Hi, welcome to Tear down! Tuesday We haven't had a multimeter for quite some time, let alone a fluke. So we've got the Fluke 17b multimeter courtesy of Todd from Todd Fun.com Thanks! Todd Uh, you saw this in the mailbag the other day and it's the cheap Ass made in China Fluke. Supposedly designed by the Fluke Group but you know, manufactured to a low price point in China and it's only marketed and sold in China although I Um, have seen reports that it has actually gone into India as well. go figure.

But anyway, it's like it's under a hundred bucks delivered or something like that. I Think it's retail? might be slightly, uh, more than that, but you can certainly get it on the street. Um, some people reported even as little as60 or $70 and well, curious to see what's inside this thing. Does it live up to the fluke reputation? Is it as good as a fluke 87? Well, there's only one way to find out.

You know what we say here on the E blog? don't turn it on, take it apart and here it is and we'll Benchmark it against the Classic Fluke 875, the pretty much the industry standard uh meter and the the main meter that fluke one of the main meters fluke made their reputation on and they still do. Let's have a look, tear it down see what the build quality is like inside cuz outside it it feels just like a fluke. It's robust and rugged. The plastic.

the quality of plastic feels good, the rain switch seems you know reasonable and if we try and have a look at the quality of the Plastics here, the 87 certainly. Uh, which is this one here compared to the Uh 17b on the left there. the quality of the Plastics it it just it, you know. I'm no plastics expert, but uh, from experience the Fluke P plastic just seems like a a B.

like like it's probably an impact resistant polymer plastic. I'm not sure if the 17b is, it just seems to be a different type. And it's not just the uh finish either. It's all right.

let's get into the screws here. these will be uh, self tappers. no doubt. they cly feel like self tappers.

There we go. no difference, uh there there? I don't Oh yeah, they're similar thread. We'll compare the threads later. I Don't think they're the same as the 875 though.

but uh yeah. I'm not surprised that they're using self tappers there at all. It's good enough for the Fluke 87. so I guess they figure it's good enough for this 17b made in China Wouldn't it be ironic if? uh, this one actually had nice metal threaded insert screws? Anyway, the 875 is quite an old Uh model.

This is interesting actually. um, just really noticed this. They got this recess here which uh I don't know what's designed to go into there. Um, there doesn't seem to be anything matching on the uh oh, that's okay.

now that's the holder. Yep, all right, that's the uh just the recess for the magnetic hanger holder in there, which you didn't get with it, by the way. So let's try and open it. I Don't think the battery has to come out, so a too easy look at that.

Beautiful and the initial reaction upon opening this is that they've done a really good job of it for such, you know, a lowcost meter. It's certainly, uh, certainly very well laid out and it looks very well built. I Mean it's built down into price as we'll go into uh, seeing a few things, which, uh, make that happen. but so they're doing all the right things here.

We've got um HRC fuses, which we'll get into not as, uh, good as the 87 of course, but at least they're there. We've got a Um input protection the large input protection resistor. It looks like a high voltage, uh, network of 1206 resistors there, all in series. We've got um Ms on the input.

looks like three of them. I'm not sure if they're all paralleled up. they're probably doing different um, input, uh, ranges and you know they've done a reasonably good job. We've got a chip on board completely uh, epoxy blob there.

obviously room for a secondary, uh, quad flap pack footprint there. I Guess it depends on which one they can can get this week perhaps? I Don't know if anyone else has a 7 m. open it up and let us know if you actually have a Qfp footprint device or maybe that was during development or something like that. and then when they went into uh, high volume high volume production, they probably went for the Uh chip on board.

Like that, you can, uh, see, it's a multi-layer uh board and uh, you can see the shielding they've put underneath all of the main circuitry up here. of course. I'm a big fan of the battery contacts directly on like that. That's much better than the Uh 9V battery snap in the old design Fluke 87 it's really fluke 87's really showing its age there, but you know there's no wiring uh in this thing at all of course, which is excellent.

and it's lacking the thick film resistor uh, hybrid, the Precision resistor divider which will get into when we look at the Uh 875 of course, but that's that's what you'd expect. You know, this is um, you know, only a sub1 class instrument. It's not going to use a Um fluke, you know, high-end Uh Precision resistor Network in it, but they've done a reasonable job. The input Jacks aren't nearly as good as the 87 which we'll get into, but generally, at first glance this looks like a very well-designed and built $100 class multimeter.

