"N_Cook" wrote in message
...
Charles wrote in message
. ..


"N_Cook" wrote in message
...
Discuss

I assume you meant commercial repair of consumer goods. If so, my
feeling
is Yes, but to a limited degree. I doubt that repair shops will see much
more than a 5% increase in actual volume (those customers who opt to
actually have it repaired). There will be more inquiries. The low-end
stuff will remain in the throw-away category and the high-end stuff is
mostly already covered by extended warranties (which most consumers opt
for).



There is a price breakpoint , that varies from owner to owner (company or
individual). Cost to repair versus cost to replace, so a ratio.
I would assume that breakpoint ratio moves towards favouring repair in
resession.
Also assuming some degree of essentiality that would also vary with degree
of resession.


So you might think, but in my experience, particularly with companies, there
are many factors other than price, which drive the decision making process.
For instance, one place that I was until a few months ago, repairing large
volumes of a particular board for, has been taken over by another company. I
was charging them 30 quid a pop to repair them. They are currently buying in
new boards from the manufacturer, at 150 quid a time, and throwing the
faulty ones away ! (I know this for a fact, as I know someone that works for
them). The best of it is that as a part of the repair, I used to carry out a
reliability mod, that made them virtually indestructible after it had been
carried out. So here we are hovering on the edge of recession, and you would
think that a saving of 120 quid a board, and a reduction in your field
service call-back rate, would be just what the doctor ordered, but no. For
reasons best known to themselves, they throw money away. So how do you
reconcile that one ?

Just as an aside. I know how much you love valves ... Today, I had a
Marshall on the bench. Pair of EL34s in the output. On the tester, it
sounded awful, and the 'scope showed a highly assymetric output waveform.
The drive to both outputs was fine, and the bias was correct on both valves.
The waveforms on the anode of each valve looked pretty similar, but on the
back side of the output tranny, it looked lousy. Both valves had screen
voltage, fed via a 1k resistor each, but I noticed that the screen volts at
the actual pin was 4 volts lower on one valve, than the other. When I
measured actually across each screenfeed R, one of them had 4.4 volts across
it, and the other had nothing. Turned out that the screen grid was open
circuit on that valve. I hung a test one in there, and the voltage drop
reappeared as it should, and the waveform on the output was now perfect. A
new pair of valves and a bias check finished the job off. How unusual a
problem is that ? In all my years of working with valves, I don't think that
I can remember ever having had an open circuit screen grid.

Arfa