I have always been a big fan of Chris Kinman's pickups, having them installed in most of my gigging guitars.

But I had a big P90 itch that I wanted to scratch, but no suitable guitar to mount them in. I toyed with the idea of building a customised Telecaster (along the lines of the humbucker-equipped one I use, which can be seen here), or with modifying a hollow-body archtop type of guitar (if I could find one suitable to butcher in this way), but then saw the P90-equipped Hamer XT series for sale for very low prices, and decided to simply buy one and change the pickups.

On that front I turned out to be quite lucky. Firstly, I ordered the guitar through the Jackson Rare Guitars empire (their offshoot Boutique Music Wholesale) which crashed in unfortunate circumstances soon afterwards (events can be seen here). Secondly, Fender decided to abandon the Hamer line at about this time, meaning that supplies of this specific model would soon dry up.

The existing pickups weren't bad, but also weren't anything to light my fire.

Putting in a set of Kinmans completely transformed the guitar, along with a proper setup of the neck, bridge height and intonation.

I love it!

not for sale