If I decided to attempt to further harden the meter, looking at how they have this front end, it seems like the easiest thing would be to find some replacement parts. So far, no luck in hunting down a drop-in. If you look at the sketch I made of the front end, those resistors connect to the custom IC. Guessing the diodes provided better leakage and breakdown specs. Maybe you could wrap around that diode circuit with a couple of TVSs but it would not be clean. Then again, it's not like it failed at low levels like the older 87Vs, so I am less inclined to modify it.
The Fluke fan boys will be happy again.
That 87V was always a bit odd with how poorly it did compared with all the other Flukes I had looked at. For the 10 people who took the time to vote for seeing it, good on you. I wouldn't have considered running it again.
Still more testing to go but I don't see any reason the 87V will have problems. I may have just jinxed it. Watch the PCB get ground to dust after the MOVs burst into flames.
It would be interesting to know more about why Fluke uses what appears to nickle finish rather than gold of nothing at all. I wonder if that plating the key to why the 17B+ did so well. After 50K full cycles, that meter hardly looked like it had been cycled. Maybe new tooling played a part as well.