On Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 3:41:23 PM UTC-4, wrote:
I have an old IBM labelled Fluke built DMM (8060a equivalent) that hasn't worked in years for reasons I don't recall exactly, but seem to think it was stone dead. I had it apart and left in a box and, since my last 87 crapped out a few weeks ago, I needed the low ohms feature of one or the other so I took another look at the old IBM.

I found just about every electrolytic on the board physically leaky, and most down in value and ESR, some considerably. I replaced them all but when assembling the meter, I checked the two flexible rubber interconnect strips. One of them is round and reads zero ohms all across it's length, so that one's good.

The other is a flat rectangular piece, and I cannot get any kind of resistance reading *anywhere* across it. I've cleaned it several times including using an abrasive last time and cannot get a whiff of conductance, and I've put considerable pressure on the test leads. I guess it being unassembled and sitting in free air must have poisoned it somehow as I don't recall it having any issues with erratic segments before the meter died.

It will be easy to hard wire this but was wondering if this is a low ohm transfer strip of something maybe a few ohms to a few thousand. If it's low ohms, I'll just hard wire it. If it's something other, there's plenty of room to put in 1/8 w resistors of appropriate value.

Anyone know the approximate resistance of the strip?

I removed the switch assy, the main IC socket, and the variable capacitors from the board. Several rounds of 91% IPA bathing has not cleaned the sticky electrolyte off the board, except where I could get an acid brush in to scrub. Two remaining options are to remove every other part off the board and scrub with a fiber brush or go to a more aggressive cleaner. I'm going with option two and see what happens.

John