Spent $400 on a used o-scope from eBay and it fixed my intermittent fault in 20 minutes

2 comments

2 Comments

$400 is a lot for a scope, but fixing an intermittent fault in 20 minutes pays for itself real quick. Those random gremlins can eat up hours of guessing and swapping parts, so a tool that shows you exactly what's happening is worth every penny. A good used scope beats buying new any day, especially when it saves you from chasing ghosts in a circuit.

lily3941mo agoMost Upvoted

Read an article in Nuts & Volts last month about a guy who chased a no-start condition for three weekends straight on an old motorcycle, swapped coils, the whole carburetor, even the ignition switch before he finally put a scope on the crank sensor and saw it was dropping a pulse at certain RPMs. Totally would have saved him days if he had one. That's the thing about intermittent faults, they hide until you can actually see the waveform. Makes you wonder how many parts get thrown at problems that a $400 investment could fix in an afternoon.