On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:26:28 -0700, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:29:21 +0800 "Den" quickly quoth:
"Larry Jaques" ...\

They're noisy, wasteful, and don't suck as well as they should.

But don't reinvent the wheel when models are available:
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...emnumber=96677
(I'll believe 28.3" of mercury when I see it.)

Better yet, go carbon:
http://tinyurl.com/5susk7 or http://tinyurl.com/6crtmm

Any real vacuum pump will be better vacuum and much more efficient
than an air venturi vacuum pump. An Oil Diffusion unit for
refrigeration is overkill for desoldering, a simple diaphragm or
oilless piston compressor will do nicely.

You can store vacuum from a slow compressor to get the bursts you
need for desoldering, but the tank needs to be either very heavy wall,
a perfect sphere and/or internally reinforced, or they'll collapse.

Unfortunately I'm downunder - surplus stuff is hard to come by & we don't
have a harbour freight!

Ouch! Shipping to/from AU really sucks since everyone doing it adds a
quintuple charge to do so. I thought you had a store like HFT down
there, though. From what I've gleaned here and on the Wreck a few
years ago, much of our HFT/Northern stuff is available in Canada at
Crappy Tire or Princess Auto. I could have sworn that you had a
similar outlet there. How about eBay.au?

Somebody in Oz will find a market in importing and reselling this
stuff, the trick is finding them.

You guys in the states (well some of you at least) seem pretty lucky having
access to surplus gear & stores like harbour freight.

And actual industrial gear like vacuum pumps that need a simple
rebuild, but the MegaCorporate factory that owned it can't be
bothered. They toss it out, someone rescues it and fixes it...

Amen to that. We're triply blessed with Surplus Center, Northern, and
HFT.

And you can often find deals at larger outfits when they realize
that widget's been sitting on the shelf for five years with no hope of
moving at full price. (When it has three or four annual inventory
count stickers on the box, that's the time to ask for a deal.)

Speaking of surplus, I just saw today's www.WOOT.com offering: A
recertified 750GB SATA/300 hard drive for $77.77 + $5 s/h. 750GB on a
3.5" form factor drive. UFR!

I paid $300 for my first hard drive, a 20MB Seagate.

If you find another one, let me know. I want to get the old PC-XT
running for ****s and giggles, and the *replacement* 42 MB MFM drive
died - still have the original 20MB that they said we'd never fill...

Any way to backwards-interface an IDE to look like a MFM?

-- Bruce --