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It's now $185 instead of $150. They had a special going last month that was under $100. Wished I'd have needed more parts then.
I just made a $125 order. I tried to think of another $55 worth of stuff I needed, but just couldn't do it.
The limit increase had me looking on Ebay & Amazon for the parts I needed from Stens.

$35 isn't enough to knock me out of being a customer. But it does make one shop around a little more.

PTmowerMech said:

It's now $185 instead of $150. They had a special going last month that was under $100. Wished I'd have needed more parts then.
I just made a $125 order. I tried to think of another $55 worth of stuff I needed, but just couldn't do it.
The limit increase had me looking on Ebay & Amazon for the parts I needed from Stens.

$35 isn't enough to knock me out of being a customer. But it does make one shop around a little more.

Click to expand...

The Stens representative contacted via phone recently because I had filled out a request online showing interest. He said he was coming by out on field calls in a couple of weeks (no show, no call). I asked him what kind of savings I could expect from Stens over Amazon and EBay. He said about 14%, which isn’t much. Obviously they have tiered pricing based on volume. So I don’t pay taxes (or very little) on Amazon and EBay, have fantastic service and error free orders, have free shipping usually, can order parts just in time, Small if large order, and quality parts , great selection, and good prices. Why would I switch?

It all depends on your operation. For me it is worth it to have Stens and Rotary accounts. Stens with the Xtreme PTO clutches have save me a lot of my funds over purchasing direct from Xtreme. Just started with Rotary and it will take time to order in replacement stock as I sell out the A&I parts I have on hand.

Shipping charges are and have been part of my purchases so I calculate it into my customer's final cost for parts. (Just depends if I need to charge it as a separate fee or not). But all of us do I do try to meet minimum free shipping amounts, just plain good business sense. Sometimes it is well worth it to pay a small shipping fee with push comes to shove on repairs.

lowest cost is not necessary the best deal when you got to get a achine out the door quickly. It the 930M ignition switch I just installed. I could have saved $25 on one but it would have taken nearly a month to get it out of China vs getting one within a few days from an eBay supplier which still save the shipping that my regular JD parts supplier charges.

One side note you got to be careful on what you order as there are con jobs out there that claim OEM parts but ship after market parts. I ran into this several times lately.

Tiger Small Engine said:

The Stens representative contacted via phone recently because I had filled out a request online showing interest. He said he was coming by out on field calls in a couple of weeks (no show, no call). I asked him what kind of savings I could expect from Stens over Amazon and EBay. He said about 14%, which isn’t much. Obviously they have tiered pricing based on volume. So I don’t pay taxes (or very little) on Amazon and EBay, have fantastic service and error free orders, have free shipping usually, can order parts just in time, Small if large order, and quality parts , great selection, and good prices. Why would I switch?

Click to expand...

Why switch? If your buying OEM from Ama/EBay at a good price, then yeah that's the way to go. But if the OEM's are high and you have to go with aftermarket, Sten's quality is guaranteed to be better. Especially on those two cycle carbs. I've yet to get a bad Stens carb. But the Amazon aftermarkets, it's a crap shoot. Even with their 4 stroke carbs. I've got a box that has some that are anywhere from 6 months old to 6 minutes old that are just junk.
Plus Stens delivers faster here than Amazon or Ebay. Seems everything I buy from Amazon now a days takes at least a week to get. Stens is usually 3 days. But that's because UPS has a stupid thing going on here.
Everything goes to the Little Rock DC. They then load it onto another truck and ship it about 30 miles south to their Pine Bluff DC. If the driver shows up anytime after about 4am, it sit at that DC for a whole day. When I lived in Texas, it was always two working days to the shop.
Amazon use to be almost always be two days. Here lately, they've slowed way down.

That quick shipping, at least for some of us is necessary, because it keeps from getting piled up with equipment. I don't like having too much stuff torn apart, at one time.

PTmowerMech said:

If your buying OEM from Ama/EBay at a good price, then yeah that's the way to go.

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Problem is there's no way to tell you are getting real deal OEM parts off Amazon/Ebay. Spark plugs are hugely pirated just for one.

And mentioning shipping charges all my vendors have up the base rates.

