Thanks again for the excellent suggestion Brach. I went to desolder the pot from the board and noticed something I hadn’t before. The manual has us tack the pots in place on the top and then solder them on the bottom. Well, the tack on the center pin of the rate pot had a “tail” coming off of it and it was dangerously close to R29. I think you can see where this is going… I got out the desoldering braid… slurped the excess solder up and guess what… the rate knob works perfectly.
Ugh. I guess the sloppy solder was close enough that it was involving R29 in the circuit and thus why the knob was metering so wonky. I’ve now re-tested everything with the meter (and with audio) and it seems like the pedal is working flawlessly. The only thing I haven’t tested yet is MIDI. I’ll do that later.
Anyway… I am so sorry… I don’t know how that happened but obviously I got sloppy on that one tack. FWIW, I double-checked all the rest of the pots and they’re all clean. I’m sorry for making you work so hard to diagnose my sloppy soldering. I am really embarrassed.
Regardless… I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help even if it was my mistake all along.