vacuum tweezers

Ha, not sure what's better "tiddly-winking" or "virtual industries".

All the tips look like filed down and reworked leur-loc needles. Is this correct?

You're AlwaysWrong. Of course that's not correct.

the probes look a hell of a lot like huge needles that have been prettied up.

They have the same connection taper as medical needles, but are clearly not the same. But it might be that something like this

would work. I've ordered some, and I'll try them. The Virtual gold-plated brass tips are potentially solderable (which is bad, not to mention being $30 each) so the stainless dispensing needles (9 cents each) might be interesting.

The Virtual pump unit and hose/handle are very nice. Their support is good, too.

Some of that dental stuff from allstarhandpiece looks interesting, like the small burrs for carving copperclad FR4 maybe.

Get a sample pack of dispensing needles from Nordsen EFD. They gave me one gratis, and it has enough different types to try all sorts of things. Works with the ubiquitous pneumatic adhesive/solder paste dispensers if you can't use it on your suck'n-place.

Ok, so the connector part is the same. I have some old metal needles upto 11 guage. They're too fat to dispense anything but grease.

what sort of pump is in the unit? Does it sound cool?

I agree about using tweezers. It needs only a tiny bit of flux on the tips to make SMT parts stick to them, which is a pain.

I ordered one of these

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That comes with a rubber tip set, good for ICs but not 1206 and smaller stuff. The pump unit is small, solid, and quiet.

These cheap bent dental dispensing needles seem to work great.

They were about 10 cents each, shipped.

Oh, in other news, Paint works fine to map your blind spots.

What you do is stare at the white dot from 10" away, and wave the mouse cursor around in your peripherial vision, and click on anything that you can't see. The red is my left eye, which is normal, and the yellow is the right side, all lasered from the retina repair. It may get a little better, but you don't notice blind spots anyhow. They were only discovered in 1660.

It's not a bad idea to do this now and then.