[Newfie]

Rebuild a battery? No problem. 3 a day for $30 each.

https://youtu.be/afwO_MZjRjA

EPA?
Energy
Perspiration
Attitude

[Tanada]

Hardy critters; engine and man.

The mechanic does good work, no question of that. On the other hand I have seen a lot of old machinery brought back to life on Youtube and a couple times in person. Older cast iron engine blocks were a lot more durable than folks today using aluminum appreciate. While you might need to "rebuild" your 1960's engine every 50,000 miles it was a process you could do multiple times because when you are using sleeve liners in the cylinders a competent machine shop with reline the block and give you back an engine bored out to the same factory tolerances it had when brand new. My understanding is aluminum blocks are less forgiving of that sort of treatment but the new ones are rated to last 200,000 miles so it works out the same with less need for relining everything like mechanics used to do.

Heck for about two decades Chevrolet sold three engine displacements using the very same block by using thicker or thinner liners in the cylinders. Nobody would do that today when every ounce of block reduces your MPG a fraction of a percent. Today aluminum blocks are just as light and insubstantial as the engineers can get away with in the name of efficiency and they are pretty darn good at their designs.

[Pops]

Ford is selling a "crate" Mach E motor for a few grand. They did a resto-mod conversion on a 76 F100 with a custom frame and complete mustang Mach E suspension in-house I guess as a promo. I think it is very cool. When they get the complete "crate" thing available, with controls and all I really like to do somethin similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQZzg6rWyo

[Revi]

I think we want to preserve all the sailboats we can find. Even old ones if the hulls are still good. It's going to be important in the future. Think of this. England dug all sorts of canals to move goods around. Moving goods by roads didn't work. The roads weren't fixed up that the romans built until the late 1700s. The only way to move things was by water. That's why I suggest rail to sail. [url][url]https://www.yachtworld.com/yacht/1984-farr-garrett-40-gpr-fr-7859629/[/url][/url]

[Newfie]

Here is a long running thread listing them.

https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f4 ... ost3582756

Then there is another thread in the same site called “free or nearly free”.

Last year a guy I know gave away a really nice sailboat, Southern. Ross 35, because he didn’t want to fuss with selling.

Both of our boats are nearly that old.

[Doly]

Moving goods by roads didn't work. The roads weren't fixed up that the romans built until the late 1700s.

Roads are good only if they are regularly maintained. Mind you, canals need maintenance, too. It's just that for a period of time in England it was more practical to move goods by canal than by road. Carts take more horsepower than barges.

[Tanada]

Moving goods by roads didn't work. The roads weren't fixed up that the romans built until the late 1700s.

Roads are good only if they are regularly maintained. Mind you, canals need maintenance, too. It's just that for a period of time in England it was more practical to move goods by canal than by road. Carts take more horsepower than barges.

I declare that the understatement of the century! Three examples from history.
A good healthy pack mule can carry 250kg of cargo for eight hours a day and stay healthy if well treated.
Now take that mule and hitch them to a two wheel cart on a muddy spring/fall road and if you are very lucky they can drag along 1,000 kg of cart, driver and cargo for two or three hours before they need a long rest.
That same mule can tow 60,000kg of canal boat loaded with passengers and cargo to get to that total weight without undue effort.

Draft horses and mules were a huge part of the economic system for good sound reasons based on the difficulty of transport overland. In places where water is relatively abundant like western Europe and the Mississippi drainage basin it is vastly easier aka cheaper to transport cargo and passengers via water up creeks and rivers and over canal networks because the friction between a flat bottom water craft and the surface is a tiny fraction of the friction any land vehicle experiences. The closest we come on dry transport is steel wheels on steel tracks in trolley's and railroads.

[Newfie]

At the moment we reside in an old portion of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, or C&D canal. This abandoned stub is still connected to the main canal and occasionally, when a large ship passes through the main canal, we get jostled, sometimes a fair bit.

[theluckycountry]

Rebuild a battery? No problem. 3 a day for $30 each.

https://youtu.be/afwO_MZjRjA

Ahhh, the third world, gotta love it. As long as they never send any of those batteries over here.

[Newfie]

If the whole world goes to hell, or Mad Max, we will meet them there and they will have necessary skill sets we don’t.

I look up to and admire these guys. True Grit.

[Tanada]

If the whole world goes to hell, or Mad Max, we will meet them there and they will have necessary skill sets we don’t.

I look up to and admire these guys. True Grit.

