{"id":26,"date":"2012-09-23T05:31:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-23T05:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2012-09-23T05:31:44","modified_gmt":"2012-09-23T05:31:44","slug":"los-alamos-black-hole-surplus-closing-923","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/los-alamos-black-hole-surplus-closing-923\/","title":{"rendered":"Los Alamos Black Hole surplus closing 9\/23"},"content":{"rendered":"

Which much sadness and dismay I echo the announcement that the Black Hole<\/strong> of Los Alamos is closing this weekend.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, this means I don’t have easy access to surplus science, electronics, and scrap material anymore.\u00a0 About two years ago Ed Grothus (or Ed v1.0 as I called him) died and his son-in-law (Ed v2.0) took over.\u00a0 Ed v1.0 was a very interesting and controversial person.\u00a0 The only issue I had with Ed was he didn’t want to sell anything from the yard.\u00a0 If he did, he usually went about 1\/2 of its original retail price.\u00a0 Ed v2.0 was much more willing to part with the stuff.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I couldn’t take full advantage of the situation because I just left my job at the lab and had limited space in my rental house.\u00a0 No time to tinkering, other than directly on the products for the business.\u00a0 I would also need a home machine shop to take full advantage of what I found there.<\/p>\n

Sadly it seems most junkyards filled with interesting ex-lab equipment seem to be drying up.\u00a0 I am not sure where future generations will get their low cost junk parts to experiment with.\u00a0 I am guessing a lot of start-ups in this country came about because people had access to low cost surplus gear to play around with.\u00a0 I know junkyards are both ugly and dangerous places, but for those willing to brave the rodent, and occasionally bee infested piles of junk, sometimes some real gems can be found.\u00a0 The items could not be afforded if they had to be directly purchased.\u00a0 I’ve also found that a lot of the old junk is of better quality and still in good shape then a lot of modern equivalents.\u00a0 I am not sure what this says about the hardware we have access to today from vendors.<\/p>\n

For example, I noticed that many of the 30+ year old cables were still soft and pliable.\u00a0 Today’s plastic resin power cables seems to dry out and crack in less than several years.\u00a0 I also notice that many of the electronic connectors were silver plated instead of chrome.\u00a0 There’s also some scary stuff in the junk too, like lead, mercury, asbestos, etc.<\/p>\n

Well, nothing I can do about the situation.\u00a0 Lets just hope somehow the next generation is able to find junk parts somewhere so we can keep inspiring them to try, fail, and learn.\u00a0 It seems like we’re forgetting the method that brought most of our innovations out.<\/p>\n

J<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Which much sadness and dismay I echo the announcement that the Black Hole of Los Alamos is closing this weekend.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, this means I don’t have easy access to surplus science, electronics, and scrap material anymore.\u00a0 About two years ago Ed Grothus (or Ed v1.0 as I called him) died and his son-in-law… Continue reading Los Alamos Black Hole surplus closing 9\/23<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/27"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}