Now I'll start off with the 10 amp fuse here and it is a little fuse Uh branded 11 amp Um HRC fuse with a 20 ker amp interrupting current and that's a the basically the same. It's a different brand, but it's still a good brand. but it's the same as what's used on the Fluke 875. Excellent.

But if you compare that to the Fluke 875 here, they do actually have um, some blast Shields separating that and also, uh, keeping it in place from sliding out because there's nothing on the Um 1B here to stop this uh fuse vibrating loose and actually not making contact. It's very unlikely to happen, but in theory it's possible. And on the milliamp side, we don't have the same uh 20 Kamp interrupting current fuse as you do on the 875 so they have C cut cost there a bit, but it's a CRA brand. um, fast acting uh ceramic, uh 500 milliamp? uh fuse? you know they're sort of.

They're almost high rupture capacity I Don't actually know what the interrupting Uh current of this one is, but it's certainly better than a cheapo glass fuse. More than good enough on this class instrument. Now, as for the 10 amp current shunt here, Uh, it's pretty ordinary, but I've seen a lot worse. It's certainly not like the Uh tapped one used on the Fluke 87 and and you can see the Fluke 87 one down in there.

It's just a much nicer implementation of a 10 amp current shunt with the Uh tapped uh four wire measurement like that coming off the side. And for the AC coupling cap, it's a weer brand MKS 1000 Vol 10. Uh, narad, they haven't skimped on the brand there at all. And as for the input resistors here, they've got 5 200k 126ers in series like that.

The reason they've done that is to uh, give a high voltage resistor instead of using a single one meeg resistor. They've gone for 5 200ks in series, which uh, increases the voltage threshold across the entire resistor. So they certainly, um, haven't skimped there at all. They could have just used the one Mega and relied upon the uh, you know, the the poor um, uh voltage, uh breakdown, the creepage distance between a single 1206 like that or two of them or something like that.

But no, they've gone to the effort to put five in there. The input the there I don't recognize the symbol or the brand. it's R112 and the MS here are marked TVR 911 Once again, are not something I recognize. but uh, they look like they can do the business and down around this circuitry.

here. We have a linear technology LT 1097 by the looks of it and that's a Precision Opam. So they've used one of the most expensive brands in the business linear Tech They're probably getting it very cheap, but uh, still, they haven't skimped there. And here we have a Texas Instruments uh, 74, HC 148 a priority encoder there.

We've got our main Crystal over there. What is that? 4 mahz uh, dries the processor this will Pro you know, don't ask me what uh uh chip they got under there I Got no idea I could attempt to, uh, probe it of course, but that would, uh, take quite a significant uh amount of time. but you could maybe work it out from the uh pinout if you, uh, know your um, various multimeter chipsets. So if anyone wants to have a crack at that, and uh, figure out which uh chipset that possibly is and uh, which means we can possibly mod this thing and please go for it.

Now this meter, um shows its Heritage in the original Fluke 19 from more than a decade ago and that the fluke 9 was uh, fluke. First attempt at a Chinese made multimeter and it failed. Uh, dismally a ton of them out in the field just uh, failed. I don't think there's uh, many left.

uh, you know, working these days and um, that I believe, um, used to use the chipset out of the fluke 87. they just leveraged it. Um, but this one is clearly not doing that. So they've used some other, presumably, um, off-the-shelf multimeter chipset.

And of course, one of the things you'll notice on this meter is the multitude of trim pots, adjustment trim pots. There's five there, and there's another three over here. eight total trim pots, and of course, a meter Like the Fluke 87, of course, doesn't have any trim pots, at all. It's all electronic.

uh Clos case calibration and all that sort of stuff. So you know this clearly shows. its um, you know, the Hallmarks of uh of being you know, a $50 or $100 class multimeter in that respect. But uh, certainly the solder quality on this thing is, uh, first class I mean barring the Uh 10 amp current shunt there, but that's um, very common for these.

Um, uh, I Believe you know these Nikome resist. It's probably a Nyome resistance wire or something like that, so that's very common. It's not, actually, um, a bad joint on there. That's just the way that they often, uh, form on these current shunts.

Uh, you know. But apart from that, the soering quality is excellent. The build quality is, uh, quite excellent for you know, this class of instrument. No, you know, well above the pack.

So where have they saved cost on this thing? Well, you know. seen a few things already in terms of the 500 milliamp fuse there, for example. but the other one is, of course, the input. Jacks And if you take a look at them, they're just.

you know, classic. Uh. one hung low brand? uh, you know. multimeter input Jacks The plastic receptacle here is molded into the main case and there's a uh, threaded metal insert there, of course, molded into the plastic itself and they've used a screw there.

