Jim
I do not own a SawStop, so I have no horse in this race.
Without seeing the actual circuit boards, I will make some assumptions.
If they are well designed, the life of the board, barring failure, should be 40 years. This would be based on the life expectancy of any tantalum capacitors. Regular electrolytic capacitors should have a life expectancy of 15-20 years.
Resistors and diodes are basically environmentally dependent for their age, but if they were sized properly they should be the last parts to fail. Power transistors, rectifiers ,and voltage regulator chips, would be in the 20+ year range. Any IC type processor chips should also be in the 20+ year range, if not longer.
I have worked on obsolete electronics my entire working career. The first parts to fail are the non tantalum capacitors, followed closely by any IC voltage regualtors. It's not uncommon when a circuit board fails that we replace all of the capacitors and any voltge regulator circuit components and the board "comes back to life".
What can make it hard is if the OEM Vendor, now out of business for 2+ decades, never issued schematics and went in and erased all of the chip data printed on any chip sets. This used to be a common practice. If all of the chip nomenclature is visible, and there are accurate schematics of the electronic control circuitry, repairing the board will be a very real possibility.
I would expect, based on my experience with electronic repair for the past 40 years, that aside from infant mortality, it will be some 20+ years before a "trend" in failure begins to occur. By then who knows what can happen.
I think your fine with the original warranty. Any infant mortality failure should happen while it's still under warranty.
Last edited by Mike Cutler; 09-07-2019 at 7:32 AM.
"The first thing you need to know, will likely be the last thing you learn." (Unknown)