It's also worth pointing out that by the '80s,
some of the boards
required diagnostics and equipment that it wasn't practical for every
Hmm... I suspect I could find most common faults, and fix them, with the
tools I take to HPCC meetings. This is a fairly small toolkit (contents :
scrrewdrivers from 0.8mm to 8mm, nutdrivers, allen keys, torx keys,
tempertature controlled soldering iron, solder sucker, solder wick,
pliers, strippers, cutters, pin vice, spanners (AF, BA, metric) Leatherman
tool, logicdart, DMM)
field service guy to carry. A lot of companies did as
the one I worked
for: field service engineers were trained (quite carefully) to pin a
That word 'trained' always worries me. You can't train somebody to do
faultfinding in my experience (just as you can't train people to be good
electronic designers, or musical composers, or...). Yes, there are things
you have to know, but beyond that, you have to have experience, and
really understand what's going on. This is _not_ what you get from the
service training course from what I've read.
problem down to a board, replace that, and send the
faulty one to their
central workshop (ours was in Stoke) where it would be repaired and
tested. There's nothing wrong with swapping a board providing you know
which to swap (implying "why", at some level) and the faulty one gets
Problem with that is that to really _know_ which module to swap you have
to have really found the fault, almost to component level. And as we all
know, it's finding the fault that takes the time. Soldering in a
replacement chip -- even an SMD one -- takes only a few minutes at most.
fixed (assuming it's economic).
-tony