After 45+ years of doing professional audio/video servicing, and the last 25 years at my shop, I decided to retire.
Now, I just do occasional servicing at my small home basement shop, at my own pace.
It's pretty well equipped with the tech equipment that I need, I brought home some, bought some new, and maintain a good bit of the stock I had in the shop.
I still have my accounts active at all the parts distributors I've used through the years (Mouser/Newark/AES/Vetco, etc.
I still get requests through my business website, and friends and neighbors call on my services, but I choose to relax my pace now after all those decades of being busy 6 days a week. - Tens of thousands of customers products over that time.
A guy's gotta enjoy his retirement you know.
And no, I don't consider what I still do a "hobby", I've always operated professionally.
It was a hobby, when I was in my teens.
Now, I enjoy some custom-building of projects for my own enjoyment, and to occupy some time - they say once you stop, you die.
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I bought a used one decades ago. ( a 79) Same problem, but I never bothered to fix it.
I trust my FLuke, but I still use a Radio Shack from the 80's and a new Chinese $30 wonder for "auto" as it has dwell and tach.
My bummer is it looks like my old Tektronix scope died. I'll post on that. Not sure I have an excuse for a new digital storage scope.
Well, the Fluke meters use a sturdy detent design in the rotary selector anyway, so as long as you are careful in shutting it off, the end-of-rotation stops don't really matter.
The other stop nub is at the AC amps setting.
They're under the knob once it's popped off the front cover, little projections molded as part of the cover.
And my old analog Simpson 260-6XL meter comes in handy at times.
My old 1970's Tektronix dual-trace scope had a damaged circuit for the lower trace which I could never seem to get fixed, so I tossed it and got a pretty decent Tenma digital on sale from MCM/Newark, although my old Heathkit analog is still hanging out under my workbench if I need it.
One can never have enough tools of the trade.
Better buy a spare before the weekend. It is fated to quit Sunday afternoon after the last local shop you can buy a battery from closes.
Being an old retired service tech, I've visited in many repair shops, and worked in several over the decades.
The one thing that just about every shop had, was Fluke meters on their tech's benches.
It was common among us guys to have them, it was widely considered the reliable choice.
Those meters never seem to go out of spec/calibration, I've checked mine, and never heard among others of that happening.
Of course, that was if the meter was not abused.
If you stay home, do small diy projects, buy a cheap Chinese meter, maybe two if you build amp to test multiples points at the same time, differential and absolute output dc offset on passlabs amps comes to mind.
If you want to have a DVM for all your professional career, to carry it everywhere in tool case, to be always safe around high voltage, and to have the more useful test equipment of all, always ready for you, buy a Fluke…
My main DVM is. Fluke 87, more versatile than the smaller 77, and I use it everyday since the day I bought it.
SB
If you want to have a DVM for all your professional career, to carry it everywhere in tool case, to be always safe around high voltage, and to have the more useful test equipment of all, always ready for you, buy a Fluke…
My main DVM is. Fluke 87, more versatile than the smaller 77, and I use it everyday since the day I bought it.
SB
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In any category you can buy once or buy repeatedly. Shoes a great example of that. I've bought new cheapie hiking boots that barely lasted 1 season but also have a set of Chippewa work boots I bought nearly 3 decades ago still in use. That's Fluke, a set of Chippewas.
Don't recall exactly when I got my 87 but it's at least 20 years old and still works perfect. I don't even think about it any more, it's just there and I know it will do its thing. The only update is I've worn out sets of probes over the years. Replaced them once with aliexpress specials after the original Fluke ones finally gave up. Then replaced those with Fluke ones after those broke about ~1 year later.
Would I not consider a cheap meter though? Sure. Cannot overlook the amount of extra stuff they do that my 87 does not. Have thought about picking one up just for those extras.
Found a filthy & disgusting 73 at a yard sale this summer for $5. Cleaned up great, works perfect with case & original probes + alligators. Going in my car toolbox. Agree 100% on the 87 too. Mine in near daily & definitely weekly use. It's like owning a digital caliper. You don't know how much you'd use one until you own one.
I got my start working for an audio company in tech support & customer service. My old boss swore by the Fluke 8600. He even had one on his desk.
You reminded me of something I had forgotten entirely until I read your post.
About 30 years ago, I was given a Fluke 87 with an erratic LCD display - some segments were faint, others altogether invisible. I was a dirt-poor college student at the time, and the owner of the Fluke, knowing this, gave it to me for nothing.
