NO PROBLEM FOUND
REPAIR BILLING POLICY

It is Galco's company policy to bill the quoted repair price in instances where no problem was found on the item sent for repair.  The reason behind this policy is that our technicians spend more time, on average, troubleshooting good units than they do on defective ones.  This may sound backwards, but when you look closely at the situation it makes sense.

For example, a technician receives two identical DC drive control boards for repair.  He does a static check on each of the units.  On the first he finds a defective transistor and replaces it.  On the second he finds no hard faults, so he performs additional testing including curve tracing the power semiconductors and running an ATE test on the IC’s.  Still no fault is discovered.  As a precautionary measure, he replaces common fail components such as aged capacitors on both boards.

Both boards are inserted in Galco's test fixture and run on a motor load.  Since a hard fault was found on the first board it is burned in for an hour to ensure functionality.  The second board also runs for one hour without faulting but, we have not yet eliminated an intermittent fault condition.  This board is run for an extended period during which the technician applies heat to the board and then a chemical coolant to stress the board under adverse conditions.  He also flexes the board to try to identify any intermittent foil paths.

After this testing process he makes the determination that both boards are now functional and can be shipped with Galco's comprehensive warranty coverage.  It is obvious that considerably more time was spent on the "no problem found" board.  We, as a repair company, are required to assume that all items sent to us are defective. Before we send an item back to our customers and call it "good" we have to be sure that we have tested the item sufficiently to put our name and reputation behind this determination.

For this reason, we have implemented a policy in which we do not charge extra for the additional labor, nor do we discount items in which no faults are found.