Currently
RBI is 14.85
Gardner is 13.99
Stens is 12.50

slomo said:

Problem is there's no way to tell you are getting real deal OEM parts off Amazon/Ebay. Spark plugs are hugely pirated just for one.

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And some Amazon vendors will lie too saying they selling OEM when they ship after market parts.

If the price looks sexy, probably pirated.

StarTech said:

And mentioning shipping charges all my vendors have up the base rates.

Currently
RBI is 14.85
Gardner is 13.99
Stens is 12.50


And some Amazon vendors will lie too saying they selling OEM when they ship after market parts.

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Less than $15 isn't really bad, I suppose. I have a close friend who died recently. His son was going to ship me a guitar he wanted me to have. Who ever he was trying to ship it through, wanted over $100.

It would be great to sometime hear someone lowered their price...

When you take a pay cut then you can lower your prices
Inflation is built in into every Western Economic system in order to maintain th value of capitalist capital
Thus everything has to continually go up in price , except wages which in the USA in particular has remained unchanged for decades so shareholders can take bigger dividends .

my point...

PTmowerMech said:

Less than $15 isn't really bad, I suppose. I have a close friend who died recently. His son was going to ship me a guitar he wanted me to have. Who ever he was trying to ship it through, wanted over $100.

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That sounds about right. When I tried ship an USC back to Canada for warranty repairs the local PO wanted nearly $100 to do it. But when I contact the OEM they sold me a round trip label for only $35. That I didn't mine so much as the USC was over $200 to replace.

bertsmobile1 said:

When you take a pay cut then you can lower your prices
Inflation is built in into every Western Economic system in order to maintain th value of capitalist capital
Thus everything has to continually go up in price , except wages which in the USA in particular has remained unchanged for decades so shareholders can take bigger dividends .

Click to expand...

Our wages have gone up a LOT in the past decade. Too much, really. But because of the inflation (too much money in the economy), the value of the currency has dropped. So wages must increase. If the gooberment would stop all the borrowing and spending, inflation wouldn't be an issue.

Capitalism is fine. Crony capitalism mixed with a pack of spend freaks in DC creates this mess.

StarTech said:

That sounds about right. When I tried ship an USC back to Canada for warranty repairs the local PO wanted nearly $100 to do it. But when I contact the OEM they sold me a round trip label for only $35. That I didn't mine so much as the USC was over $200 to replace.

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I just checked my local post office and they said shipping my guitar to Houston (where the other guy is) isn't even $100. So I'm wondering which carrier he's trying to ship with.
I've seen video's of all carriers mishandling packages. So it's a crap shoot as to which one is better.

PTmowerMech said:

I've seen video's of all carriers mishandling packages. So it's a crap shoot as to which one is better.

Click to expand...

Insure the crap outta of your item, & track it..

PTmowerMech said:

Our wages have gone up a LOT in the past decade. Too much, really. But because of the inflation (too much money in the economy), the value of the currency has dropped. So wages must increase. If the gooberment would stop all the borrowing and spending, inflation wouldn't be an issue.

Capitalism is fine. Crony capitalism mixed with a pack of spend freaks in DC creates this mess.

Click to expand...

The United States owes 32.5 trillion in debt, prints money like it grows on trees, has a social “safety net” program for way too many issues, pays people $15/hour to flip burgers, has illegal immigrants pouring over the border daily, finances other county’s wars…you see where I am going with this. These and more are the problems. Capitalism works great when you let it work on its own. When you start manipulating and tweaking it, the problems arise. The U.S. is like a household that is house poor, is running up the credit cards, and has a great job, but has no budget. Spending problems not earning problems. No politician has enough of a backbone to put his/her foot down and say “enough”.

PTmowerMech said:

Our wages have gone up a LOT in the past decade. Too much, really. But because of the inflation (too much money in the economy), the value of the currency has dropped. So wages must increase. If the gooberment would stop all the borrowing and spending, inflation wouldn't be an issue.

Capitalism is fine. Crony capitalism mixed with a pack of spend freaks in DC creates this mess.

Click to expand...

yep
the wages go up and the value goes down. You can make more, but that more don't mean you get more.

