Fornicus overdrive, faulty j201, or own stupidity?

[nikyramone]

Hello everyone!

It has been a while since I last posted but I got back to putting pedals together. So far a couple came out nicely but I am having issues with the fornicus overdrive.
These are the things that work as expected:
- Signal comes in and out when not engaged
- The internal led is always on
- The external led,linked to the temporary foot switch side, gets brighter depending on the signal strength
- The right regular led turns on and off when the pedal is on and off

But here is the interesting part, I get no clean sound when the pedal is engaged. I get a very quiet, very distorted sound if I raise the volume and drive a lot, while fiddling with bias and the potentiometers. This makes me think it could be a faulty transistor since there are two through-hole j201.

I had similar issues with pedals like the chop shop or the low tide modulator and changing it the j201 to smd fixed it. However, this is coming from a kit from musikding, and I haven't seen any reviews commenting on faulty j201s on that site.

Could there be something else I am missing? Is there a way for me to identify a faulty transistor? I have searched around but couldn't find a solution.

Here is a video documenting the behavior ->

and I attach some pictures of my shameful soldering.

Thanks!

 

[Cybercow]

MusikDing is rather fastidious with its component reliability. So the parts should all be good. And your soldering appears to be OK. However, I would question the socketed TO-92 devices, they can often sit sloppily in them. To assure a snug fit, I always gently wrinkle the ends of the leads before insertion. So I'd start there.

 

[nikyramone]

MusikDing is rather fastidious with its component reliability. So the parts should all be good. And your soldering appears to be OK. However, I would question the socketed TO-92 devices, they can often sit sloppily in them. To assure a snug fit, I always gently wrinkle the ends of the leads before insertion. So I'd start there.

View attachment 78009

Good thinking. I have just tried bending all legs and putting them back in but the problem persists. I have also tried messing with them while playing and it doesn't seem to do any effect.

 

[Cybercow]

If all the voltages are correct, I would proceed into re-examining all the component values to ensure an errant value is in place somewhere.

 

[nikyramone]

If all the voltages are correct, I would proceed into re-examining all the component values to ensure an errant value is in place somewhere.

Thanks, it might be a wrongly labeled component I guess. That does happen often.
I will check and if nothing shows up I will order new transistors.

 

[Cybercow]

The transistors from MusikDing should be fine. Never had a problem their parts.