What Mantis Magnifications Good for SMD Electronics

Hmm. Now that you mention it, I bought my motorcycle, new, at $1100 back in 1979. Yamaha XS-400D. Still have it. Even _that_ hobby is cheaper. I use other peoples' sailboats when I sail. Never owned one, but I know my celestial navigation and have lots of good stories to tell. Costs me almost nothing to play. The only time I went to Vegas it was on a business trip paid for by Lockheed (yeah, the one in Burbank.) Zero cost, as I don't ever gamble. And my wife is my first and only. Never paid a nickel to just a girlfriend who didn't turn out to be my wife, too.

I get out to a movie theater or dinner that I don't personally make perhaps... hmm... one, possibly two times a year? Haven't had a hair cut by a professional in, well since I moved here in 2002. So its got to be going on 8 years, now. And when I built that home for my son, there were NO contractors paid. Zero. I did ALL the work, starting with the digging to find a solid base for it.

Back when there were glass suppliers catering to hobbyists, instead of today's case where they are all essentially gone now and the few companies left ask, "How many tons of FK51A did you need?", I built my own telescopes and eyepieces, as well. Thousands of hours of work, but I learned well how to perform various testing procedures (for example, Ronchi and Foucault are good enough given experience to do very professional work without a lot of cost) they turned out better than I could have purchased, had I bothered to try that route.

I would normally be tempted to just built it, were hobbyist quantities of glass types that I'd design in be within reason. But many of those who supported hobbyist lens-making and telescope-making have gone by the way and few suppliers exist (Willmann-Bell is still out there after these years gone by, but they are like the old FORD company, "You can have any color you want, as long as its black," and only offer what amounts to a single option for telescope makers and nothing for lens making, at all.) So despite the remaining skill I have, access to glass supplies in quantities I'd care about are gone.

Yeah. I'm cheap.

So... back to the idea of a real auction on tools those many businesses going out of business are selling. ;)

Jon