Repair pricing question...

modessitt

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How would you charge for a part that is not available anywhere and must be obtained from another pcb or chassis to make the repair? Say a specific custom chip or linearity coil that is not manufactured anywhere. Pulling it from your spare board means you can never make that board work again unless you do the same thing to ANOTHER board.

When you are charging someone for repair, what would be a fair price? Do you look at similar parts that ARE available and charge that? Do is it matter that your part is used vs new?

For example, say that it's a working K7000A flyback to replace a bad one (even though most would just toss the K7000A and get a real K7000). You can't buy a new K7000A flyback, so do you charge $20 like a regular new K7000 flyback? More? Less? Reasoning?

I was just wondering what people think. Sometimes I find I'm repairing a monitor chassis that needs a specific part that can no longer be had. I have a lot of spare chassis, and don't really want to kill a perfectly good K7400 just to get a small transformer that can no longer be had, but the other option is to just tell the customer, "Sorry, parts aren't available to fix it..."


BTW - this is not in the Repair/Help section because I'm not asking for repair or help. Just opinions of the general arcade public...
 
More.

The part isn't available and you have to rob from the boneyard. I sell custom chips from $5 to $20ea depending on what it is and how hard it is to find.

The only other option is to swap chassis. You can't always swap out a game board.
 
I would charge the general bulk price of the parts board in question for each unobtanium part you have to pull from it.
 
It depends on the part. I charge more for destroying a Taito game board by robbing the custom IC. Since that board has a relatively high value I charge more for the custom. However, the two times I pulled a part off of a K7000a chassis I charge half of the replacement cost of the identical part (i.e. $10 for the flyback).

My normal rule of thumb is 50% for parts from a relatively worthless board and 200% for a board with some value.
 
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