Bob Kovacs is an engineer and singer/guitarist. He can be reached at pvreditor@yahoo.com.
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Did you ever want to say, "I built that guitar?" The Carvin GK1 guitar kit , based on the assembled version of The Bolt, is a pretty painless way for you to make that statement with a straight face. If you have even minimal tool skills, you can build this guitar in a long weekend with time left over for a barbecue, a movie and Saturday Night Live.
The basic Carvin GK1 kit, for $329.95, is more than a nice guitar· it's an adventure.
Features
The Carvin GK1 guitar kit is a basic Strat-style, with three Carvin AP11 single-coil pickups, a maple neck, a solid alder body, a string-through body bridge, a fully assembled pickguard with all the electronics mounted and wired, and the necessary tuners, strings (.009 to .042) and hardware to completely build it. It even comes with two picks!
Carvin offers many options to build your guitar the way you want it, including a humbucker, a tremolo bridge, Sperzel locking tuners and fancy-colored pickguards. The basic GK1 kit that I reviewed here contains hardware and components to build a fixed-bridge guitar.
Upon initial inspection of the parts, they looked of good quality with 14:1 ratio chrome tuners (Grover style), precise-feeling volume and tone controls, and a solid toggle pickup selector. The guitar comes with an unfinished 25.5-inch scale maple neck with undyed ebony fretboard and the unfinished solid alder body.
Although most of the intricate work is already done (fret installation, hole drilling), the builder must supply the materials needed to finish the guitar, including sandpaper, steel wool, tung oil or other finish, and furniture polish.
The best thing about the Carvin guitar kit is that all the screw holes are pre-drilled, the neck is completely assembled and calibrated, and everything is ready to be finished and put together. The builder does have to solder the pickup-to-jack wires.
Under Construction
Carvin's very clear instructions recommend tung oil for the finish, as it is simple to apply and harder to make a mistake. The instructions suggest four applications of tung oil, with a drying time of six hours between each coat.
The first step is to lightly, but thoroughly, sand the body and neck. Then, brush on four coats of tung oil. During the finishing process, it's important to not rush it; follow the instructions step by step, and keep your workspace clean. After the four coats dried, I rubbed the wood with extra fine steel wool for an attractive finish.
I appreciated Carvin's total approach to this kit. One example is the heavy, adhesive-backed copper foil used to line the control pocket. This is a better shielding method than at least one other famous-brand guitar that I've had my fingers on lately.
Four heavy screws and a sturdy steel plate attach the neck to the body. There was no way to misadjust the neck - everything fit perfectly. The instructions mention that the Carvin factory uses wax to simplify threading in these four heavy screws. I was fresh out of wax, so I used a smidgen of ChapStick on the tip of each screw and they went in smoothly.
The bridge mounted with no trouble and is completely adjustable for action and intonation.
Once assembled, the action and pickup height adjusted without any fuss. The intonation was virtually dead-on as delivered. I made a slight adjustment to the curvature of the neck, as described in the instructions. The kit includes two Allen wrenches and a special tool for the neck, action and intonation adjustments.
There were three minor problems with my assembly. Carvin instructions claim that the eyelets used to hold the through-the-body strings should be flush with the rear surface. Using a duct-taped hammer, as recommended, I could not get the eyelets exactly flush on my sample. (I did, however, manage to slightly dent the wood on the back of the guitar.)
The second problem was the clear protective plastic covering the pickguard - it went under all the screws and controls. To eliminate the plastic "feathers" remaining when I peeled off the plastic, I had to remove each and every screw and control. This took almost as much time as the final assembly.
The third problem was that the pickguard was a bit snug around the bridge plate. I had to carve it slightly with a knife to get it to fit.
These little problems aside (hey, there are always a few snags with wood work, aren't there?), the finished guitar looked, felt and smelled terrific.
The audition
Oh, that's right, this is a guitar and you're supposed to play it - not just touch it, smell it and look at it.
Since I built the Carvin kit, I had no problem adjusting the action to where I wanted it: low and fast. After playing and recording some bluesy licks, I confirmed that the feel and action was just fine - just like any other premium electric.
The AP11 pickups have a light, clean sound and plenty of output. It was no problem cranking the gain to overload the input to my amp or multitrack project recorder and get some good crunch.
This Carvin has one of the sweetest sounds from the neck pickup that I have ever heard. Like all neck pickups, it has a lot of bass. The middle and bridge pickups, of course, provide plenty of vintage treble bite when needed.
My preference during recording was to use both neck and bridge pickups with the tone cranked high and the volume control on "6." This gave me a rich, clean tone that recorded well and worked with my vocals. The tone quality reminded me of the rhythm guitar sound on Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing."
Conclusion
The Carvin GK1 is a kit that almost anyone can build and a guitar that almost anyone would be proud to own. It was a blast to show to my friends and tell them that I built it. And everyone agrees with my assessment that it looks, plays and sounds like a first-class instrument. Way to go Carvin for making an assemble-your-own guitar for us do-it-yourselfers.
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