I opened up the Fluke, cleaned up the conductive rubber elements (aka "zebra strips") that connect the LCD to the main circuit board, scoured the PCB contacts gently with a little toothpaste (fine abrasive), and got several years service from the meter after that.
That meter lived a privileged life inside my toolbox, but even so, after a few years, the Fluke's rotary switch became increasingly erratic, and eventually the meter could no longer worked on many of its ranges, and couldn't be trusted on the rest.
The final straw was that the internal 9V battery would go flat within hours of installing a fresh one. I think the defective rotary switch was somehow creating an accidental discharge path for the battery.
At that point I bought an $18 DMM from All Electronics (an electronics surplus store in the general vicinity of Los Angeles, where I lived then). To my surprise, the cheap meter did everything the 'Fluke did, and did it equally well - until a local heat-wave warped the plastic case, leaving the meter looking like a Salvador Dali painting. (It still worked, though.)
In my experience, Fluke meters are very well built, but they do have well known failure modes, are by no means the bulletproof paragons of virtue they are being made out to be by some of their fans in this thread.
For instance, I was given my Fluke 87 because the LCD display was no longer working properly. It turns out the problem I found - conductive-rubber "zebra strips" that don't work properly - is quite a common failure mode for Fluke meters of that era. Countless Fluke meters have probably ended up in the electronics recycling bin because the display didn't function properly.
As I mentioned earlier, the rotary switch in Fluke DMMs is another fairly common failure point, once the meter has reached a certain age.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I never did recycle my now-useless Fluke 87. I hung on to it out of nostalgia, and it's still tucked away somewhere near my workbench, where it's been for at least six years now. Long enough for me to have entirely forgotten that it even existed, until I read Speaker's post.
It's probably time for me to take the old Fluke 87 to the nearby electronics recycling centre. I shall feel a pinch of nostalgia as I send it to the great DMM scrapyard in the sky. I was a young man when I was given that meter!
Agreed. And there are times when having two or three cheap meters is more useful than one expensive one. For instance, three cheap DMMs can be used to simultaneously monitor anode, screen grid, and control grid voltages, making short work of setting up a good operating point for an unfamiliar pentode.
-Gnobuddy
I'd go with a Fluke 70-series or 80-series. Buy one that's calibrated. They're not that expensive on the used market. I still have the Fluke 73 I picked up in the early 1990s. I used it just a couple of days ago and it works as well now as it did when I got it. It doesn't see as much use now that I have a pair of HP 34401A bench top meters, but I still find it handy to have around.
An alternative may be Amprobe. They're owned by Fluke and even ship from Fluke. I can't say for sure that they have the same innards as the Fluke meters, but I would expect so. I have one of their K-type thermocouple thermometers. It was $50 and it works well.
I don't see a need for graphing capabilities. If you need that, I suggest getting a digital storage oscilloscope.
Tom
An alternative may be Amprobe. They're owned by Fluke and even ship from Fluke. I can't say for sure that they have the same innards as the Fluke meters, but I would expect so. I have one of their K-type thermocouple thermometers. It was $50 and it works well.
I don't see a need for graphing capabilities. If you need that, I suggest getting a digital storage oscilloscope.
Tom
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In my experience, Fluke meters are very well built, but they do have well known failure modes, are by no means the bulletproof paragons of virtue they are being made out to be by some of their fans in this thread.
And, out of respect, your "experience" is of course your own.
But please don't suggest that us professional techs and "our" experience is unwarranted, making us look like we don't know what we're talking about.
And the sneer implied in the quotation marks is intended to do what?
Not that you care, but I started with electronics a half-century ago, at age 7. As a young adult, I went to college, and studied both physics and electronics. I've designed and built electronics since I was about 9 years old. I doubt my experience is less than yours, though it is different.
I've worked with Fluke equipment - in a professional capacity - for thirty one years, since 1990. Some of the equipment I worked on was part of fundamental physics research experiments that ended up published in peer-reviewed physics research papers in PRL (Physical Review Letters).
Some of the other equipment I worked on was part of research done for the LIGO project, which led to a 2017 Nobel Prize being awarded to three administrator-scientists in the team.
In a shocking case of unfair omission, Ron Dreever, the scientist who really started the whole project, decades ago, and provided the vision that guided it for a long time, as well as one of the crucial technologies that made it possible, was completely overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee. He died a few months before his colleagues were given the award; he should have received it posthumously.
