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LPB1 is great but it will thicken your tone (aka suck treble) if you don't have a buffer in front of it.

I really don't do anything special. I bought several extra tips, they're getting hard to find.
  Also if you get an old earring with a post on it, it works great with the desoldering iron on one side and the earring on the other.as the joint heats up, the erring slides through.
Also another thing to try is to put the majority of the tip on the soldering ring itself and as the solder heats up you can slide the tip over the hole and suck out the solder.
  For the desoldering braid, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Your iron has to be slightly hotter.

Earring trick sounds like a good idea.  I need to figure out which pair of my wife's earrings I can break up without her noticing. 

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I love my desoldering iron! I've been using wick a little more as of late, but in a jam this thing is awesome.
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I have the red bulb desoldering iron but it runs so hot the tip seems too oxidized to use.  I always end up having to flow solder into the joint before I suck it back out.  Do you do anything special to keep the tip tinned?  For that matter, I seem to not be able to get braid to work.  I just end up using the blue RS desoldering pump.

Has the eye candy factor been mentioned yet?

Plus, this thing was engineered in an era when everything ran on tubes and Spitfires & P51's were current technology. 

A favorite quote that I once heard someone say:

"RadioShack: You've got questions, we've got batteries"

HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!

or is there other side effects to consider?

Staying in tune can feel like an adventure.  But it really hasn't been bad for me.  You develop a feel for zeroing it back to being in tune.  Some say bigsbys are terribly finicky that way.  I think it depends on your ear and probably your guitar's setup.  The nut slot on my b string grabs a bit, so when I zero it, I listen for the pop and then give it that last little tug.  It's just something I'm used to and it truly is no big deal. 

I put a B5 on my Agile AD2300 using a vibramate plate.  I wanted to add as much weight as possible because the guitar was way too neck heavy and would hang well on a strap.  The bigsby helped with that and the vibramate is an awesome way to install it risk-free UNLESS your not-so-expensive guitar is neck heavy because it was built using a punky piece of mahogany.  String tension caused the end of the bigsby to lift off the body really badly because it was so soft where the tailpiece bushings were.  I ended up drilling out the two machine screw holes by the bigsby logo and ran wood screws in. 

None of that was the fault of the bigsby or the vibraplate though, and I'm sure I wouldn't ever want to remove it anyway. 

The coolest thing for me about the bigs is what it does for delay trails.  It's addicting!  Beautiful modulated sounds that you get to control real-time.  Oh yeah, and my guitar hangs better on a strap now.  More sustain?  Maybe?

For me it's guitar>output, input>amp.  Or my favorite, volume pot on guitar is down because someone who is actually sophisticated enough to use that knob was playing my guitar.

Are you listening RS???  Seriously, how do they make money?

How could you go wrong with a vendor called Lee?

When we named our daughter, i thought Leigh fit well as her middle name, had a nice ring to it, later realized that my affinity for that name was due to my Lee Valley Tools addiction.
dave

There is that!

I got a couple to do that with but just ended up adding a second light so one for each end of the bench. They're  so much studier then those flimsy clamps that in my case at least, seemed to be always letting go.

So for an extra $6 I have justification to buy another tool?  I'm in!

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Lee Valley sell a bushing you sink anywhere into your work surface  so you can get rid of that annoying clamp. http://www.leevalley.com/en/wood/page.aspx?p=70534&cat=1,41636,41637,70534
dave
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Thanks Dave!  That is exactly what I have been thinking about!  I've actually searched Home Depot for something that would work.  Maybe I'll buy a few so I can move the lamp depending on what I'm working on.

Frys Electronics also has some emergency supplies including Hammond enclosures for a decent price...

Frys is great for hammonds.  They have other cool enclosures too. 

I buy the Ferric Chloride from there.

Oops.  Forgot the etchant.  Me too.  Ok, and sometimes diodes.  Wow.  I buy more there than I thought.

I'm almost embarrassed to ask this, but does anybody else have any items they only buy from Radio Shack?  I love the 62/36/2 .022" solder.  I also use their 5mm snap in LED bezels a lot.  They look like the ones I've bought at SB but they're actually better.  No joke!

Those are pretty much my only non-emergency buys there.