Hi kaye!
That's all a lot of dough for a friggin control board, and I bet no one around like that fella out in Cali has a better price huh? Yeah once it croaks it's done because of the "Encapsulation" Unless you have a way of getting to the components and troubleshooting them for replacement by getting rid of the stuff they cover the board with if I understand you correctly?
Well, thanks for letting me know because years ago like back in the early eighties, I was an equipment repair person for a distributor in NYC and surrounding areas and they were popular with a few local municipalities in the some of the surrounding suburbs in the Metro area, and back then all I heard was rantin and raving about how quite and dependable they were, and just kept my mouth shut because I really didn't know much about them and I mostly worked on power sources and other equipment that was hooked up to at least 208 single phase and mostly 3 phase 480 primary input power for most of the middle to larger shops...
Most of the engine drives I worked on back in those days were Lincolns and not too many of those and a boat load of Miller machines which always had something or another going wrong with them, so I made the distributor some money on the warranty repairs but not much as you well know...
Most of the money I made for the company was on convincing them to use this mix of gas or these consumables or that FCAW wire... In other owrds anything that had "REPEAT SALES" written all over it and after a while that got real old... I only got excited when it was time to install new equipment and that was only three times a week at most unless we were in the busy season which were 16-18 hrs./ 7 days a week, but some of the systems we installed were really state of the art back then, and now most of them are considered obsolete today!!! Those were some interesting experiences back then. ;)
Respectfully,
Henry