> btw, your idea about 'oh, i cant make
> car parts, so those will be assumed to
> be available' is bunk. either you
That's not what I said. They're not available because I can't make them. They're available because we produce massive numbers of cars and junk them after 5-10 years of service. In the absence of fuel (which would be the second thing to go after electricity in almost any feasible grid-failure scenario) demand for cars (and all sorts of other gas-powered appliances) will drop, resulting in even more cheap/free cars for the taking.
Can you think of a disaster that would make abandoned cars scarce?
> believe this impending doom, or you
I never said the doom is impending. It makes no difference to me if the next dark ages comes along during our children's, or grandchildren's time. Whoever is around when it happens will need to know how to generate and store electricity because it leverages all the other modern technologies.
> dont. take a look at what the mechanics
> is cuba can do. they hand-forge
> waterpumps for their 50 year old US
> cars.... i am not saying i agree with
Actually, there's a series of books on home metalworking by David and Vincent Gingery that I've been meaning to buy. I used to think that metalworking is out of the ordinary person's reach, but I no longer do.
> yout (in fact i disagree strongly), but
> your logic for why this enterprise is
> needed is full of holes.
I'm glad you think so, I'm always looking for ways to debug my thinking. Let's just make sure we're on the same page, though.
All I'm really trying to do is identify the minimal set of items I'd need to have in order to obtain everything else. Call it a mental exercise, a puzzle, if you like.
For generating electricity, I've concluded that the only part I can't make or make do without are magnets. So now I've moved on to batteries. I'm trying to figure out if one or more of the following is true...
a) They can be made from scratch.
b) They can be reduced to some minimal component that cannot be made from scratch, but once you have it, you can build the rest.
c) There is an alternative to batteries that can be made from scratch or can be reduced to minimal components more than batteries can.