Previous Product Reviews
or,
Blasts from the Past
Given that many of our readers have only recently become acquainted with us, we thought we’d revisit some of the more entertaining product reviews that Vic Skeptics has performed in past years.
The Electrostatic Gravitator
Our mate Barrie Johnson combines his two greatest loves, electronics and fossicking: and he knows a bit about electronics – most of his working life was spent as electronics maintenance officer in a major Melbourne hospital.
In semi-retirement in the early 2000s, Barrie opened a business in the heart of the Victorian goldfields, servicing and repairing detection equipment. One day a friend brought in a flash-looking device called The Electrostatic Gravitator.
He’d been so impressed by a prominent advertisement in a glossy American fossicker’s magazine that he bought one, notwithstanding its considerable expense. Unfortunately, once unpacked it failed to live up to expectations.
Barrie promised to look into it (literally). What he discovered was a maze of components and wires. The weird thing was that most of the circuits were open. Things weren’t connected to other things.
Barrie concluded that not only could the Gravitator not work, it was never designed to work. He reported back to his disappointed customer, then went to the trouble of posting a warning to the magazine that it was hosting ads for a dubious product, including technical details. That, he thought, was that.