Product teardown: Fluke 8000A

[reagle]

A few days ago while at a local Hamfest I picked up a few old multimeters. One was a Fluke 8000A. Seeing how it's been opened already and was missing front overlay, I did not have high hopes for it working. That turned out to be the case. I did end up with a nice selection of pretty pictures and a few rants to share:

http://kuzyatech.com/fluke-8000a-teardown-and-repair-attempt

[free_electron]

A couple of things.

That edge connector is not a debugpprt. It brings out the display row and column lines. A lot of 70's vintage equipment did that. There was a board you could plug on to this to give you the bcd coded data of the display. Used for hookup to line printers or early computers. Gpib was still very much HPIB and HP only... So they provided access to the display datastream. Some spare comtacts of the switches were brought out as well so you could read what range and function the meter was set at.

There is indeed beauty in those silver mica capacitors

The orange thing is not a mov. Simple ceramic high voltage disc capacitor

The mica resistor is a current sens resistor it has two copper terminals bent un u- shape on both sodes with a constatane or wolfram wire between them. It is in essence a kelvin connection precision r

The 'nice wire' is also a current sense resistor for low range. It is soldered to the switch pin on one side and sits , soldered, in a sleeve in the other side. The trimming is simply done by melting the solder and pushing or pulling the resistor in the sleeve.

Judging from the logo on the chips they were made by siliconix. There is a possibility you can find these... But probably at a price tenfold over what you paid for the meter.

Nice teardown. I like the 'artsy' photography.

[reagle]

Thanks for the wealth of information and your kind words. These old instruments are beautiful to look at and artsy pictures come out with very little effort!
Will check my facts next time a bit better though- all I had to do was look at the schematic a bit more and I'd be able to tell what some of these more unusual things were

[DmitryL]

Thanks for the wealth of information and your kind words. These old instruments are beautiful to look at and artsy pictures come out with very little effort!
Will check my facts next time a bit better though- all I had to do was look at the schematic a bit more and I'd be able to tell what some of these more unusual things were

Are you still looking for these custom Fluke 8000A chips ? I recently bought the same multimeter type out of curiousity on a car boot sale.
It appeared that it has LED indicators missing, some tracks correded, etc. Thus, it doesn't make any sense to repair it. If you want, I can send these chips to you.
Sending whole thing might cost a lot, I think...