The Thin Air Press kit that Woodcraft sells is actually manufactured by the Roarockit Skateboard Company. The TAP Kit started out as a way to teach young people how to laminate skateboard decks in Hawaii.
The hand pump that is used comes from the wine industry, a company called VacuVin supplies it to us. This little pump will pull (without a problem) 25 HG. this equals many of the electric vacuum pumps on the market used for vacuum veneering. It is a High HG/Low volume pump. Its original use, a pump to evacuate air from wine bottles, is available at most liquor, wine stores and on EBay.
I did a lot of testing of pumps when I first come up with the idea of using a hand pump for vacuum veneering. I tried the brake bleeder pump and found out quickly that it was too hard on the fingers to evacuate air from a 14" X 47" vacuum bag and that it was not as powerful as the VacuVin.
All this may not be an issue for what you are working on as I suspect the volume of air you are dealing with is quite small. I am not familiar with the process you are wanting to do with a vacuum chamber but I suspect it would be, as mentioned, pretty messy when done in a bag. The TAP kit is really meant for vacuum veneering and clamping pieces of wood together for gluing.
We sell the kits online but your best bet if you are wanting to buy one and wanting to save money on shipping is to buy it through almost any of the large online tool companies across the US and Canada. In Australia Carba-Tec distribute our kits. They almost all have local stores close to cities.
I hope this answers some of the questions you may have about our kit.
There are lots of links to see what people are using our kits for on our Blog at the Roarockit site.
http://roarockit.blogsome.com/
Thanks.
Ted Hunter
Product Development
Roarockit
