A few days ago I received my new Fluke T110 VDE voltage tester. I am happy to have one again, but I find the overall build quality of the product worse than how my original product was. I wonder if the engineers at Fluke use their products in real life (for work or hobby), or they just develop them and use products of other manufacturers.
When I first unpacked the new product, I noticed many differences, compared to the original product that I owned. The "new" cable between the two probes seems to be a bit longer and I think it is also a bit softer (you can bend it better) - but this is the only "positive" difference. The other differences are not so good and I would say that they represent a quality problem. As example, the probe tips (the thin ones) are not as shiny as they were on the original product and the metal finish is pretty rough, they also have a different metal colour than the 4 mm screw-on pins, I was wondering if they forgot / skipped a step in the manufacturing process. The red insulation of the red probe tip is a little shorter compared to the black one, so when you screw on the 4 mm metal pins onto the probe tips, you have an unaesthetic gap between the metal pin and the red insulation (1 mm big), which also could be a problem if the probe tip with the pin remains hanged somewhere on the rim of an uneven hole (I had this problem). Furthermore, there is that black rubber thing where you can store the plastic probe tip covers and the 4 mm metal pins, that was a useful accessory, but at the new model I noticed the problem that one of the metal pins is almost slipping out, while the other one stays in there firmly as expected, so one of the holes is larger than the other one. Last but not least, when you slide the black probe onto the yellow probe (with the red tip), it stays there very loose. When you hold the voltage tester with the probe tips facing the ground, the black probe slips sometimes easily out and falls to the ground. This is not good at all. The original product that I got, had no such problems, I rather had the problem that I needed some force to push the black probe onto the yellow probe, but it was staying there firmly, without sliding out, no matter in which position I was holding the voltage tester.
I am sad to say it, but this was the last Fluke product that I bought. And I made this decision not because of the initial safety problem that remained unnoticed for many years and not because of the long replacement period of the product, but because of the bad quality of the new product. I see that nowadays Fluke is also trying to lower the manufacturing costs (like other manufacturers do), lowering also the quality of their products. I would have preferred to receive only a new cable and replace it myself. The old product also wasn't flawless (like I wrote in one of the other replies), but the new product is worse.