Tiger Small Engine said:

The United States owes 32.5 trillion in debt, prints money like it grows on trees, has a social “safety net” program for way too many issues, pays people $15/hour to flip burgers, has illegal immigrants pouring over the border daily, finances other county’s wars…you see where I am going with this. These and more are the problems. Capitalism works great when you let it work on its own. When you start manipulating and tweaking it, the problems arise. The U.S. is like a household that is house poor, is running up the credit cards, and has a great job, but has no budget. Spending problems not earning problems. No politician has enough of a backbone to put his/her foot down and say “enough”.

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The national debt figure is a smoke & mirror job.
The actual debt , ie the money requred to pay out the bonds and actual real loans that are held by private industry & other countries is around 1/3 of that , the rest is money the government borrowed from itself but appaears on the books as a "loan ".
A case of the left pocket owing the right pocket .
Once the gold standard was dropped the governments ( ours does the same thing ) has to pretend they are not just "printing money" because the economic theory will not allow money to appear from nowhere.
So the Government generates bonds ( I owe yous ) which they sell to the Treasury and to private enterprise which includes foreign governments , like Saudi Arabia, Japan & China

The problem is not what the government spends, it is what it does not collect because mutinational companies like Ford, Apple , Microsloth, Texaco, Sarah Lea , etc etc etc all offshore their profits to tax havens where they pay little to no tax on the profits and almost no tax to the US government .
ou will find Companies like Ford will register the patients on their cars in the USA then sell the patient to Ford Camen Islands .
Ford Camen islands then charges Ford USA royalties for using the patients in making the cars.
Apple USA sold their Trademarks to Apple North Ireland who license them back to Appe USA for an amount that is almost the same as Apples nett USA trading profits and just about all of the top 2000 US companies have a similar tax avoidance scheme .

Then to cover this stories are leaked to sympathetic media about how social security is sending the country broke so you end up hating your neighbour because they are on some sort of benefit when in reality is is the payments they get which are usually spent the second they arrive that keeps industry afloat .
And on top of that the "taxation is thieft " mantra get spread through out the community so no cares when the unbelievably wealthy get yet another tax cut while the poor are mugging people in the street because they cannot get enough money to pay the rent .
The Danes are one of the happiest, healthiest people on the planet and they pay over 50% in direct taxes .

Capitalist demand economies only work if the government sets firm rules and enforces them
But right now the goal posts for multination companies and the obscenely wealty are so far apart that they are just about on the side lines where as the goal posts for the workers are just barely wide enough for the ball to pass through.
During the GFC the government could have taken over all of the rubbish loans that the banks had made to the poor to buy their houses for less than 10% of what they gave to wall St
And the net result, thousands lost their entire life savings , perfectly good houses were repossed & bulldozed while the criminal bankers were back in business in less than 2 years and paying themselves massive bonuses again.
Over 75% of all of the economic stimulus went into the stock market which did absolutely nothing for the bulk of the population but allowed stanley to merge with B & D then buy out every other tool maker, close down the USA factories and off shore all of the manufacturing to China to produce even more profits for shareholdes who already have so much money they have no idea what to do with it .

bertsmobile1 said:

The national debt figure is a smoke & mirror job.
The actual debt , ie the money requred to pay out the bonds and actual real loans that are held by private industry & other countries is around 1/3 of that , the rest is money the government borrowed from itself but appaears on the books as a "loan ".
A case of the left pocket owing the right pocket .
Once the gold standard was dropped the governments ( ours does the same thing ) has to pretend they are not just "printing money" because the economic theory will not allow money to appear from nowhere.
So the Government generates bonds ( I owe yous ) which they sell to the Treasury and to private enterprise which includes foreign governments , like Saudi Arabia, Japan & China

The problem is not what the government spends, it is what it does not collect because mutinational companies like Ford, Apple , Microsloth, Texaco, Sarah Lea , etc etc etc all offshore their profits to tax havens where they pay little to no tax on the profits and almost no tax to the US government .

