re seeing it pictured here after cleaning - every guitar I receive goes through a meticulous disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly. The previous owner of this one must’ve been a heavy cigarette smoker, or spent a lot of time in smoky bars .I just barely made the cutoff for growing up when you could smoke inside restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, so I do have some first hand experience there. I even have some hazy digital point-and-shoot camera photos where you can just make out my face through the smoke to prove it. Anyway, the case had a very strong smell of cigarettes, and the guitar itself was coated completely in a thin translucent brown film. It’s too bad I didn’t take a picture, a before and after comparison would’ve been cool. It really dulled the sparkle and charm of this finish.
I left the case open for over a week to air out, and while it still smells like smoke right up close it’s mostly dissipated. The body on the other hand had to be scrubbed with a wet cloth, and the brown film came off in clumps (gross…). The neck was a bit cleaner from being played, but it does have a more yellow color than I’d expect. That’s likely a combination of the smoke as well as years of sunlight or gigging exposure. Still, after cleaning, it’s in pretty great condition, with some impressions mainly on the rear of the body but otherwise quite nice. The flip flop finishes seem to be “softer” to me, I’m not sure if it is the clear coat they used or whatever the top coat is, but my flip flop pink Pacer Deluxe has a very similar pattern where if viewed from a shallow angle, it has more “bumpiness” especially on the back where belt buckles or shirt buttons make contact.
As for the technical bits, it did arrive with some minor modifications. The first one is that the Floyd Rose wood screws are gone and replaced with more modern studs, as well as a collar type trem arm instead of the screw-in style which would’ve been correct for this year. I’m fine with this change because one of the major flaws of Pacer Deluxes is that the wood between the treble side floyd post and the electronics cavity routed into the body is quite thin, so heavy whammy users have a tendency to crack or elongate the wood there. The fatter studs pressed into the body spread the load out a bit more and resolve this problem nicely, and it’s a good reliability change to make even on a guitar like this one which has no evidence of cracking in that area. In fact, the only reason I don’t do this mod to every Deluxe I own is because I’m still a bit of an originality stickler, and I am not a heavy whammy user anyway so I can maintain them fine with the stock wood screws. I did double check to make sure it was a real German OFR while I was cleaning though.
The next change though I did reverse - it arrived with black Gotoh 135° tuners instead of the correct West German Schaller tuners. The neck is truly an American one, not a relogoed Focus neck, so I’m not sure why this was done - and they aren’t the 90° Gotoh tuners used on some other American series Kramers in various serial number ranges (which this one is very close to, E5xxx). I’m nitpicking a bit here of course but this should’ve had black Schallers, which I conveniently had a spare set of, so I simply swapped those on. Since this required taking the strings off, it let me do a deep cleaning of the neck and headstock as well as get under the bridge area too.
One last note, inevitably FF Blue Deluxes draw some parallels to Reb Beach of Winger fame’s Pacer Deluxe. I want to cover that but as I’m writing this I realize that’s going to be a pretty big can of worms that really deserves its own post. So for now, just know that this guitar is NOT all that similar to his, other than it being a blue Kramer.