Reverse Engineering PCB Expertise

Ageing assets are a big challenge in the oil and gas sector. Many rigs still rely on control systems designed decades ago, and when critical boards fail, replacements aren’t exactly sitting on the shelf.

One rig operator turned to ABL Circuits to solve this very problem. The task? Recreate 17 different rack-mounted PCBs originally designed in the 1980s - boards that controlled essential safety systems including valves, sprinklers and detectors.

Using our reverse engineering expertise, each board demanded 40–50 hours of meticulous work. The original documentation was a patchwork of oversized paper drawings, not all of which matched the ageing PCB samples. Our engineers had to unravel these discrepancies and reproduce designs that were faithful to the originals, down to every last component.

The result: a complete set of fully functional replacement boards, manufactured and tested to ABL’s exacting standards, giving the rig operator the reliability they needed to keep vital emergency systems online.