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I was with you, right up until the last sentence. Our government funded (from 2016 to 2021) funded things like gender studies in Pakistan. So when you say the government doesn't have a spending problem, I just have to laugh.
Giving the government more money will only allow them to spend more money. The big corporations do more for the economy than the government ever thought about doing.
Elon Musk has over 50,000 US employees. His personal income tax is probably equal to, or higher than all those employee's combined.

bertsmobile1 said:

Capitalist demand economies only work if the government sets firm rules and enforces them
But right now the goal posts for multination companies and the obscenely wealty are so far apart that they are just about on the side lines where as the goal posts for the workers are just barely wide enough for the ball to pass through.

Click to expand...

Free market capitalism isn't a bad thing. Crony capitalism is. Corporations are entitled to at least 95% of their earnings, how ever they choose to earn it, because it comes from their customers.

bertsmobile1 said:

During the GFC the government could have taken over all of the rubbish loans that the banks had made to the poor to buy their houses for less than 10% of what they gave to wall St
And the net result, thousands lost their entire life savings , perfectly good houses were repossed & bulldozed while the criminal bankers were back in business in less than 2 years and paying themselves massive bonuses again.
Over 75% of all of the economic stimulus went into the stock market which did absolutely nothing for the bulk of the population but allowed stanley to merge with B & D then buy out every other tool maker, close down the USA factories and off shore all of the manufacturing to China to produce even more profits for shareholdes who already have so much money they have no idea what to do with it .

Click to expand...

You'll get no argument from me on the stock market and banks. That's crony capitalism at it's finest.

PTmowerMech said:

Free market capitalism isn't a bad thing. Crony capitalism is. Corporations are entitled to at least 95% of their earnings, how ever they choose to earn it, because it comes from their customers.

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Might be entitled but they rarely get that much; unless, they use crooked bookkeepping. Even I paid 14% or more in taxes on my net income as a self employed business owner this year. That is only 86% of my earnings I got to keep to run the business and to pay myself.

And $5149 really don't go very far does it.

Getting right off topic but all governments fund all sorts of things that may seem strange to the external viewer
Some is just to keep idiot senators with barrows to push happy , others are for political reasons or to appease foreign governments .
Businesses are only able to operate because there are roads, rail lines , workers with appropriate skills, a society where there is some sort of order , a sound financial system , no conflicts on their soil etc etc etc
No company made 1¢ of profits without those things in place despite the owners who think THEY made all of the profits .
Thus business have obligations to all those around them which more & more they are withdrawing from as share holders get greedier & greedier for higher returns on their capital..
Then we get the insane idea that shareholders are guaranteed a dividend and have the right to sue directors if their dividend is big enough .
If governments spent no money what so ever unless every one agreed it was being well spent then nothing would be spent and every woman would need 4 security guards to prevent them being raped every time they left the house , all delivery vehicles would need two armed guards to ensure they were not held up , ships would need armed escort ships to ensure pirates did not take them over etc etc etc etc
Not a world any of us would want to live in.
Most business go to extreme lengths to avoid paying any tax what so ever but expect to receive endless government support ,so perfect example was the continuing bail out of Wall St .
In a true capatilist system , share holders are just that so they get a cut of the profits when times are good but also have to put their hands in their pockets when times are bad & the business needs more liquidity .
IF a business is run badly then it must be allowed to fail because the assets of the failed business get picked up by others , usually at a discount so can help them become bigger & stronger and the shareholders loose their shares . That is the way the system is supposed to work .

Now when it comes to social security, the fasted way to stimulate a flagging economy is to give MORE social security to the poorest sector of the community because they will spend it.
They will pay off loans liberating bank funds to write even more loans, they will buy food from the local stores, they will replace worn out cloths / appliances etc etc.
All of this ultimately provides a benefit to the upper levels because the increased activity will create increased turn over and thus increased profits .
Give Musk a 10% tax cut and all he will do is buy Face book or You Tube which benefits no one other than the shareholders .
President Regan got it 100% wrong , there is no trickle down effect , the flow of cash stops very abruptly, usually at the share market or real estate market and the benefits to the majority of the population is zero
In the USA the problem is short duration of governments so no long term policy can ever be instigated , Senators who get elected forever ( the USA trying to pretend they are a kingdom like the UK with a house of Lords ) and voluntery voting so candidates for anything from local police chief right through to the President have to kiss the backside of the wealthy to get the funds needed to whip up a frenzied response in the population in order to get them off their backsides to vote and those funds come with big strings attached so the system can only ever be corrupt and the corruption just gets deeper & deeper over time

bertsmobile1 said:

No company made 1¢ of profits without those things in place despite the owners who think THEY made all of the profits .

