Amp repair cost — is this right?

This is 3-4 hours tops for someone experienced with the equipment and product knowledge. For someone who is not it could be 8 hours though with the right equipment I have no idea how I would spend 8 hours replacing 18 caps. Setting bias takes minutes and you work on something else while it is warming up.  Desoldering a cap, cleaning the holes, and resoldering should be a few minutes per cap. Assembly and disassembly time and overhead for parts ordering packing and unpacking must be considered.

Equivalent or given today's parts better components as pointed out is a few hundred dollars at best.

There is overhead for parts and also overhead costs in case they break it. $800 is reasonable, $1300 isn't. That sounds like a premium price for someone to "figure it out".

$10K? !! 


My UBER driver has 2-3x that invested in his business for a point of perspective. I hope you have IR on that hot air reflow. $10K is also about $3K/yr. in tax write-off, another perspective to be weighed against a full time repair shop with 6 figure billing.


Digikey ships out at 6pm Pacific and it is there by noon the next day.  Odds are you don't have all those large electrolytic capacitors in stock so you were going to be ordering any way. Typical turnaround on repair is 1-2 weeks on electronics, so the 1 day turn on parts should not be an issue and customers understand parts need to be ordered.


The op stated 18 capacitors replaced, it appears some touch up of solder joints, though that could just be resoldering the capacitors.  Not good to just randomly resolder joints. That can create more problems than it solves. 


The op already paid a $160 estimate fee to locate the problem.  It is the manufacturer recommended service location, hence they have access to the manufacturer for schematics and other service information.


The approximately size of the capacitors was noted above and only some of them are large, and they are not 40-60,000uF, they are smaller and as noted the total cost is likely in the $200 range.


None of what you said negates that for someone skilled with the right tools, and the manufacturers recommended shop, so they should not be guessing, but just doing the work, that this is a 3-4 hour job, plus overhead for parts sourcing, packing, unpacking, admin overhead, etc.

Based on the comments I will take that bet. A bunch show evidence of understanding the work just fine. It's the ones that go off on a tangent with esoteric replacement parts that make me pause.