The author derives a general explicit formula and presents an heuristic algorithm for solving Baker’s model. The examples show that this new approximate solution procedure for determining near optimum inspection intervals is more accurate than the ones suggested by Chung (1993) and Vaurio (1994), and is more efficient computationally than the one suggested by Hariga (1996). The construction and solution of the simplest profit model for an exponential failure distribution were presented in Baker (1990), and approximate analytical results were obtained by Chung (1993) and Vaurio (1994). The author will therefore mainly devote the following discussion to the problem of further approximating optimum inspection intervals.