Games Like Repair Guru

Nothing on the bench is scripted

A machine that comes in is a real circuit, built out of real components, with something genuinely wrong with one of them. There is no hidden answer and no list of steps. There is a resistor that has drifted, a capacitor that has gone leaky, a solder joint that lets go once the board is warm — and the reading your meter gives you is what that circuit would actually do. Twenty-six machines, from a desk lamp to a home organ. Twenty-seven kinds of component. Five hundred and fifteen different things that can be wrong, and every one of them can be found and fixed.

Halve the chain, then halve what is left

Every machine is a chain of blocks with a test point between each pair. Full signal at one point and nothing at the next means the fault is in the block between them. Probe in the middle rather than at the end, and every measurement halves what is left to search. That is the whole method, and the game never does it for you.

Most faults are shy

A dry joint is perfect cold and lets go at eighty per cent warmth. A worn control only crackles while somebody is turning the knob. A cracked track needs a knock. Half the faults in this trade do not exist until you switch the machine on and leave it running — so you watch it, listen to it, and put the thermal camera on it. The machine on the bench shows you what it is doing. It stutters, it goes feeble, it smokes. What you hear is mixed live from the same readings the notes are written from, so it is evidence rather than decoration.

Find the fault before you buy the part

Anyone can replace a circuit board one component at a time, and everyone who does it goes broke doing it. Parts come out of a drawer that starts nearly empty. A day is seven hours and every action spends some of them. Wages come out of the till in the morning whether the day earned them or not. Reputation is slow to earn and quick to lose: two points for a clean repair, nine off for one that comes back. So test it warm, test it cold, knock it, and only then hand it over.

The other half of the trade

Buy them broken, mend them, sell them on. There is a salvage yard full of house clearances described the way the seller sees them, which is to say badly. There is a shopfront, a licence that says how much you may list, and an advertising agency that will sell you search ranking by the week. What sells is ranking and reputation multiplied together, which means the bench is still the thing that matters.

And a shop to run

Kit that changes what can be known rather than what can be bought: a better scope resolves one per cent instead of five, a logging meter reads every test point in one pass, a bench supply takes "is it the mains?" off the table either way. Three people you can put on the books, each of whom has to earn their wages. A specialism that builds up in whatever you spend your days on, and brings you more of it.

The details