ModKitsDIY The Thunderdrive Overdrive Effects Pedal Kit

Awesome pedal! This was a fun and straightforward kit to put together! I ordered through Amplified Parts and shipping was fast. This pedal is kind of like a clean boost that can go into fuzz/overdrive if in the last small turn of the drive knob. There's a lot of tonal variety that can be had from this pedal and it delivers pretty thick sounding overdrive to a point that it kind of sounds like a vintage fuzz (not so much necessarily like a tube screamer in my opinion). Theres a lot of room for modding if you want to experiment with different diodes, etc. I custom painted my enclosure which was a lot of fun! I think that the back page of my instructions were not printed correctly, but Mod Kits puts all of their documents in PDFs on their website for easy access to download. There were no missing parts. I screwed the screw on one of the black plastc knobs a bit tight which slightly stripped it. I wedged in a peice of electrical tape to give it traction and re screwed it in. All in all, excellent pedal kit from a good company!

Good, easy to make. But overall a nice pedal with little defects!

The Thunderdrive is an entry-level build kit, so it's designed to be easy to build. With that in mind, it only uses point-to-point wiring instead of a printed circuit board, so mistakes are fairly easy to fix. The directions are good, although not perfect - there wasn't enough info on how to read resistor and capacitor values. I had this information handy so it wasn't an issue, but it would be nice to at least state which color codes or cap codes go with the values specified in the circuit. However, all in all, this was my second pedal build (after a Build-Your-Own-Clone kit) and it worked the first try without any debugging. My only major complaint about the kit is it's too bare-bones to really be useful to a gigging musician. An LED indicating when the effect is on/off and a 9V power adaptor are real necessities. (Most of us don't like having to buy a mega pack of 9V batteries to take with us every time we play a gig.) These are fairly easy additions and I'm not sure why they are omitted from the kit.

This is a great little kit! it handles something of a clean boost, all the way to where something like a DS-1 picks up. The instructions are very clear and the pedal sounds like you'd expect and hope. It's a fun project with the heavy lifting already done for you. My build is slightly noisy with the gains very high, but that's to be expected on a first build and this type of circuit if i'm not mistaken. It's not distracting, so who cares. It was fun to build with modest soldering and electronics skill, and sounds good. I'll be looking for more like this.

I was really impressed by the instructions, very clear and concise. There is even a basic troubleshooting section that would be helpful if you need it. I decorated the enclosure with metal stamps, a red sharpie and some clear spray paint instead of using the provided sticker. That was the longest part of the build, the electronics went together quickly and the pedal worked great the first time I plugged into it. I am considering buying one if these to build using Vero board/ strip board and using a socket to change out transistors and diodes to experiment with different sounds. Highly recommend.

Pretty good instructions and came with all parts. After I finished working everything up, I went to put a 9V in (doesn't come with) and the battery didn't fit inside the chassis. Such a bummer when you spend the time to put it together, then you can't even power it on to test. I'll have to drill a hole and get a 9V DC Jack installed too...

This was a gift for my son, who seemed quite pleased with it. He hasn’t shared any details about it, so I can’t respond to that.

I helped an eleven year-old to build this. The instructions were excellent and only a little extra help was needed. This particular eleven year-old has done some soldering before, although mostly PCBs rather than 'free' or 'point to point' as with this kit. We had trouble testing and in the end had to wait until it was given to the guitarist parent to try it out. Didn't work first time but a little visual inspection and we found and fixed the problem. If there's a shortcoming with this project it's that there's not much by way of troubleshooting advice, nor any advice about testing during assembly (e.g. using a multimeter across solder points) which I think might be helpful. I'm no musician but it sounded alright to me. Everyone was very happy about the whole thing.