Pedal Progression: 3 Zendrive

This is another pedal from almost two decades ago, a Hermida zen drive, repairing and rebuilding with better parts. A great overdrive more body and fuller than your standard overdrive. “dumble-like”-comes to mind.

As with all old leftover pedals it is plagued by misaligned and ill-sized holes, but I still really like the sound, so it is worth repairing simply because I can.

As can be clearly seen, there is some horrible alignment for the led, pots and huge washers. Solved what could be done by adding a steel plate, mounting the pots to that, inside the enclosure. I also scraped away some of the peeling label and added a new layer of clear coat.

Next I upgrade all caps in the audio signal path and changing some ceramics to polymer. Very nice nichicon qyx film caps here can really see the layers in the film, and they are massive for their values, large and yellow. To leave nothing wanting, I use my standard reciep with mil spec dale n60/rn55’s in place of resistors supplying power, brown, and PRP’s hi-fi resistors in the signal path, red. The pedal already dud have nice switchcraft Jack’s and Panasonic audiograde electrolytics.

The knobs were really too close vertically to have good labels so decided to mark and clear coat them instead, Gain, Volume, Tone, Voice, a nice bright violet led to match and it’s certainly OK to use again. No mods for this overdrive really since I mostly experiment on my Klon and tube screamers, more on those in the future.