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Their employee's made a profit. Hardly any money into the company, and every week they get a check. If it wasn't for employers, there'd be no employee's or businesses.

In fact, you don't even have to have government for businesses to function. All that's really needed is customers with a median of exchange for goods and services.

A LOT of people have ran businesses outside of the governments knowledge. I did at my last shop. That is until the city tax man came around saying I had to pay them to put up a sign and start collecting tax. ($100 just to put a sign up) That's why I started shutting down the shop and moved out into the country.
Governments aren't very helpful when it comes to businesses. Especially when they devalue the currency and force inflation on the masses. They always require taxes, permits and retarded regulations that cost the business and it's customers money, for things that benefit no one except themselves. Where as a business benefits everyone who needs that business.

I don't mind paying some taxes as long as the money is going to benefit the people that pay them. The 2018 gender studies funding for Pakistan benefited no Americans.

And if it wasn't for the rich people around here, there wouldn't be enough jobs for us to even have a town.

Elon Musk is great for almost any economy.

No one can get to your door if there was no road to it .
No one could pay you is there was not a financial system that worked
There would be no electricity if the government did not force the electric company to connect to loss making households
So don't kid yourself about the need for some sort of government.

Musk is the reincarnation of PT Barnam . a showman to the nth degree who got lucky in the tech boom same a Bezos 20% effort 80% dumb luck.
With Tesla Musk is a typical start up with no one to answer to other than himself as he had enough cash to kick it off without substantial financial backers.
So he is the same as Ford was back in the days of the model T.
When businesses are new they are run by people with a vision and usually backed by venture financers.
Venture finance looks for a massive sell off profit and will accept no dividends so they are happy to finance loss years and get no dividends .
Then when the business is profitable they sell their 20¢ shares for $ 20 to $100 and invest the profits into other start up ventures .
However they always sell to rent seekers who are hungry for dividents to recover their $ 100 a share so they elect directors who maximumize dividends at the cost of research, devlopement & growth which is where all the other vehicle makers are currently at .
People like to think there is a closed loop cospiracey between auto makers & oil companies that force car companies to continuslly fit bigger engines and not branch out into things like EV's.
The reality of it is launching a new product into any market that is different from the established product line is a big risk
Tooling up for an EV cost in the order of $ 100,000,000 and that is on top of the $ 200,000,000 spent on research & deveopement
So that is $ 300,000,000 that has to be diverted from dividends that the rent seekers will not condone untill forced into doing it .
Increasing the engine size cost a few hundred thousands and gets recouped in the first sale year .
Introducing a new model can take a decade to break even .
Cold economic reality .
Most of the auto makers had an EV almost ready to produce but the problem was finding a suitable power source.
Musk forced things by using an unsuitable power source ( Li batteries ) and in time the massive problems of using Li will become apparent but Musk will have sold out by then and playing on his mountain of money .
HE is not criminal but he is not the Messiah either , just some one who saw a chance of turning a quick buck.
If he was as worried about CO2 pollution as he pretends to be then he would have started with a 1 to 4 ton delivery vehicle not a 300 mph car
Every city has hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles that all use 1 to 2 tanks for fuel each & every day plus cost a fortune for fuel & servicing so the delivery companies would leap naked over burning coals if they could get a reliable electric delivery vehicle even if the ticket price is 4 times an ICE vehicle because they will make that up in the first year and be laughing all the way to the bank for the next 6 to 10 years when they can sell them off for 1/2 what they paid for them .
For 30 years I ran a delivery business.
We bought junkers for the drivers which the 3 partners kept on the road as cheaply as possible .
All ran on LPG apart from the 8 motorcycles .
Our biggest cost was wages , next to that was running costs which were around 75% of wages .
There have ben several trials of EV's for delivery and one group actually used them reasonably effectively
These were older style vans converted to run an Pb batteries which were converted fork lift batteries , charged durning the day from solar pannels on the roof & swapped over each shift .
It did not pan out financially as the runs had to be too short to be economic due to reduced payloads because of the 1100kg of batteries and limited range .

