Loaded a new pickguard with Seymour Duncan, Classic Stack noiseless singles in the neck and middle and a 59/Custom Hybrid humbucker in the bridge.
I normally wire and solder up my own selection of pots and switches but decided to give the Custom HSS Gen 2 ObsidianWire a try in this build. I'm glad I did as its an all quality unit and the push in wire termination works a treat.
Still run a tiny bit of solder on the pick up wire ends so they would not fray when inserting into the terminal block.
If your thinking about trying this Custom HSS Gen 2 unit you will certainly be impressed by its quality build. I wondered how good the spring tension termination would be to use and it was easy with tight good connections.
It took longer to mount the pickups than to connect them. All up probably took me 1 hour to do a thorough install.
Super easy to hook up. A little tricksy with the push-button thing and getting the wire in there correctly but it works out. Biggest problem with it being "difficult" is wires that are perhaps a tad too short. But overall - not very difficult. I took it super slow and got everything right the first time. I'm psyched now because I can swap in different pickups pretty easily. I got the Universal because I initially had a humbucker on it, but ended up going back to a normal SS config. Super flexible. Love it.
Only weird thing with Youtube videos is that I only found examples from Landon Bailey (which ARE great) but he always uses the Vintage 3-Way and I had the Custom. Just a bit different but nothing to worry about.
quick, easy replacement of stock equipment; really appreciate the solderless harness setup. Solid swiching and tone control.
What a well-designed piece of kit! Gives you a lot of versatility for experimenting with different pickup combinations.
I wanted to try assembling some parts I had into an offset tele-style guitar with neck humbucker, but I didn't know anything about electronics or have soldering equipment. The Obsidian was the cleanest no-solder solution I found. I bought one with the push-pull tone pot for coil splitting a humbucker pickup and found it very easy to install. The Wago push-button terminal block on the board is perfect for guitar wiring, and less fussy than screw terminals.
If you've got a Lawing Zexcoil pickup with six individual coils, the push-pull switch as configured won't enable their "silent split". With a normal coil split, one of the coils is just sent to ground when splitting. The Zexcoil needs to be switched from series to parallel instead, which requires different wiring. If you split the Zexcoil with this configuration, you only get sound from three strings, but it works fine in non-split mode.
I emailed Obsidian with questions about the configuration and got a reply directly from the founder!
Took a minute to figure out the correct wiring.
Customer service was great.
Fast response to my questions.
I could install another 1 in no time.
So far I like it. Seems to be high quality.
I usually solder.
I see the benefits of a quick pup swap.
