Click to enlarge.

I bought the notoriously bland, famously on-the-edge-of-being-a-great-overdrive DOD 250 on the cheap recently. I picked it up with the sole intention of modding the circuitry. There are some great mods out there:

For instance, Analog Man has a page up giving a brief explanation of the circuit, and the differences between the reissue and the original pedal. It’s a good place to start for modding this pedal.

Also, a quick Google search will turn up half a dozen or so forum threads like this one, detailing people’s trial and errors with parts replacement.

I decided to start with true bypass.

One of my favorite things about this pedal is the use of a pin connector to easily separate the PCB from the actual hardware in the pedal. It’s a feature that will make it a hundred times easier to modify and test the circuit on a trial/error sort of basis. One snap of the connectors and I’ve got the circuit in my signal chain. An easy separation and I’ve got a stand-alone PCB to play with on the bench. Cool.

The signal path coming from/going to the white, female side of the connector is as follows:

From left to right, looking down on the opened enclosure.

Black: – output from circuit, coming from the second pin of the level pot.
White – ground
Green – positive
Grey -  output

A quick diagram to show the wiring from the pin connector to the jacks & switch:

click to enlarge

Here is the enclosure boxed back together:

And there it is, the first of man mods to this pedal is finished. All in all, it took about an hour- including reading up on true bypass and the best ways to go about it. I highly recommend “The Ins and Outs of Bypassing” on Geofex. It will give you a great idea of what’s happening in a true bypass pedal, and how you might be able to modify one for yourself.

I will update with the new mods as they progress. Cheers!