Fluke meters are Fluke meters; it doesn't matter whether you're repairing TVs or building research-grade electronics at a university research lab. The meters exhibit the same strengths - and the same weaknesses - in both situations.
Firstly, I did no such thing. I did say that some people on this thread (clearly including you) are fans of the Fluke brand, and tend not to see the failures in their favourite brand. Confirmation bias is not a surprise. Very few people think their baby is ugly.
Secondly, didn't you report that your Fluke broke just few posts ago, in exactly the way I described, because of brittle plastic parts? Your own experience corroborates mine, not contradicts it.
Thirdly, I believe failure of the "zebra strips" has been mentioned at least once on this thread by another poster. It is a fairly common problem with Fluke meters from a certain era.
Confirmation bias is common. My in-laws loved the Honda brand, and frequently told me how reliable Hondas were. Their old and very tired Honda Accord was in the shop frequently, costing them money they didn't have, but they would not consider buying a newer car of a different brand for less money than all those repairs were costing them. They just knew that Hondas were the best brand of car on the market.
Here are a few pictures, taken a few minutes ago, for your entertainment, of my remaining collection of Fluke 75 meters .
One picture shows all the remaining survivors from the pool of about 40 Fluke meters that came into my care a few years ago.
Many meters broke along the way, and I took those to electronics recycling. This is why there are a lot fewer than forty meters in the photo. The rest broke, became unusable, and got recycled.
One of the attached photos shows one Fluke 75 which is functional, but the brittle plastic of the case shattered on the bottom of the meter. You can see the hole, and the PCB inside. The case shattered when the meter was simply set down on a wooden lab table. The plastic becomes extremely brittle in these old Fluke 75s.
The black "feet" on the underside of these Fluke meters has turned to a disgusting sticky goo on many of the meters. I've taken a close-up of one for you to admire.
Perhaps your lack of sufficient experience with large numbers of Fluke meters is the reason why you never saw these types of failures? It seems your profession only put you into contact with a few Flukes, while mine put me in contact with a lot more.
-Gnobuddy
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Naresh, the "zebra stripe" failure I myself encountered happened in Los Angeles county, which is hot.
However, I've seen similar failure reports from other people - I don't remember where they were located.
The large number of now-brittle grey Fluke 75 meters I inherited have lived their entire lives here in the Fraser Valley region of British Columbia. It is the most temperate part of Canada, and I doubt the meters were ever exposed to temperatures below zero Celsius, or above, say, 35 C.
-Gnobuddy
Now those are VERY old Fluke meters. I think these were already around in 1991. That makes them 30 years old. That is an age other brands rarely reach Complaining about brittle plastic after 30 years of use seems a bit off.
We got our share of Philips measurement gear that had brittle plastic cases but these were less than 15 years old when that happened.
Complaining about brittle plastic after 30 years of use seems a bit off.We got our share of Philips measurement gear that had brittle plastic cases but these were less than 15 years old when that happened.
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I fully agree!jean-paul said:
In fact, if you go back and read my earlier posts, you'll find in not one, but in *TWO* of my previous posts in this thread, I specifically mentioned that I do not consider this to be an unreasonable failure.
I additionally stated that the meters in question had long ago exceeded any reasonable expectation of service life.
However: one person on this thread says his Fluke meter lasted 40 years without failing. Another said his went 30 years. There were statements made about (all) Fluke meters lasting for a lifetime.
And, let's not forget, OldTech wrote a post hinting that I might simply be lying when I said these meters are not immortal and flawless, but do, in fact, fail when they are sufficiently old.
I don't appreciate being called a liar, and I thought that claim was worth addressing.
Now, it's certainly possible that one Fluke meter lasted 40 years, and another one lasted 30 years. However, as my photos show, those extraordinarily long lives are not typical, and very old Flukes are indeed subject to various forms of failure.
In fact, out of the 40 meters in that batch, there are now only 24 ones left. Sixteen of them failed completely (not just cosmetically), to the point of becoming unusable, and were recycled in consequence.
So: I'm not complaining that 30 year old meters are failing. I'm simply addressing the myth that Flukes never fail, even after 30 or 40 years. That simply isn't true.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure my Fluke that had the "zebra-stripe" failure wasn't more than a decade old when it was given to me (because it didn't work).
I think that was a Fluke 87, but it's been several years since I last saw it, and I wouldn't swear to it.
-Gnobuddy