Taqueria Strange Bias Issue

monte

New member
Hi all,

Quick intro: I'm a relatively new builder but have a dozen or so successful projects by now. I can make sense of schematics/circuits and whenever I've encountered an issue so far, I was able to troubleshoot it myself. But here's one that's got me scratching my head for a day.

I built the Taqueria kit and everything went (mostly) smooth. When biasing the JFETs, I have a strange reading on the second transistor. I can bias the first and third one to the recommended values (on both positions of the switch). The voltage at transistor 2 reads ~17.5v (which is the voltage being put out by the power section) but when I try to bias it, I can only budge the voltage a ~0.3V up or down (on both positions). I tried swapping transistors, looking for solder bridges... the usual. No luck.

Any ideas? At first I thought it might be a faulty trimpot, but it would be extremely unlikely that both trimpots at this position would happen to be equally faulty. I also don't understand why I can adjust the voltage (which would mean it is going through the trimpot), but only by such a minimal margin. Since the power is coming from the same path for all 3 JFETs (pre switch/bias trimpot), I am out of ideas on what to check next. Could anyone pitch in here? I've circled the problem section on the schematic below.

Thank you so much in advance!
 

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Verify / inspect R5 and the Drive pot (and the connections between them).

The trimpot can't drop voltage if the transistor isn't pulling any current. It could be the transistor itself, but start by checking it's ground path / biasing.

If nothing turns up, put one of the known good transistors from the other locations in that spot just to be absolutely sure you aren't swapping in more bad transistors..
 
Hi Robert! Thanks for the quick answer and insight. Looks like I may have a cold solder joint between R5 and pin 2 of the JFET. Everything else checks. I'll refresh the joint later and will report back. Thank you so much!
 
That was the culprit. I damaged the tracings trying to fix it and had to Frankenstein the JFET with some wires to other points on the PCB. Not my prettiest build, but the pedal works now and sounds amazing. Definitely putting it on my board. Thanks a bunch once again!
 
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