There is a thing called common sense that sometimes it takes freight train running over some before they get it.

Some companies are just better at providing a service than others. Here I went last week Sunday and Monday trying to buy some storage boxes from Lowe's On neither trip I could get any help getting them down from the overhead top shelf. Finally had to drive further this Sunday to Home Depot to get the same boxes. At least I researched before I went and knew HD had them in stock. Boy what a difference in the level of help getting them down. The boxes were too on the top shelf which took a forklift to get down. Now I was just buying one box either it was ten of them. I was surprised that they were actually lower in cost too. I will going back for some larger boxes later for my v-belt storage.

But right now I got to label the current boxes and clear our out my living room of parts. This way I know where things are and stop ordering things I already have on hand.

bertsmobile1 said:

No one can get to your door if there was no road to it .
No one could pay you is there was not a financial system that worked
There would be no electricity if the government did not force the electric company to connect to loss making households
So don't kid yourself about the need for some sort of government.

Click to expand...

No one said there shouldn't be government. I just said it doesn't need to be a 1000 headed monster, hell bent on taxing everything under the sun to pay for their pet projects.

bertsmobile1 said:

Musk is the reincarnation of PT Barnam . a showman to the nth degree who got lucky in the tech boom same a Bezos 20% effort 80% dumb luck.
With Tesla Musk is a typical start up with no one to answer to other than himself as he had enough cash to kick it off without substantial financial backers.
So he is the same as Ford was back in the days of the model T.
When businesses are new they are run by people with a vision and usually backed by venture financers.
Venture finance looks for a massive sell off profit and will accept no dividends so they are happy to finance loss years and get no dividends .
Then when the business is profitable they sell their 20¢ shares for $ 20 to $100 and invest the profits into other start up ventures .
However they always sell to rent seekers who are hungry for dividents to recover their $ 100 a share so they elect directors who maximumize dividends at the cost of research, devlopement & growth which is where all the other vehicle makers are currently at .
People like to think there is a closed loop cospiracey between auto makers & oil companies that force car companies to continuslly fit bigger engines and not branch out into things like EV's.
The reality of it is launching a new product into any market that is different from the established product line is a big risk
Tooling up for an EV cost in the order of $ 100,000,000 and that is on top of the $ 200,000,000 spent on research & deveopement
So that is $ 300,000,000 that has to be diverted from dividends that the rent seekers will not condone untill forced into doing it .
Increasing the engine size cost a few hundred thousands and gets recouped in the first sale year .
Introducing a new model can take a decade to break even .
Cold economic reality .
Most of the auto makers had an EV almost ready to produce but the problem was finding a suitable power source.
Musk forced things by using an unsuitable power source ( Li batteries ) and in time the massive problems of using Li will become apparent but Musk will have sold out by then and playing on his mountain of money .
HE is not criminal but he is not the Messiah either , just some one who saw a chance of turning a quick buck.
If he was as worried about CO2 pollution as he pretends to be then he would have started with a 1 to 4 ton delivery vehicle not a 300 mph car
Every city has hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles that all use 1 to 2 tanks for fuel each & every day plus cost a fortune for fuel & servicing so the delivery companies would leap naked over burning coals if they could get a reliable electric delivery vehicle even if the ticket price is 4 times an ICE vehicle because they will make that up in the first year and be laughing all the way to the bank for the next 6 to 10 years when they can sell them off for 1/2 what they paid for them .
For 30 years I ran a delivery business.
We bought junkers for the drivers which the 3 partners kept on the road as cheaply as possible .
All ran on LPG apart from the 8 motorcycles .
Our biggest cost was wages , next to that was running costs which were around 75% of wages .
There have ben several trials of EV's for delivery and one group actually used them reasonably effectively
These were older style vans converted to run an Pb batteries which were converted fork lift batteries , charged durning the day from solar pannels on the roof & swapped over each shift .
It did not pan out financially as the runs had to be too short to be economic due to reduced payloads because of the 1100kg of batteries and limited range .

Click to expand...

