A year or so later I bought one of these 3.5 digit "Pocket calculator" style DMMs at Radio Shack for the princely sum of $19.99 just before Christmas. By this time I'd been working in the High School AV Lab for a while and had some idea what to expect from a DMM; I had already realized that the Heathkit was utterly useless. This little thing was an absolute marvel; even Mr. Basche, who had several DMMs bought by the school and himself, couldn't believe the feature set for only $20.
mnem
How many digits am I holding up?
Weird coincidence. Probably about while you were post that, I was trying to fix mine. It's a bit different though, it has a slider switch and push button. I think it was the first meter I bought. But it quit working properly many years ago.
The obvious problem was that when I set it to the ohms function it just shut off. I figured it was a simple fix, just take it apart and clean the gunk out of the slider switch and it will be fine. I did that, and also cleaned some crud off the battery contacts and figured it would be fine.
Put it back together and now it remains on in the ohms position, but I tested it by hooking it to my bench power supply set to 2.5 volts and it read 1.2 V or so.
Then I found that if I pressed on the front in just the right spot it would jump up and read 2.5 volts like it should. OK, cracked solder joint or something. Except I inspected every joint under my binocular microscope from several lighting angles and couldn't find a single joint that looked bad.
And in the process of taking the thing apart several times, since you can't just test the circuit board out of the case, I managed to break several of the tabs that hold the case together. Tried to glue them back and had an issue with a pressurized super glue tube that belched out everywhere when I opened it, cleaned up that mess, tried to glue the tabs back, resoldered a few joints on the board in the area where pushing on the case made it work, and no dice. Still reads wrong unless I push hard right on where it says "meter." Which is no where near any of the inside switches or contacts for anything. It's actually right where one corner of the big IC is on the circuit board. Figured maybe I could resolder all the pins of the IC in that area, but I decided I had already spent too much time on fixing something I don't need and was taking up way more time than I expected.