hey folks,
i'm kind of back. a little bit. maybe not for long.
there will be an announcement on monday morning about krytox lube availability.
things are progressing on the panavise front. i am hoping to start a gb-style thread for the panavises done up in full GH gear next week. melvang has been incredibly helpful here, and has found both an amazing powdercoater that hopefully will become our main paint shop, and melvang himself will be doing some mechanical modifications to the vises to beef them up something fierce.
i still have quite a large stock of USB adapters, soldapullts and soldapullt rebuild kits. happy to accept orders for those items.
it is very likely that i will run several group buys for edsyn soldering stations. there will be two levels. a lower tier "learn to solder kit" that dragonxx21 and turtle are helping me test out. this set will be based on the edsyn cl1481 fixed temperature iron and kester 44. the next level up will be the edsyn 951sx station, which appears, on its face, to be a competitor to the hakko 888d. however, having used both, the edsyn station is simply on another level. the power output is nearly 2x, and the durability and build of every single part is head and shoulders above the hakko station. further, the edsyn station will come with an extremely generous warranty that i can easily promise to help with, as entire operation, including all manufacturing, service and management, is 15 minutes away from me.
looking into the future, look for geekhackers to directly vend higher-end tooling, while lower priced product and consumables will be vended by a select set of trustworthy community vendors who have copacetic product offerings.