Um, doesn't look like there's any Shake proof washer under that with just the bent metal going down to the PCB at the bottom. Um, and they started this I believe that's identical to the Uh Fluke uh, 19 of, uh, a decade ago. but anyway, that's very synonymous with Um cheap meters. There's nothing in that bad with it.

It's um, but it's not in the same class as the ones on the Fluke 87. And if you take a look at the Classic Fluke 87, of course they have a fully custom uh input jack. uh, molded enclosure like this that would be high quality impact resistant polymer or something like that. They've got the O-ring seal around here to keep out uh, dust and uh, moisture from getting into the meter and it, You know it really is a different Um class of input jack there and you'll notice the uh, you know, the high voltage, um isolation slot cutouts between each connector.

You know there's no real contest there at all. but this is, you know, Don't get me wrong, this is certainly um, adequate. and I just took that screw out and it really I had to put a lot of force on that to get that out and then it went snap and then it. uh, unscrewed.

But um, as I suspected, there is no um uh Shake proof washer on there at all. But if you have a look at the input jacks down in there, they are a nice solid input jack. They're not actually split like they are on the 875 input jack um, sens in, but they're uh, you know they're certainly solid enough. Good enough for this, uh, price class of instrument.

Now you might notice on those uh, what look like gold um pads there that they're uh, tarnished. They're fairly well tarnished and I've actually scraped away a bit of the uh pad there and it's certainly much shinier there. And I don't think that's gold plated I think that might even be bare copper there. That's why it's actually, uh, tarnished.

If we compare that with the Fluke 875 over here, you can see the gold pads here, but it's got a similar, sort of um, bare uh copper uh pad there on the boards. Now, of course, another place that they've skimped is the shielding because you'll notice that there's no removable uh metal shield on this. There's no uh spring which comes up to a shielded um, you know, foil, uh, insert in the back of the case or anything like that. um, as opposed to the Fluke 87 which will show you.

although as I pointed out, you can see the uh, um, the uh, ground plane shielding under on on the inner layer, on the board, under all the main circuitry there. But in terms of like, just the overall shielding, the input uh circuitry, it's um, it's just not there whereas the Fluke 87 of course has the uh metal shielding on the back like that. and I I actually don't quite know why I'm comparing you know this class of instrument the 875 to this, you know, made in China um one which is, you know, a quarter or a fifth of the cost or something like that, um, or even, uh, less and uh, and of course, doesn't come with a lifetime warranty. But anyway, it gives us a benchmark to what we're uh, comparing to.

and they've decided to go with the uh cheap PCB mounted uh, piso there as opposed to the Fluke 875 which has, you know, the beautiful um piso ceramic Um buzzer on the back with the nice goldplated spring terminals. Beautiful, and although you can get reasonably loud versions of these, that, uh, most likely um, explains the piss week continu M buzzer in this thing if you heard if you watch the mail bag I demonstrated that compared to the Fluke 87, no contest, this one's a shocker. And here's a comparison of the two boards side by side I've EXT fully extracted the Uh Fluke 875 board uh, outer here. and of course, one thing we're going to look at is the resistor hybrid Network here because that is of course what's lacking on virtually all um, you know, multimeters.

In this sort of class, you really have to step up to the you know, 0. 5% uh, or better you know, really expensive uh class multimeters before you start getting that uh resistor hybrid there. so you know in this case, we' got the Uh trimmers and just you know, pretty bul standard ordinary stuff and the 875 has fluke branded uh stuff there. But if we have a look at the the thick film resistor hybrid, there it is that's actually a Precision resistor divider and uh, these are actually, um, you know, reasonably, uh, expensive and well qualified components and you simply do not find them in the $50 or $100 even the 200.

Sometimes the $200 class uh meters you you just don't get them and that's what's missing in the you know, uh 17. be here and of course you would expect it to be missing cuz that's you know they can't afford to include an expensive Precision low drift uh, resistor input divider like that. So because and effectively, you don't need it because the performance you get in one of these 0.5% class multimeters, you can just use all standard parts and your drift is going to be perfectly acceptable. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with uh, not having one of those I wouldn't have expected one in here and I would have called them crazy Overkill if they did use it.

Now taken the board out. let's have a look at the backside of it and uh, there's a few things of note here. One is that they've actually, uh, greased it up. You can see all the grease all around there, so they've obviously decided that, uh, they needed to grease this sucker up for good operation.

