But people have been welding with batteries for ages. The most primitive welder is a car battery and a couple of wire leads. Tons of videos of it on YouTube.
Yeah, fair enough. Two car batteries in series is even better.
Not easy on the batteries, but it will get the jeep out of the bush.
You can also make your own stick electrodes from coathanger wire tightly wrapped in paper.
I couldn't tell you how many pairs of sunglasses you should parallel to protect yourself...
This rig, on the other hand, is something you could pack into just about any plant and fix something with without raising any eyebrows. If you have $5,000 to spend, that is. Super handy for small jobs in hard to access places.
Batteries in series, typical stick welding voltage is ~27v. You might be able to light up on one battery, but you will quickly learn why it's called "stick" welding.
I wouldn't arc weld with any number of pairs of sunglasses, that was firmly tongue-in-cheek; but yes you are right, stacked glasses would be series.
Also, if you try this, before pulling the battery from the non-broken jeep, drive it to the top of a hill so you can bump start it later when the battery is too dead to turn the engine over.
Not really if you just keep it lubed. I have a BMW shaft drive bike, and I have to change the rear end oil, the driveshaft oil, the transmission oil and the engine oil every year. My Honda just needs the chain lubed, adjusted, and engine oil changed. You check it every 600-1000 miles or so, but I can adjust and lube the chain in about 5 minutes.
I think it's hilarious that I can upgrade my 2004 Honda Accord and add CarPlay into it with a myriad of screen sizes and options, features, cameras. There's an entire world of car stereo / infotainment gear out there that is cheaper and better than ever. Meanwhile, everybody with their new cars are just stuck with the terrible built in systems, or can only upgrade with a $1000 worth of audio processing gear and multi-channel amplifiers.
I think this is a negative recency bias, nobody makes aftermarket stuff for brand new cars because nobody with a brand new car is trying to augment it.
Your link proves my exact point. You need some specific one-off gear from some no-name android tablet manufacturer that doesn't fit any other car. LOL@ this thing running Android 12, which was out of support in March of this year... Much aftermarket support wow.
The 2004 Accord has a DIN slot in it. Which has a myriad of options available for it, despite the dwindling aftermarket.
Have you seen how to upgrade a 2023 Honda Accord infotainment system? You can't without major work. You can use the factory head unit, and feed all the amplified signals into a $1000+ sound processor, with a bunch of other modules specifically built for the car, then run the speaker outputs out to some crazy-ass 8 channel amplifier (because more speakers means the stereo is better for some reason), then feed that back to your speakers. And then at that point, all you've upgraded is the audio, not even the head unit itself. And why does it even have a center channel again?
Also, people obviously care about what infotainment is in their cars, as there is a huge amount of people saying they won't buy a car without CarPlay. Sounds like people DO want to augment their infotainment systems. Nobody is trying to do it, because you can't do it. Imagine if you could buy the car you wanted, and install your own accessories in it.
Look, I wasn’t even getting into proprietary or not. Obviously generic DIN was better than the present automotive industry situation.
You made a claim that you can’t upgrade these systems without $1000 of gear and I proved that idea wrong with a single link. It doesn’t really matter that it’s Android 12 - nobody really cares because all it has to do is run CarPlay and Android Auto. As long as the system can do that it’s infinitely upgradable from a software perspective. Nobody’s actually using the base Android system.
I also have a friend that spent under $500 to add CarPlay to a Chevy Sonic with a similar system and they’re very happy with it.
And that’s why I want a car to have CarPlay and Android auto, because it negates any need to upgrade the system down the line. The upgrades happen on your phone.
Imagine if you could install your own accessories in it…like the one I linked? I mean, again, I get it, it’s not a simple DIN setup but for the 1% of people who are interested in upgrading their car system this this is a real product you can buy for basically any car model. I owned an Alpine head unit for my 2005 Volkswagen and I wouldn’t really describe it as not janky compared to the OEM head unit, but the thing had Bluetooth and that’s all I needed.
It seems like this, but it actually not true. What's interesting in F1 is that you have to find the right balance between innovation and consistency.
James Vowles, current Williams TP ordered his team to "break everything" in order to improve and change: https://youtu.be/nYzwvTSffiY?t=3129
What is often forgotten is, that all F1 cars are prototypes, they NEED to constantly change and innovate, and every year it starts from the beginning (almost).
There is a fantastic book called Total Competition, which is a conversation between two ex-team principles, one of them Ross Brawn, probably most successful F1 engineer. In it, Brawn says: "But where I think Formula One is very strong is in the culture. If you wanted to develop a concept and to drive things forward at maximum pace, utilize it in Formula One. The composite companies love Formula One because we are willing to try things. If they’ve got a new resin system or a new type of fibre, they give it to the Formula One teams to explore for them, to look at the applications and come back with the feedback. If they put it in the aerospace industry, five years later they would have an answer. Put it into Formula One and five months later they have got an answer"
Apart from the many many times where a teams R&D department has come up with a radical new idea for a machine part which gives them an advantage, and then all the other teams copy it making it the new standard. This is how F1 has evolved forever, by taking risks and experimenting. Not by reliability and consistency!
Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.
Americans are really dumb and do next to no research on most purchases. I know several people who think that's a waste of time. The best that a lot of folks can do is a YouTube video.
Throw money at the problem. Learn nothing. Complain when things go bad.
That's what a ton of Americans do now and it's wild seeing it as often as I do. There was recently that Ars article that looked at a study showing how bad anti-intellectualism in this country has become. Being dumb is now a sort of prideful thing for a lot of Americans.
> 10 years ago you could go onto a lot and buy a brand new Dodge Dart for around $17,000.
$17k 10 years ago is $23k today. That's under the MSRP of a 2026 Toyota Corolla.
In constant dollars car prices for comparable trim levels of similar styles of car have actually been have been pretty steady for the last 40 years or so. The average car is a lot more expensive now in constant dollars because the mix of cars bought has shifted significantly toward larger and more luxurious cars.
For example when I was looking for a new car earlier this year I looked at the Honda Civic. When I compared the price to my last Civic, which I bought in 1989, it was about the same after correcting for inflation since 1989. I also looked at the CR-V, and when comparing to my 2006 CR-V today's CR-V after correction for inflation since 2006 is actually about 5-10% cheaper.
Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.
This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.
A few years ago my car was totaled by an uninsured illegal in a hit and run, and I was forced to get another one (bought used). This was back when the bubble was even worse, and since I lived on dirt roads, I needed a 4x4. Literally the only thing I could find not clapped out were luxury models, because rich people were about the only people at the time dumping cars that weren't completely clapped out.
It's not that it takes all day to do the work. It's that you get to your "appointment" and they really haven't set aside any time for you. You're just put in line like the next walk up guy.
Yeah those places are super tiny and run by one or two people. Or they are running them under an awning and the whole restaurant is built on a bicycle. Try setting up a bicycle restaurant anywhere in the US and see what happens. You can barely set up a taco truck here. Unfortunately to run a restaurant here you need really expensive restaurant real estate.
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
That same land was once grazed by massive herds of buffalo. The native species need large animals grazing to stay healthy.
Sure, there's overgrazing in places, but that's a matter of degree. The fact remains that cattle grazing is a necessary step to replace what was lost, if preservation of what remains of native species is desired.
reply