The opportunities that surround us are really quite amazing. Did you know you can go to ebay.com and buy Soviet military hardware? You can. It's posted there and you can just buy it. A long time ago I went to ebay and I bought a Soviet Navy IDA-71 rebreather. I can't remember why. I think, at the time, I imagined I could renovate and upgrade it with automatic controls and safety features and have myself a cheap rebreather. In reality, I now have completed enough engineering projects, small and large, to know that that would have consumed years of my life and would have cost much, much more than just buying a commercially available rebreather that would be much better than anything I could build in my spare time. So this amazing piece of cold war equipment has been languishing (languishing!) in various closets for the past approximately ten years. I remembered it a few weeks ago and it made me a bit sad. I decided it should be on display, rather than in storage. It's an amazing little piece of equipment. I have both the basic rebreather and the optional nitrox rig and they're both in okay condition. So I pulled them out of storage, cleaned them up and put them back together (they had been disassembled for the past decade), and printed out some brackets to hang them on the wall in my home office. What better place for them? The living room has a library/conservatory sort of feel to it and my spare bedroom / office is full of tools so that was the obvious choice. It turned out pretty well. I had to buy some silicone "rescue" tape to put the hoses back together but otherwise it was a quick and easy job. Hooray.