Another interesting thing to note is the shape of the soft button contact pads in there. and if we look at the fluke 87 five, look at that. They're identical. So that really goes to show that it does look like the same design team um, using probably the same component Library have uh laid out the Fluke 7 board so it looks like they, you know most likely haven't outsourced this thing.

It's done by the same group as the 875 I would suspect cuz that's identical and that's not a coincidence. And that's the Locking clip on the back of the Rain switch on the 875. and if you have a look at the 7 m here, very similar. Construction in terms of the retention clip there and I've popped it off and you can see all the grease in there and the gold plating on those pads.

looks, uh, decent quality I Don't think they've skimped there. And the back of the Uh Rain switch is a um, classic uh, two, uh, dual contact UM spring Arrangement So let's compare that to the 875. Well, the 875 is different of course being that there's no grease in there. But and the um uh contact Arrangement is uh, different as well.

They use a four uh Leaf terminal system as opposed to the two Leaf terminal contact one on the 7B. But really? I mean you know I'm certainly not going to complain about that at all. That rain switch looks pretty good. Clearly, it's a, you know, the fluke Heritage There, it looks pretty much identical in terms of Uh implementation there with the Uh plastic with the um, you know, the moving arms on there that sort of snap into the next location.

the 875, which is the one on the right. Here it differs in that it's got a metal um uh insert in the middle, there just a metal post and uh, the 7B doesn't so they you know, skimped a little bit, but it's a similar Arrangement You can see the same design and the same Heritage there. Clearly, this meter is clearly done by the fluke. Design Group But I've got to say that the 875 implementation is a nicer one.

It just feels a little bit better, but there's there's not much in it. I mean the uh, Certainly, the rain switch on the 7B gets a thumbs up. and the metal inserts on those look deep. and uh, these posts feel really solid too.

I Don't uh, have any problem with those at all? I can't budge those. they feel really nice and well molded. I like it. and in terms of other Uh aspects of the design, they do have a very deep uh tongue and Groove arrangement for the case like that for uh, blast shielding for.

you know if this thing, uh, if you connect it to a high energy uh circuit, it's going to uh, that's going to help really contain the blast in there. There you have it, that's the Fluke 17b and what do I think? Well, I'm actually very impressed. This is probably the best built Uh meter in this price class. um, probably by far and it's not surprising.

it's got the Fluke name on it. It's what you'd expect. What would you think of when you were going to buy you know, a sub $100 fluke. What would you expect them to get right? Well, Fluke are know of course for their legendary um input protection.

You know safety and you certainly get that on this. This is a Cat 2 600 volt cat, 1,000 volt rated input and the input front end is designed properly and uh, you know it's well protected. They haven't skimped there at all. Um, they have skimped on the places you'd expect uh, them to.

On this class of instrument. you don't expect the thick film uh Precision resistor hybrid in there. You don't expect any custom fluke. uh Parts they're probably just using an off-the-shelf uh chipset.

same as uh, everyone else with this, uh, same functionality. they're skimped on The buzzer are a bit I don't like that, but you know, um, they've skipped in terms of uh, you know calibration of this thing. there's they're just using off-the-shelf pots. It's probably you know, straight out of the app.

note this imp implementation for uh, this particular chipset. whichever it one they're using skimped a little bit on the 10 amp current shant and on uh, the 500 milliamp fuse. They've skimped a bit on the input Jacks isn't as well. There's no, you know, o-ring sealing around the jacks or rubber sealing around the base of the case.

and they've left out a true RMS uh converter as well. That uh, saves them a significant Penny on the bill of materials I'm sure. And of course they skimped on the rubber holster. This is really lightweight and flimsy, you know, and it doesn't have the impact protection absorbers in there that the really, you know, much thicker and much, uh, stiffer 87 five holster has and that's where they've um, you know, skimped on the price of this thing.

But you and that's exactly what you'd expect when you think of, um, you know a a cheap $100 made in China fluke. It delivers exactly as promised and I like it it should be should be. Don't quote me, but uh, I get a good vibe from this thing. It's all about the vibe and uh, you know I think this will, um, last a long time.

It's uh, certainly worth the uh dollar investment. But um, as you'll probably see in the review, it is poor. Very poor. uh bang per Buck this thing.

Um, you know it's a very basic meter, but if you want a very wellb built basic meter with that Fluke name on the front, it's a winner. So there you go. There's a tear down of the fluke 17b digital multimeter available only in China and India I Believe and thanks to Todd from Todd fund for donating this for the tear down and review. And if you like the uh, tear down if you like tear down Tuesday please give it a big thumbs up.

And if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eev blog. Forum the link is below in the description. Catch you next time.