Yeah, it was very helpful. He could only repair to 64% but it was free so you could keep going back, I'd much rather have a free 64% than an expensive 100%, which is all he repairs to now.
Yeah, those expensive repairs will bankrupt you even if you only have 10% condition gone on certain stuff. I honestly think that somewhere in this game there should be someone at 100 repair that will repair for free. Then again I always hated this repair system ever since Fallout3 but I loved everything else about the game so I kept playing anyway. There should be a perk that you can get that if you have 100 repair skill you should be able to fully repair any and all equipment yourself to max. At first I thought the repair kit was going to be the coolest thing ever because I thought they were going to be like Repair Hammers from The Elder Scrolls in that they'd be cheap, plentiful, and useful. But the amount of items it takes to build a repair kit is way too much for what it does. For all that stuff one repair kit should be able to repair anything you want fully when used up. So I was disappointed with that and someday I hope there will be a Fallout game where the repair system is cool (Fallout1, 2, and Tactics all had unbreakable equipment). Really hate having to carry dead weight for repairs and I really hate how when you get a really rare weapon you end up having to pay huge amounts of caps to get it repaired or completely destroy a perfectly valuable and equally rare duplicate to repair one.