So good News, for me anyhow. I did fix the damn thing. so here's what was wrong for anyone who stumbles across a similar fault.
When I got the Toneohm, the mains lead was cut off....Bad sign.
It also rattled a bit....even worse a sign!
So I took the lid off.
R29 was Completly busted, into two pieces in fact (see photo).
So after finding the schematic, I replaced this. But after realising that R29 was responsible for referencing to ground the low side of the Kelvin input - I wasn't hopeful that this was the whole story.
Indeed, there were a few more problems lurking.
After a few quick checks of the +/- 5V rails to ensure there were no shorts I decided to power the ToneOhm Up.
It sprung into life, with a few digits on the LCD.
When I put the ToneOhm into Resistance mode and shorted the input wires, instead of a small current (without looking too much at the schematic I decided I should expect somewhere around 10-50mA on the highest setting), instead I got >300mA.
I set the multimeter to voltmeter mode and discovered that this worked fine reading 1V and 10V correctly when i attached my PSU.
So at least knowing that it wasn't a total write-off, I whipped out the multimeter and found Q2 (BC212L), Q3 (BC212L), and Q4 (BC184) to be shorted.
I also noted that the 5V regulator that should have been fitted would have had a current limit of just above 500mA, but I noted that someone had tried to repair this before me and stuck in a big T0-220 LM7805.
With a current limit of over 1A I deemed this too high, in the event of a fault. so I replaced it with the original part (MC78M05).
Now a little more confident I powered the thing up again......
Well it wasn't any better. a quick scope out of the opamp pins showed that the +ve input was at a negative voltage. Since this pins voltage was supposed to be derived from a pot divider from 5V to 0V I knew this meant that the opamp was shafted.
So not having the right part to hand I replaced this with an OP07 instrumentation amp, didn't have the bandwidth, but I decided it would do.
Hey, presto...It still didn't work....Grrr
This was where I was at fault. The 10 BC212L i ordered from Ebay were not BC212L the were just plain old BC212....different pinout.....In my haste I ordered the wrong things and in my eagerness, I didn't check this when I soldered them in....
with the pads already being desoldered once, I was taking no chances. I put some fresh ones in rotating the devices and bending the pins to match the 212L order.
And it worked!. phew.
TonyOhm (for that is what he is now called) is now working....well it would be if I had a current probe.
The drive output seems to work absolutely fine, I will now need to make a probe to utilise this and hopefully the probe input circuit works......
No rest for the wicked!