There are times when you amass a lot of weapons which you would like to sell to raise caps, but they have been worn down to a low value. Or you may get a weapon you want to use but it is in poor condition and not doing maximum damage. Either way, you have options for repairing your weapons. (Note: Weapons worn down to 0 condition cannot be repaired by you.)
One way to repair a weapon is by mating it with another weapon of the same type. The problem is that you may not have enough such weapons to bring your weapon up to good condition. In fact, the game limits how much you can repair weapons depending on your Repair Skill.
Another way is find a vendor who repairs gear. The problem with them is that they charge a fortune. Another problem is that almost all of them are also limited in how much they can repair things.
A third way is to use Weapon Repair Kits. More about them below.
The best way to repair weapons is to let ED-E do it. There's no cost and weapons can ultimately be repaired to 100% condition.
One catch is that ED-E from Primm is not pre-equipped to offer this service. You have to go to Lonesome road, activate the Lonesome road's ED-E, and give him a circuit board that gives him the service.
The good news is that it is free, you can get it in a couple of minutes, and when you leave LR and get Primm's ED-E, the board will automatically be installed when you activate ED-E.
In our walkthrough, we immediately do this after leaving Goodsprings and from there, we go to Primm and get its ED-E upgraded for repairing weapons.
Weapon Repair Kits can only improve the condition of a weapon about a 4th of its 100% condition at a time. The same is true for ED-E. The disadvantage of WRKs is that it may be hard to get all the things needed to make them. Say that you have 8 weapons you want to repair to 100% and you have 8 WRKs. It may take all of them to fix up just 3-4 weapons.
ED-E doesn't require any supplies to repair weapons, but the disadvantage with ED-E is that he can only do one repair per in-game day. However, you can Wait or sleep 18-24 in-game hours (or less, but see below) after each repair and then do another one. One repair takes about 30 seconds in the real world.
When I have a lot of weapons to sell, instead of doing the all at once, I do enough to get all the caps from the merchant, then I repair some more which takes long enough in-game for the merchant's cash to be replenished.
With 8 weapons to repair an average of 2-3 times each, it may take 15-30 real-world minutes to repair them all, which is a bit of a nuisance. If you had unlimited Weapon Repair Kits, you could repair them all in a couple of minutes, but it can be difficult to enough find components to repair just 2-3 to 100% with WRKs, much less 8 or more.
When I didn't know better, I would repair weapons with spare weapons of the same type, but it always bothered me that the repaired weapon's value was less than its initial value plus the value of those used to repair it.
Say you have 3 Nail guns with the highest being in about 50% condition and the other two being less. If you use the 2nd and 3rd ones to repair the first one, at the very best (limited by your Repair skill) you will have one upgraded Nail gun worth 5000 caps at most and the other two Nail guns are gone. but if you let ED-E repair all three, you can have three weapons each worth 5000 caps.
Disclaimer: While the game will show that you have three weapons worth 5000 each, what you actually get when you sell them will be less, depending your Barter rating. Still, the principle is the same.
Repairing a weapon is not always worth the effort. If a weapon is at 50% condition and its value is, say, 150 caps or less, the time and effort spent repairing it to 100% only gets you another 150 caps, so I don't repair such weapons to sell, just to use.
A grenade launcher is an example. It doesn't have a very high value even at 100%, but if I'm fighting a pack of Legion Assassins, I'm not worried about its value. I want it in as good condition as possible.
Another exception to having ED-E repair weapons is the Varmint Rifle in Primm. Not only does it not have a high 100% value, but in Primm you get a ton of them to use for repairing yours.
ED-E works well with Early Bird for which I routinely Wait for 6 a.m. whenever it gets to be around noon. I usually have some weapon that needs repairing, so Early Bird provides lots of opportunity to do it without it being any extra trouble since I'm Waiting anyway.
Also, if you have gotten a lot of weapons from some mission. Whatever merchant you go to probably won't have enough caps to buy all those weapons in 100% condition and it usually takes 3 days for their caps to get replenished. That is about the same amount of time to have ED-E repair 1 or 2 weapons to 100%.
