Sustainiac Aux Boards are a filtered-down technology from Sustainiac’s OEM products for OEM manufacturers such as Schecter, Jackson and Ibanez. Sustainiac has now made their auxiliary (Aux) boards available as an addition to the standard retrofit kit.
Customers often order Sustainiac Stealth Pro kits and are then daunted by the complexity of the wiring job that now lies before them. Understandably, it can look very confusing at first glance, but the schematics give you the connection layout rather than the ultimate component position. This is where things can get tricky. There are certain wires that radiate signals that need to be kept away from other signal wires. This is the main cause of crosstalk. If the installation instructions and the wiring schematic have been followed correctly, then the Stealth Pro kit can be installed relatively easily. But to simplify the installation process and remove a lot of the troubleshooting problems, Sustainiac released a selection of Aux boards.
Instead of ordering your Sustainiac Stealth Pro kit with mini toggle switches or Push/pull pots, the Aux boards replace this part of the order with a set of controls fitted to a secondary circuit board.
The Aux boards connect to the main circuit board via a pre-wired harness. Using the Aux boards drastically reduces the amount of soldering needed for the installation. It also helps to reduce uncontrollable squealing of distortion due to crosstalk. This tends to happen with improper wire placement within the control cavity. The pre-wired harnesses deal with a lot of these issues by keeping certain wires apart.
The AUX-2 board uses a slightly longer wired harness than the other two boards. Although even the shorter harnesses are big enough to fit most cavities.
At the moment, the toggle switches are only available in Chrome.
There are 4 variants of the Sustainiac Aux boards:
AUX-TT
The Aux-TT board consists of two chrome mini toggle switches mounted to a vertical circuit board. This board requires a 35mm cavity depth. The switch centres are 25.4mm (1 inch) apart. 7mm holes are needed to fit the switches.
AUX-2
The Aux-2 board consists of two chrome mini toggle switches mounted to a horizontal circuit. This unit can be found in Schecter’s C1 models.
The board does take up more room than the AUX-TT version but works well if cavity depth is limited but cavity space is available.
AUX-JS
The board is the same unit used in the Ibanex JS2480 Joe Satriani model.
It consists of a chrome 3-way mini toggle switch for the Harmonic Mode and a push/pull tone control for Sustainiac on/off.
This board requires a 35mm cavity depth. The switch to pot centres are 30mm (1.18 inch) apart. The switch requires a 7mm hole. The pot replaces the existing tone pot without modification. There is an additional wire to run the tone signal to the pickup selector switch.
AUX-RG
The Aux-RG board is the best option for Ibanez JEM or RG models. It is much like the older Aux-2 board (used in many Schecter guitars) except it is smaller.
The Aux-RG board dimensions are:
1.57 in. (40mm) wide x 0.96 in. (24.5mm) tall. The board requires a 1.35 in. (35mm) cavity depth. The mini toggle switches are 0.79 in. (20mm) apart and require a 0.28 in. (7mm) hole.
If you would like to purchase one of the Aux boards, as well as the full Sustainiac Stealth Pro kits, please visit our sister site, PCJ Custom Guitars.
There is an install option that has also become available to the custom-build community and those hobbyists who aren’t afraid to go at their guitars with a router.
The Sustainiac Stealth Pro OEM board has also now been made available for sale. This board places everything you need on one circuit board. While this simplifies the installation greatly, it does require a larger cavity to fit the board. this is why it is aimed more at people designing their own guitars from scratch. It is far easier to factor design choices like this in early on, rather than later in the build process. Read more about the OEM boards here.
