Fluke spare parts availability (and cost) (#R22)
Is it a rant, or is it an editorial note? Well, it’s probably a rant.
Spare parts. Fluke spare parts, to be precise.
Earlier this year, I sniped a Fluke 187 off eBay. 150€ delivered, really minor blemishes, probes included, fully functional except for the tilting bail. A fully functional unit is about double that, so I consider this a bargain. The stand is shown in the photo right besides this post, someone simply broke the two clips that make it hold onto the main unit. Mechanically super simple stuff.
Fixing the tilt is of interest to me, as using it sitting flat on the table only is sometimes annoying. But it’s not top priority, the Fluke is only a secondary unit to me, the Greenlee DM-860A = Brymen BM869s is still my main meter.
There are 3D printed third-party replacement parts available on eBay, and the STL file is also somewhere on the interwebs. These are like 15€ and the file is free, so owning a printer, that’s an easy choice for me. But I’m curious about the cost of getting the real part.
So I asked.
First stop: The Fluke website. Fluke uses some ChatGPT-based bot to sort customer requests into “duh, that’s obvious” and “wtf? ask a human” categories, and apparently asking for a spare part gets you into the latter. That is somewhat to be expected, since I found a list of available parts in one of the service manuals, but no pricing list, be it US or even a local one. And that already smells of laughably inflated list prices (LeCroy does offer a 50% discount right away, so not buying anything from them just for that reason), combined with Dave’s evergreen “if you have to ask the price, you probably cannot afford it” world view about professional gear.
So, second stop, I navigated their pages to find the German customer support representative. I have no idea why there are two of them (no other country in their loong list of partners and reps has that), what distinguishes them, who should be contacted – so I went with the first, generic address.
Third stop: The actual mail support. Asking for pricing on Fluke spare part 659026. This is what I got:
Paraphrasing very loosely, it goes like this:
As OEM, we only sell to distributors. Want a Fluke? You’re asking the wrong guys here, go, ask someone else from this list
And the attached link redirects to https://www.fluke.com/de-de, which isn’t even the deep link of the page where I got their contact info from in the first place. Well, thanks for nothing.
Stop four. Choosing some company from the “where-to-buy” list, classic online sellers:
There’s six of them:
- Bürklin: Bürklin only recently decided to sell to private individuals, they were B2B only up until at least 2019 with the small exception of the shop at their central office in Munich, which is a 2x 300km trip away. Never bought anything from them in my life.
- Conrad: Known to be a “pharmacy”, local slang for being the most expensive competitor of them all. Would be a fallback if needed.
- Distrelec: Former sister company of Reichelt, now a sister company of RS. Also switched from pure B2B to selling to everyone a short while ago. While checking that out, the registration page made my browser go apeshit, so no ty.
- Farnell: B2B only. Over the years, there were at least two B2C resellers, none of them exist today (would have been interested in their PLA filament clearance sale recently…)
- RS Components: B2B only but once had a B2C store with a subset of products available (apparently still exists)
- Reichelt: Been an on-off customer there for the last, uh, 20 years? So I logged in and asked.
(none of them list the spare part number directly, neither does anyone else in Germany – so this would be special order on all of them)
Reichelt customer support did take a week to give me an answer:
Nope, that item is neither part of our regular range of products, nor can it be ordered from our suppliers (not even on special order – we checked)
Stop five: Large distributors:
Safe to say these are all B2B only, probably with the exception of FEGA that, like Bürklin, has a local office/shop where one can shop certain stocked items. Special order for non-B2B customers: Not gonna happen.
Stop six: Distributors for Industry.
Well, that also sounds pretty B2B-ish to me. Datatec is B2B, but CalPlus allows registration for private customers and I found some forum posts where people have ordered spare parts from them.
So I dropped them a mail, and they replied the next morning. Here’s the deal:
- 659026 is 17.00€ (net)
- minimium order sum is 30.00€
- shipping cost is 12.80€ (net)
- lead time: 3 weeks
I didn’t ask if they just add a fee to reach minimum order sum or the order of other items (second stand, maybe? hard sell, though…) is required, but let’s assume the former: 30.00€ + 12.80€ = 42.80€ net order sum, plus 19% VAT = 50,93€.
For a 20g piece of yellow plastic that is easily user-replaceable and likely breaks sometimes, I think 50€ and three weeks of lead time are quite unacceptable.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m very pleased SOMEONE actually would be down selling this thing to me, a poor idiot that uses professional gear at home. I’m glad Calplus exists and answers to requests of potential customers. But the fact that this yellow tilt/stand actually costs more than one third of the beautiful meter itself is ridiculous, and so is the price of 255€ per kilogram for moulded yellow plastic with a bit of an anti-slip lip at the bottom. Would you fix a saggy trunk lid strut on your 50k car for 15k when there’s new cars available for less than that sum? Yeah, me neither, that sounds excessive. I’ve bought an Aneng 8008 meter with leads and a working stand for 15€ back in 2017…
And so we come to final #7: Guess I’m gonna print this thing myself, and if I ever sell the meter, I’ll include a link to this blog post on why they shouldn’t bother trying to source a genuine Fluke spare part for the broken stand…
eBay search is active though, if a genuine part ever shows up for like 20€, it’ll be mine.