Here are the steps for ED-E to repair a weapon:
- When having ED-E repair a weapon, first equip it so that you are sure you are repairing the right one.
- Talk to ED-E to see if he is ready to repair it (i.e.: he's waited a day).
- If ED-E does not offer to repair it, Wait until 6 a.m. then talk to him again.
- Select the line to repair the weapon. He only takes a second to do a repair.
- Look at the weapon's CND gauge on the screen to see if it's at 100%.
If not, then Wait 24 hours and repair it again.
Possible Glitches:
- Save 25% of your Wait time for repairs?
I noticed that if the game time was around noon when ED-E did a repair, I could just Wait until 6 a.m. (18 hours) instead of 24 hours, then I would wait 24 hours after that to get to the next 6 a.m.
This made me wonder what the least time was that I needed to wait. It turned out that it was around 18 hours, so I did 5 or 6 repairs in a row Waiting 18 hours each time and it worked fine. I was saving 25% of the time it takes to do a bunch of repairs. Could a Nobel Prize be far off?
Then I tried to do another repair and ED-E didn't offer. I figured that I lost track and hadn't Waited, so I Waited 18 hours and he still didn't offer. I tried a dozen "fixes" and no joy. Eventually, I did the ultimate fix and powered down the game for a good 20 seconds and then when I started it back up, going through all the graphics and menus, it was back to normal.
I had already noticed that while in theory I was saving 25% of the Wait every time, it didn't seem like much, but after what I just went through, I decided it definitely wasn't worth the aggravation.
Since then, I have found that if I wait, say, from 3 p.m. to 6 a.m. (15 hours), it works fine, but after that I return to the 24 hour Waits rather than chance a lockup.
- Disappearing Repaired Weapons:
The first time I used ED-E (in Lonesome Road) on the Nail Guns, two of them showed in my Weapons list, but after I repaired them both to 100%, only one of them showed and it didn't have the usual "(2)" after the name to indicate that there were two of the same weapon in the same condition.
When I clicked on it to sell it, the Nail Gun disappeared from my list and only one showed up in the commisary's list and it only showed that I was owed the caps for one.
So I cancelled that sale and got out of the commisary. I clicked on Nail Gun and on X to drop it. One dropped and one was still in the list, so I sold that, picked up the second one and sold it, and all was well.
Since then, this has happened every time I repaired multiples of the same weapon type to 100%.
The latest incident (Dec. 2024) was when I had gotten 6 Recharger Pistols:
The first time I looked at the Rechargers, the top one was on a line by itself, the next two lines each showed "(2)", and the next line was by itself.
I fast travelled to the 188 vendor and there was only one Recharger line with no numbers after it. I clicked on it, expecting that one would be sold and the other five would still be in my list.
Instead, only one showed in the trader's list and none in mine, and the money being deducted from the trader was for just one. The other five were just gone. I cancelled the transaction.
I spent a long time trying to get this to work, including giving some to Boone and/or ED-E, dropping them all on the ground and picking them back up, and a lot more ideas.
I finally got all 6 to show up in my list again as shown.
This time I clicked X to drop one, then I closed the list and could see it on the ground. I repeated this, dropping one at a time, until I had all 6 on the ground.
Then I picked up one at a time and sold it until all 6 were sold. Note that this didn't work when I dropped all 6 at once.
This may seem like more trouble than it's worth, but believe me, it's worth a LOT of caps, and the trouble CAN be minimized. The total value of 6 Rechargers is over 15600 caps.
First of all, before repairing multiples of the same weapon type, save so that if things do go wrong, you can get everything back the way it was.
Secondly, don't repair more than three of the same weapon types to 100% at the same time. Most vendors don't have enough caps to buy them all anyway.
With three, repair one and give it to Boone, then repair the second one and give it to ED-E and then repair and sell the third one. After you've sold yours, get one back, sell it, then get the last one back and sell it.
With more than three, repeat the above steps for three at a time.
Repairing Gobi Sniper to 100%:
A web page claimed that a Gobi could not be repaired to 100%.
When I said that ED-E could do it, I was told to prove it.
I hope this picture is sufficient:
Of course, anyone could prove it by getting the Gobi and following the instructions on this page.