Ever come up with unusual fixes?

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In Microns^
[img][800:768]http://i771.photobucket.com/albums/xx360/mld_album/IMAG0037.jpg[/img]
Converted to Mercury. ^

Chamber or mason canning jar.^
[img][800:691]http://i771.photobucket.com/albums/xx360/mld_album/IMAG0031.jpg[/img]
Evacuation Pump.^

My test:
I wasn't able to pull the "500 microns" with this setup. You can see over a 1000 microns in top pic.. This setup wasn't that airtight, though the gauge wouldn't climb when I turned the pump off.

Possible the pump oil needs changed. For air conditioning or refrigeration work, the "standard" for vacuum is 500 microns or less.

Yep, though I'm not doing it professionally at the moment, I am a gunsmith by trade. It does sort of give me a leg up in fixing things, since owning a couple of lathes and a milling machine gives me a pretty good manufacturing capability for small parts and such. Shop fixes are a whole other category for me, half the fun of owning tools if making more tools with them, and coming up with unusual uses for them to get a job done when you don't have the specific tool for it. Before I had the milling machine, I used to use a drill press with an X-Y table mounted on it for light milling work, I'd chain drill a slot and use an end mill to clean up the cut afterward. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

Even before I went to school I was very mechanical, and it took a while for me to realize that what seemed simple and obvious to me wasn't always obvious to other people. When I was in school I did a lot of informal tutoring when I'd see someone else struggling with a malfunction that I just instinctively knew how to fix, I once stopped a classmate from taking a shotgun apart with a hammer because he didn't see the set screws that were holding it together. That's one of the things that drew me to gunsmithing, it's one of the few purely mechanical fields left with absolutely nothing electronic involved.