About three months ago, while casually browsing Ebay, i stumbled across a Keithley 2110 with recent cal, as defective "Shows 0 on all ranges", "no repair attempt made".
Can't be that bad, can it? Also, I really did not want it badly and told myself "that surely will go for way more than 200€", we can bid that just for fun, can we?
Oh well, did I learn a lesson. As you might have guessed, it ended up going for slightly over 200€ and on my bench.
As described, it displays about zero on all DC Ranges, 25° on Type K Thermocouple and half scale on the ACV Ranges. Tamper sticker was undamaged as well.
Selftest shows Errors 603 (Frontend MCU Communication) and 607 (Buffer 1 Offset) and stops there. Now, as we will see soon, these Errors didn't make a lot of sense, and the manual for the Picotest M3510 references these error codes to a more reasonable 603 (AD Offset fail) and 607 (Rundown too noisy). [The Unit has FW 2.01] I proceeded to measure the input impedance on different DCV Ranges, 1000V/100V/10V are all around 12-14Meg. 1v/0.1V show a worrying ~45kOhm.
Now after assessing the state of affairs from the outside, its time to poke the tamper sticker and have a look inside...
Well, at least finding the fault didn't take long, and we can guess why no repair attempt was made - the smell was still lingering, but must have been quite intense when it happend.
I proceded to remove the IC (first frontend mux) with hot air, which was a mistake, as it was caked on the PCB, and the PCB material itself seems really heat sensitive.
Lesson learned, next time I will cut the legs and unsolder them one-by-one.
It seems it got so hot, the damage in the center even extends to the other side.
So i did the only thing left to do and took a Dremel to the poor PCB. The picture is with my attempt at restoring the Guard traces already in place.
I cleaned in between and after soldering with IPA and Q-Tips and otherwise tried my best to keep my greasy paws off the pcb.
After that, i took me about one and a half hour to solder the new mux IC into place.
And, to my amazement, it worked. DCV, ACV, capacitance, DCI, Thermocouple. I tested what i could. I compared it to my Keithley 2100, and it's almost spot in DCV, and on the rest of the ranges and functions it's close enough i can't tell which one is off.