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Welcome!
Best troubleshooting tip I can think of:  buy a Hakko FR-301. It is a headache-saving, money-saving, sanity-saving investment for anything solder related.

I believe it's closest relative is the EH-5101 version, better known as the "V6 9volt" from 1981.
In my personal experience with the Electric Mistress circuit, the typical booster that gets tacked onto the end of the circuit of every clone I've seen is a poor choice to overcome the volume drop issue people complain about. The booster increases the sound, but it also increases the BBD noise, since it comes AFTER the BBD. I also feel it alters the "electric mistress tone", which can only be fully achieved when you leave the circuit after the BBD alone.
A much better solution to increase the gain is to boost the clean signal level BEFORE the BBD, which is exactly what was done in the 1999 Deluxe version. By simply adding the 3.6k, 10k resistors and 1uf cap seen off pin 2 and 6 of IC1a here:  clean boost in place of the straight connection between pin 6 and pin 2 off IC1a of the Current Lover schematic, you get a massive amount of clean boost! You'll probably have to put a trimmer in for the 10k resistor because it seriously bumps up the output of the circuit without adding BBD noise. (It works almost exactly like the resistor/cap combo off the cathode of a valve, which you can adjust the gain). With that modification, the entire circuit after R19 on the Current Lover schematic becomes unnecessary. R19 would be your output point, just like the original Electric Mistress, and to my ears, just sounds more correcter 

I'll have to get their thoughts on soldering (lead, fumes, etc.)

Give them the truth. Lead solder = good.
RoHS compliant lead-free solder = fix it again and again and again which exposes you to more fumes, burns, and malfunctioning pcbs that cause electrical fire hazards, etc.

Still having login issues. The forum doesn't seem to be passing login information when you actually click on specific posts. I'll be logged in on the main forum page, but then click on a specific post in "open discussion", and then I'm logged out.

Sounds like it went well. On the next one, maybe incorporate some trouble-shooting skills, which is really the most valuable thing you learn with soldering. How to fix instrument cables, broken solder joints on jacks, bad stomp switches, etc. Stuff they will definitely see a benefit to knowing.

Never mind that some of those kids likely play better than me...  I'm excited and nervous.

I wouldn't worry at all about that since you're really there to display pedal building. Have a screwdriver on hand to open your pedals up to show the inner workings. Have some schematics printed off to show what's going on. Maybe you could even bring a pcb and demonstrate soldering a few components in. That will be educational.
If they wanted guitar playing, some dude with an acoustic could just sit there and play some boring scales really fast. Anybody can see that. Show them the stuff they don't get to see.

I was just browsing at LMS  and saw that they carry clear stomp switch washers

The problem isn't finding clear washers. With a clear regular washer it would be very difficult to get a consistent light transfer without the switch or jack being perfectly centered in the hole, which is just about impossible to do as you tighten it down. A clear isolation/insulation washer is what is needed to keep things centered and keep a consistent gap around the circumference for the light to bleed through.

Oh, no! What happened to "Donut"?
Mmm...donut.

Alerts are being really glitchy. I started out with 3, marked all of them "read", they cleared, then immediately went back to 3 when I navigated to a new page. But after navigating to a few other pages they cycled between 0 and randomly as 2. Now it's back to the original 3. "New" tags won't clear on anything regardless if I click "mark read", view the post, etc.

That printing looks great! I've used the Tayda drilling for a pretty complex build (EQD Data Corrupter), and everything was spot-on perfect for the fit. Highly recommended.

Weird, some article popped up on my Firefox homepage today talking about where all the barf bags went.

I didn't have any desire to read it at the time but now ...

I wonder what other things they'll start getting rid of that don't seem to get used often. Hmm...life preserver under the seat? C'mon. How many people really take a dump on the plane? Goodbye, toilet paper! Co-pilot? You only need one pilot, really. Extra fuel? Gone.
Pretty soon we'll all just be sitting on the floor flying in a stripped-down tin can that may or may not make it if there's any kind of delay. But don't worry. You can buy a testor of Jack Daniels for $50...if you pre-ordered it with our app!

I know nobody manufactures them, but with 3D printing so prevalent, I'm sure somebody could make them.
Transparent resin printing
The most practical use for these would be to add LED lighting to vintage pedals without having to drill or modify in any way. The washers could either be for a 1/4" jack or the stomp switch. With how ridiculously bright LEDs are these days, I'm sure the light would bleed out just fine.

They probably took the bags out so they could move the seats closer together.

LOL! Come to think of it, that flight did feel more cramped than any flight I've been on recently.
Here is the kicker though:  they handed out free earbuds to anybody that wanted them! You can't tell me a barf bag is more expensive than earbuds. And people take the earbuds with them. People don't take the barf bag if they don't use it. So the absence of bags can't be because of economic considerations. It seems like it would be illegal for airplanes not to have bags, especially with the hyper-sensitivity the world has to communicable disease after that little covid thing. Barf hurling around has to be one of the most unsanitary things this side of who flung poo. I guess flying from now on is a BYOBB situation.

I know this thread is old, but I prefer to use what is established, rather than start a million new threads covering the same thing.
Soapbox time:
Have you ever been on an airline that didn't have ANY barf bags? I was on one last night. And of course, they hit some really bad turbulence, the kind that has those wonderful free-fall drops mixed in. And yep, people started puking. But there were no bags anywhere. And since it's "company policy" that everybody (including flight attendants) have to stay where they are during turbulence, that means nobody could go to the bathroom, nobody could get any assistance, nobody could do anything about puke flying all over. By the time the plane landed, the aisles looked like a crime scene of spent napkins and piles of digested pretzels.
I'm wondering...who is the absolute bungling idiot that refused to put barf bags on the plane? What did they expect would happen when the puke starts flowing? Does somebody hate the poor souls who have to clean the planes? Yet another example of the crippling stupidity so prevalent in the world today.

I wonder if there are any clear isolation washers for 1/4" jacks? That could be another solution for adding LED lighting to an older pedal without having to do any mods. They already do this type of LED lighting for stomp switches.