Elons a GOAT. He employs people all over the world. Over 50K here in the US. His EV's are fine for somethings. Not fine for other things.
I wouldn't buy an EV pick up to haul a lot of stuff all day long. But if I could pick up a cheap one, just to go to town and back, or maybe short trips (less than 200 miles) that would be fine too.
I darn sure wouldn't want one to go 1000 miles in. Most folks don't even drive more than 100 miles per day.

I do love how some will complain about how they mine the lithium. Saying it's destroying the land. But will support coal. lol. They've never seen how they flatten mountains in West VA, or Pennsylvania.
Americans used to lead the world in new technology. Now it seems to be frowned upon. I don't get it.

PTmowerMech said:

Americans used to lead the world in new technology. Now it seems to be frowned upon. I don't get it.

Click to expand...

That's the point, they don't want anyone to get or understand it..

PTmowerMech said:

No one said there shouldn't be government. I just said it doesn't need to be a 1000 headed monster, hell bent on taxing everything under the sun to pay for their pet projects.


Elons a GOAT. He employs people all over the world. Over 50K here in the US. His EV's are fine for somethings. Not fine for other things.
I wouldn't buy an EV pick up to haul a lot of stuff all day long. But if I could pick up a cheap one, just to go to town and back, or maybe short trips (less than 200 miles) that would be fine too.
I darn sure wouldn't want one to go 1000 miles in. Most folks don't even drive more than 100 miles per day.

I do love how some will complain about how they mine the lithium. Saying it's destroying the land. But will support coal. lol. They've never seen how they flatten mountains in West VA, or Pennsylvania.
Americans used to lead the world in new technology. Now it seems to be frowned upon. I don't get it.

Click to expand...

I have an applied science degree so I understand just how much damage Lithium mining dose and it makes coal look quite beingn .
There is a big difference between a big hole in the ground and land that is toxic to all forms of life for decades.
And you do not know what an open cut coal mine really looks like till you see some of the ones here where New York city & subburbs would fit in them 3 times over and none of the skycrapers would come up to ground level
Then there was Mt Lyall which at one time was the richest copper deposit in the world.
All that is left of it is a lake , and most of the copper from it is in the USA as roof cladding , gutters & railway electrification lines .

My engineering upbringing has me hating wasting resources just because they are cheap and we have been allowing businesses to squander what is not actually theirs to make massive profits leaving a big mess for future generations to clean up.
And 99% of what we do is wasting, not using economically as we should be doing .
How amny resturants do you know where they have outdoor heating so you can eat outdoors in winter ?
A perfect example of squander .
Lithium is a wonderful power source, for watches , clocks, cameras, phones and perhaps as high a power load as for an E scooter or E bike but that is the limit
In a EV the batteries go 2 to 4 tones so yo are in a situation where more energy is being used to move the batteries than the payload , and then there is the spontaneous combustion if it is not charged according to a strict protocol ( all the houses that burn down with E something on the wrong or faulty charger ) and of course batteries damaged in collisions , let alone the fact that Li batteries can not be recycled economically, just recovering the different parts costs 4 times what a new one costs .
They have to be ery carefully dissasembled because if you accidentially short out the plates it will explode then catch fire and te fire can not be extinguished and on top of that if the battery gets hotter than 75C to 85 C ( depending upon the exact chemistry ) it will explode and burst into flames .

apart from the gasses produced buring coal, the rest of the byproducts are useful.
The fly ash can be minned for the radioactive elements like thorium ( power station feed) and when you are finished the reminder goes into cement , about 30 to 60 % by volume is fly ash , also used in road base , bitumen & insulating boards .

What they found here that the limestone was emmitting radioactive gasses that are building up in homes in the area. The solution was for us all to have powered ventilation system at to our homes crawl spaces. Now with the added concrete products used we should just glowing in the dark.

Have not heard about that one but it does make sence even whith my limited knowledge of mineralogy .
And I hope you see the abject stupidity of this.
Gasses are coming out of the lime he house is built over and that is making a few people sick
So we now vent that gass into the atmosphers so we can make every one sick

It is like if "I have to wear a tie you have to wear one" attitude. So soon as they are out of sight the tie goes. <LOL>

Coal mining in our north east


Lithium mine