It seems you have very little experience with repairing equipment.
You'd be wrong in your assumption. I've probably repaired more test
equipment in my life than you've ever even seen. I worked for 3 years for
a fairly large used test equipment company (
www.techrecovery.com ) as
their only component level tech. When I realized I could make a whole lot
more money buying broken equipment, doing the repairs, and reselling on
Ebay, I left them.
ObShameless Plug:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/techman7734/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p3686
Although my stock is a bit low at the moment as in Jan and Feb I sold over
$25K worth of equipment, if anyone sees anything they like, I'd knock 10%
off on a private sale.
At this point there are several used equipment dealers who send their
stuff to *me* for repair.
What breaks most often is the PSU, inputs or outputs.
Of course.
These are mostly
built around standard chips and easy to repair (especially true for
modern low and mid range equipment). If the logic gets defective it is
usually caused by the power supply going wrong. And then there are the
occasional bad solder joints but those are rare. All in all most
equipment can be serviced even without a service manual as long as you
think logically.
Sometimes that is true, but many times not. I've seen just about
everything under the sun go wrong or bad. Likely because I've repaired
thousands of instruments.
