Bedrock Bob

The Prius is a good car. I know several people who drive them. They get great mileage and they aren't terribly expensive. There are a few hybrid delivery vans around town too. The next step in the hybrid engineering should be to generate power with braking force. Like a locomotive. Instead of friction at the brake pads stopping you a generator stops the vehicle and charges a battery in the process. The designs for hybrid semi tractors use braking to charge the batteries. The vehicle runs on diesel with electric assist when cruising on the highway. But when parking and maneuve

Electric vehicles suck. Only a stupid person would buy one.

If 1 in 5 Californians switched back to gas cars after buying electric cars that means 80% of them stuck with their electric cars. 80% is a mighty strong majority of people. Especially in a culture that revolves around their automobiles. It would seem that the vast majority of people are happy with their electric vehicles. Electric cars are great for local driving. As long as they are close to the charger and not pulling an RV in the mountains they work fine. As with any battery operated tool we know it takes a while to charge them up. We generally can work around that. Bu

You are an elementist. You sit there stoned on an array of metals, smoking seaweed, snorting vitamin pills talking smack about lithium. Lithium is a groovy metal. It is the next step in our technological evolution. It is virtually everywhere, and mineable deposits could be almost anywhere. So add some lithium to your intake and see what miracles might happen. All the cool kids are doing it. ..... Fun fact. Those lithium batteries produce copious amounts of hydrogen when you discharge them fast. I have had drills explode a dozen times driving big deck screws. T

If you aren't going to argue with me then what is the point of the discussion? Geez man. Im not sure what kind of chargers they are. Lots of people use them. I'm trying to figure out how I can hook up my fishing batteries to the darn things and charge them up after a weekend on the trout boat. Just pull up in my diesel pickup and siphon off some recreational electrons paid for by tax dollars. There is another sweet use of the Li batteries. They have kayak trolling motors that run on the 24v dewalt tool batteries. They say a couple batteries will last all day. I keep threatening

I don't drive an electric Toyota Land Cruiser. The point was not that the free charging stations were the best value. The point was that electric cars are not the future but the present reality. If you can get a free charge for your electric car in Las Cruces then the future is now.

No doubt it will be obsolete in a decade. The auto industry is investing bazillions of frogskins into electric cars. That will drive a technology boom in both motors and batteries. In ten years they will have made advances that we couldn't imagine today. There is a guy in Albuquerque with an electric dragster. It's an old bread delivery truck. He actually runs in the low 10's. The car has so much instant horsepower they have a computer to control wheel spin. They are just getting It ironed out and It will already blow away just about any street car. It uses an array of 12v. Lead aci

Back at the end of the second World war soda pop often contained lithium. It was a very common anti depressant that was included in many soft drinks. 7-UP had a maximum dosage. (Several products including soft drinks and chewing tobacco contained cocaine.) Lithium is recommendled for azz chap, butthurt and nasal whine. It will also fix Traumatic Post Disorder Stress (TPDS) which is the inability to tolerate conversations on the internet that you are not involved in.

I think it is fairly common for conversations here to wander a bit Slim. Case in point...Do you have anything to add that is on topic? If you do you can post It and carry the conversation in the direction you would like it to go. I'm sorry you didn't get the blockbuster news you expected. And I hope the direction this thread took has not caused you any undue stress. That is just the way things go sometimes. If it is any consolation they are also considering recovering lithium from the potash mines in New Mexico. They are ready to start extracting the lithium from the leach

You also forgot logging, construction and manufacturing. Along with several others. News flash. It takes equipment, fuel and materials to mine and farm just like it does to fish. It is not a serial process that begins with oil or mined materials. It is an intersectional web where primary extraction is no more important than the manpower, science and technology that is needed to produce the final product. The same science, technology and manpower is also needed to support the workings of the mine. The process itself is the "creator of wealth". Not the minerals nor the miners. The

It looks like a hematite concretion to me. You know the drill. Streak and hardness. A peek at the inside under the weathering. A close look under magnification to see the constituents and texture of the minerals. It's not "palladium". Palladium is a mineral. That is a rock comprised of minerals. It could possibly contain palladium but it is not palladium.

The old timers moved big rocks with nothing more than levers and ropes. For the small prospector the solutions are the same. I recently moved a 12x12 building that weighed about 3000 lbs. Loaded it on a trailer, unloaded it and set it up in a lady's back yard. No machinery at all. I lifted it with a digging bar and cribbing. I pulled it with a come along. I skidded it on timbers. I used some logs as rollers to cross a little drainage canal. Big equipment is often set by hand before it is grouted. Construction guys often lift equipment with levers to position it. Especially on

Hey Rocky! How are things? There has actually been one potential iron posted. It wasn't an obvious artifact anyway. And a guy just recently had a sweet meteor wrong. I would have kept it for sure. Otherwise it has been the usual stream of slag and hematite. An occasional old rusty horse shoe. Mike just educated us on ferromanganese today. It looked like a metal mineral but it was an industrial slag by product. Never heard of such madness but it is true! I think a couple of the resident die hards posted some lakebed finds too. So there are some worthy posts in the

It's not manganese. It is an iron and manganese silicide. So the specific gravity will be greater than the same volume of manganese. At least so it seems. Manganese is about 7.4 and iron is 7.6 or so. Im not sure specific gravity makes much difference in your quest to know exactly what it is. It is clearly not meteoritic iron. It is some type of cultured mineral created in an arc furnace.

And a lump of schist it is!