You know growing up poor anywhere is alike in that you learn survival skills for your specific environment from a young age. There was a popular song a couple decades about it in country music, "A Country Boy Can Survive"

https://youtu.be/3cQNkIrg-Tk

...I can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk 'til dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too
Ain't too many things these old boys can't do
We grow good old tomatoes and homemade wine
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

Because you can't starve us out
And you can't make us run
'Cause we're them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say "grace" and we say "Ma'am"
And if you ain't into that we don't give a damn

We came from the West Virginia coal mines
And the Rocky Mountains and the western skies
And we can skin a buck; we can run a trout-line
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just hillbilly
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to be a businessman
He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I'd send him some homemade wine

But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For 43 dollars my friend lost his life
I'd love to spit some beech nut in that dude's eyes
And shoot him with my old .45
'Cause a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive...

[Newfie]

Saw that slogan in a bumper sticker just last week.

Dairy farmers and commercial fisherman will outlive cockroaches.

[Revi]

Saw that slogan in a bumper sticker just last week.

Dairy farmers and commercial fisherman will outlive cockroaches.

I agree. It seems like dairy farmers and fishermen will do almost anything to keep going. I hope some of the commercial fishermen's kids I am teaching sailing to are able to use some of the things they learn in the future. I think it helps to know about the wind and tacking at an early age. It seems like it will be a valuable thing to know again very soon. We have a fleet of windjammers here in Maine and there are a lot of sailboats around, so they may help us out with moving things around if it gets hard to find fossil fuels. I was thinking about the amount of people needed to move things around with sail, and it's not that many more than if you consider that each container must be loaded onto a truck that is moved by one or more people. Trains must be more efficient in manpower as well as fossil fuel. A combo of sail and rail must be way more efficient overall, considering both fuel and manpower.

[Newfie]

Revi,

Gi back and look at historic street car maps. They can tell you a lot. The East coast was covered with street cars, in between small townsZ. They were very simple affairs, some horse drawn. But before the “motor carriage” the were the principal way to get around. And in some places they also hauled farmers produce. Men would ride the cars to go hunting carrying their guns and dogs. Wardens would also ride the cars in the afternoons to check limits.

I have read it was theoretically possible to ride a street car from Boston to Chicago. May take a month to get there but that was the extent of the network.
inter-urban maps historic

By the mid-1880s, there were 415 street railway companies in the U.S. operating over 6,000 miles (9,700 km) of track and carrying 188 million passengers per year using animal-drawn cars.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetc ... th_America


https://www.chicagorailfan.com/interxst.html

https://www.abandonedrails.com/

[AdamB]

If the whole world goes to hell, or Mad Max, we will meet them there and they will have necessary skill sets we don’t.

I look up to and admire these guys. True Grit.

You know growing up poor anywhere is alike in that you learn survival skills for your specific environment from a young age. There was a popular song a couple decades about it in country music, "A Country Boy Can Survive"

Indeed! A favorite of mine today, remembering a misspent youth in hillbilly land that is quite a distant memory now. But a fond one nonetheless. The allure of it as a post-apocalyptic-post-peak model was always suspect, and seemed to have a high level of advocacy of those the least familiar with it. While I remember it fondly, I also remember it as hard work, boring and repetitive, and figure that America fleeing such circumstances for the big city spanning generations now meant that I wasn't the only one who didn't want to be a dirt farmer. Although the hunting and fishing was more interesting than flying a computer of course.

[Newfie]

Absolutely. Nothing like a few years of grunt labor to peek your interest in higher education.

[AdamB]

Absolutely. Nothing like a few years of grunt labor to peek your interest in higher education.

See, when I was young, I never even thought of it as grunt work. When you live that life, it is just what you DO. Grandma did the work of defeathering the chickens and turkeys, butchering whitetail we brought back in hunting system, grew the couple acres of sweet corn we sold during the summer, kept the garden growing with her grandkids as slave labor, me being one. And hell, I was out bailing hay in exchange for borrowing some farmers horse, barter was what we did, and I really did like riding those things. Got paid to mow grass for the "worker" types in the valley, using their equipment because grandpap wouldn't let me mow with his high falooting riding mower he used for the front 40. Running a trapline by age 10, made enough cash trapping raccoon and fox to buy my first deer rifle at 13, with some allowance money thrown in.

It wasn't the labor that drove me out, I just thought there had to be more to life than being some hilljack the rest of my life. It was a coin flip between college or trucking school. College won.