Just when I'd thought I'd found it..

A weapon of choice for the shredder?

I was doing some surfing the other night and came across the Kramer Assault 211. Gibson acquired the Kramer 'brand' a while ago and have finally released a set of MII (made in Indonesia) instruments. I have been on the lookout for a three single coil pickup guitar that isn't a Strat and stumbled on this nearly three singles and thought I'd check it out. My buddies up at KC's Rockshop just had a Gibson delivery and the Assault 211 was on the truck. With a street price of around 800 big ones it is probably at the top end of the MII guitars so I was expecting something pretty nice. At first look this contemporary designed cutie has the right look. Beautiful candy red finish, set neck, ebony finger board, black nickle hardware, two singles and a hummer (or is that two hummers and a non-hummer?), all was lookin' good so far.
A re-sculptured Les Paul shape with a pointy single cut gave plenty of access to the 24 fret 25.5 scale playing area. This is when it all went belly up. Yes, I could live with the compressed layout of the pickups (due to 24 frets) and the guitar oozed cool with the black chrome but.. silly me, I didn't notice this guitar was made for shredder's. The long neck is wide and flat with only a 14" radius. The shape of the neck is definitely not for thumb-over players like me but for the guy who balances his thumb along the center of the overly flat D back of the neck. PRS guitars spring to mind here. Not being a shredder this was my first go in a Floyd loaded instrument. So let's plug in and give it a tune. Well an hour later of undoing and screwing up Allen key bolts and stretching fresh strings I was still nowhere near being in-tune. In fact strange things were happening. Depressing the Floyd and releasing it held tune fine but if I pulled up on the arm, releasing back to the floating neutral the tune would return nearly half a tone sharp. How was this possible? The strings were clamped okay at the nut? Heck, it's simple geometry. There was only two explanation's, either the knife edge on the Floyd wasn't sharp enough or the crappy MII springs weren't giving back what they took. Perhaps a couple of better quality springs or some WD-40 may fix the tuning issues, I will probably never find out. As for how it sounded, well I won't be finding that out either. I'm sure the tecs at KC's will be on top of the tuning issues but I have to say out of the box this was a dud. Heck of a good looker though.