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The drummer in my band is a sewing machine repair tech. His wife owns a largish quilt shop and they sell Bernina. We've been practicing at the shop, and I kee

The drummer in my band is a sewing machine repair tech. His wife owns a largish quilt shop and they sell Bernina. We've been practicing at the shop, and I keep wondering if I should pick up some electronics repair from him- he seems like he does okay with the mechanical stuff but anything electronic is generally out-of-scope for him. In general, it looks like interesting work and I was hoping to get him to teach me, though fortunately the music and audio work has been paying the bills this year. I'm starting to get okay at fixing some kinds of circuits (analog electronics for music), but fortunately I haven't had to dig into that stuff. My assumption would be that it's much cheaper to replace whole boards as is the case with most consumer electronics. But I haven't looked into it, and so I am a bit curious.

whythre 3y ago
With last few decades of Bernina machines in particular, techs are very much incentivized to replace failing boards wholesale. Older machines from the 70s and 80s don’t have the compact machine-built boards; in these you can replace blown capacitors, ect and that’s great. It’s one of the reasons you still have machines in operation 50 years on. The Asian-built boards are usually the point of failure in the new machines (a distant second are sensors, but those also have smaller, simpler boards in em). A few years back Bernina actually lost the ability to claim they were Swiss-manufactured because the electronics were being made in Maylasia (if memory serves, this was back in 2017, I think).