My Fluke 85 died!

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I've had this baby since the early 90's. I'm not an electronics guy so the extent of my use of this DMM has been to check voltage at the various outlets of my house that I bought last June and biasing my amp. The last time I used it the readings seemed to be 'odd' in that it was reading high with the bias pot turned all the down until it got close to the number I wanted to and then it would then be reading ok for the last 20 seconds while fine tuning the adjustment. I figured it was due to the house wiring because if saw the way things were wired in this house you'd understand. I did have it inspected by an expert electrician I know before purchasing so the house is safe...just weird.

Anyway...I finally decided to try out a new set of tubes so I broke out the DMM. It wouldn't power on so i put a new battery in. Still nothing. So...I'm in the market for a new one. I don't want to spent $400. I was hoping somewhere between $50 and $100. But if a lesser expensive Fluke is still the way to go I'd spring for a 113 or 117.

Suggestions please? Thank you. Blake
 
@Sprags

If you would like suggestions on how to fix your Fluke 85, I can provide some assuming you have another working meter to take measurements.

PS. You should never need to adjust the calibration pot on a Fluke 80 series. You may have had an "oops" moment where you had the multimeter on ohms while measuring very high voltage?
 
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To be honest I'm not sure why it doesn't work but I'd like fix it if you can help me out with instructions. I really want to get my tube amp going so I splurged on a DMM from HomeDepot.

I'm going to be building a Tubelab SSE soon and its suggested it would make working on it easier if I had more than one DMM....so if I can get my Fluke 85 running again that will be a good thing.
 
To troubleshoot, first download the Fluke 85 service manual.

http://assets.fluke.com/manuals/83_85_87smeng0500.pdf

Then look at table 3-14 and report your voltage measurements for each test point/parameter (i.e. VDD, VSS, etc). Use the schematics and circuit diagram to find each test point/parameter.

Report your findings for each one. If you get 0V for all of them, it could be a simple battery connector problem?

A case study in a dead Fluke 83 by modemhead ...

http://mrmodemhead.com/blog/fluke-83-dmm-repair/

"This example arrives without its usual yellow holster and is completely dead. No display at all."
 
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