salvaged vacuum pump

Its been quite a few years since I've delved much into photography and photoprocessing, so I might be a little out of date. As I recall a vacuum pump was used with vacuum board to hold large photo papers flat when doing enlargements. If that is still the case then this may be of interest. One of our mechanics salvaged from the dump the base unit of a thirty year old desoldering station. The desoldering tool was gone but the rest was in good working condition. Using an aircraft manifold gauge (see photos) the pump would draw about 20 inches Hg of vacuum with no air flow. As parts for the older desoldering stations may be unobtainable or too expensive there may be a few of them showing up as "for parts" sales / auctions.

Ron Yellowknife, NWT Canada

I once improvised a vacuum printing easel powered by an ordinary vacuum cleaner. It worked well enough.

I also saved an old vacuum cleaner with the idea of doing something like that. There are a couple of upsides to using this instead, its light and portable, its much quieter than a vacuum cleaner, where the desoldering heater used to be connected up the temperature (actually power as it didn't have a temperature sensor in the desoldering tool) controller to provide variable power levels to something, like a heater, and this case it was free, someone found it at the dump and brought it back for me.

So that's what they were called, a vacuum easel. I don't have a darkroom set up yet, it would be nice to do that over winter.

Thanks, Ron