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Have seen one of these on eBay serial no 002. Looks a nice guitar seen specs does anyone have any experiences of them. Humbuckers unusual for Burns

Hi ok here goes the history of the Burns Zodiac, in 2000/2001 Burns decided that they wanted a "More Rock" type of Professional guitar. So they came up with a design and then farmed out the build for prototypes to Patrick Eggle. They made THREE one in See Thru Red, One in See thru Black Cherry and One in Honey Burst.
These were all made to a super high quality. Using Brazilian Mahogany for the back of the body and a solid bookmatched AAAA Grade fancy maple Cap. The Tuners were Sperzel locking, and the guitar like a lot of Burns Guitars had a zero fret. The neck is made from Hard Rock maple and it bears the "Steer" style headstock two of the prototypes were to have Indian Ebony fingerboards and one with a Maple fingerboard. The necks had the Baldwin Vintage "Geared Adjustment" style Truss Rod. 22 super Jumbo stainless steel frets, Mother of pearl inlays with Oak Leaf inlays at the 12th fret. Then a Pair of Split Coil custom Seymour Duncan Pickups. The USA "The Point Classic" Tremolo. One Volume and Two Tone Controls along with a three way blade style pickup selector. all of this was loaded into a Custom Burns branded Hiscox shaped hard case. This model was supposed to enter into the Custom Elite Series of UK Made Guitars. if I can help any further please let me know

And I believe they were discontinued after some complaints about some of the woods used in its construction. I read about that at the time, but I forget the details.

Regards,

Nick

Thanks for posting this very comprehensive description. I see there is one currently on eBay at the moment. It used to belong to Trevor Midgley. I think it looks a great guitar and can see the PE influences
Burns have not done very well outside of the Shadows style guitar or using humbuckers. Even JBs models never succeeded. I guess Burns have not really been known in the rock market arena. Their Marquee MR2 / 3 models are wonderful guitars but never really hit the market. This may of course have been poor supply and advertising by Burns.

The woods PE used were TOO expensive for Burns to use in production run the actual cost of using the same woods the PE used would have made it the single most expensive Burns production guitar and they were not willing (stupidly in my opinion) to have this as their flagship model
The same applies to the hardware the only thing burnsesque woyld be the trem and shape of headstock