[jacquesm]

Interesting thread this. You made me re-live a whole bunch of my past and I noticed something funny (or at least, I think it is funny): to this day I can't help myself, when I walk by a dumpster or the garbage before it is picked up I am still scanning for TVs, tape recorders etc. It's so automatic that if not for this thread I would not have caught on to what that was all about, it's simply a habit.

And I still can't stand waste.

One day we will look back to this age and wonder: how on earth could we have been so wasteful that perfectly good stuff ended up in a landfill.

That soldering iron of yours looks like the perfect tool for some SMD work.

I recall those in the hands of stained glass workers, either that or gas heated ones.

My first upgrade from a screwdriver looked like this:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/pEUAAOSw621hLQqd/s-l1600.jpg

Which actually worked well enough for tube based electronics, (not even hole through, just built up in the air on metal frames). And it held the heat a lot longer than the screwdrivers, which tended to carbonize after a while.