John, Paul and George Burns: July 1996-November 1997

Hardware:

Engineers Richard Den Brinker and Tim Jacobsohn offered great expertise to my Red Special guitar project and made the specialised hardware at Richard’s Brookvale engineering company PR Technology.

(Please click on images to enlarge)

On George Burns I redesigned the bridge rollers to get better mechanical advantage compared to Brian’s smaller diameter rollers. The larger outside diameter of the roller which the string sits on encounters less friction resistance than on Brian’s smaller diameter rollers. The idea looked good in theory and on paper made sense, but in practice with George Burns it didn’t really make that much of an improvement compared to John, Paul and Brian’s Red Special which all stayed in tune very well with tremolo use. This bridge and roller system would have been the design to make for the ‘high quality production guitar idea’ based on George Burns that I put to Brian and Pete at the time in 1998.

Separate bridge section drawings here soon

Version 1 above was used on ‘John’ and ‘Paul’ and is similar to the method that Brian used on his original Red Special.

Version 2 above was used on ‘George Burns’ and is more straightforward to manufacture. It was part of the ‘high quality production model Red Special guitar’ idea based on George Burns that I was trying to get Brian and Pete interested in.