  We describe our experimental setup for creating stable Bose-Einstein
condensates of Rb-85 with tunable interparticle interactions. We use
sympathetic cooling with Rb-87 in two stages, initially in a tight
Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume crossed
optical dipole trap, using the 155 G Feshbach resonance to manipulate the
elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the Rb-85 atoms. Typical Rb-85
condensates contain 4 x 10^4 atoms with a scattering length of a=+200a_0. Our
minimalist apparatus is well-suited to experiments on dual-species and spinor
Rb condensates, and has several simplifications over the Rb-85 BEC machine at
JILA (Papp, 2007; Papp and Wieman, 2006), which we discuss at the end of this
article.
