I've got three Chinese verynears. Two are from Lidl and have given good service over several years and the new one is from Netto hand hasn't seen much use yet. The new one has the annoying habit of turning the display on if it's moved, so it spends most of its time in its box with the brake on.
The other two get used quite a lot for rough measurements, checking screw sizes etc. One of them had a fight with the concrete floor last year and lost its depth measuring probe. That didn't cause any problems, since the other one could be used for the odd occasion when I needed rough depth measurements.
Today I found another way to break them.
I'd had a lathe gearbox on the bench for a week, resulting in a spreading layer of ATF on the bench. Not because the gearbox was leaking as such. just because it was full and tipped over a few degrees away from horizontal, so the ATF was weeping out of the oil filler.
The affected verynear ended up face down in the shallow layer of ATF. It appears that the buttons are moulded from silicone rubber with a conductive bar inside them to make contact with the terminals on the PCB. The silicone rubber on one of the buttons has laid in the ATF long enough to swell to the point that it won't release when pressed in.
I tried soaking it in ether to displace the oil and shrink it back to its original size after drying, but unfortunately, the rubber has started falling apart. The verynear currently works quite well with two buttons. You just have to poke a bit of wire into the hole to turn it off. I might get enthusiastic enough to make a replacement one day, but I suspect that it'll eventually get used as spares for the other one or just thrown away :-(
Mark Rand RTFM