81–90 of 209 posts
It's only a matter of time until it becomes profitable enough to salvage that one orbiting the Earth...
It's not orbiting Earth, it's orbiting the sun. I think it's fair to say that it would be the most ambitious space mission we've ever taken to try and retrieve it, at least when not adjusting for our increased technical sophistication since the appolo era...
The EV conversion made the car a lot heavier and was a pretty complex conversion https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/09/18/elon-mu...
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Pretty much. Same deal on the Corolla. Just out of curiosity I checked safelite.com and they don’t even offer a replace option on this year/make/model. Only repair, and this crack is well beyond the repair limit.
In aviation, we stop-drill the ends of cracks in aluminum to stop propagation by diffusing the stress point. If you need to wait 6 months, you might want to investigate doing that.
... okay?
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The good news is you can get almost anything on the Internet. I've found so many weird parts from shady eBay sellers that worked perfectly in the end. Other times I've had to order a similar part off of Mouser and hack it to make it fit, with varying levels of success.
This is less of an option when hardware makers fuse everything in to a single board so when one thing breaks you need a new main board which costs as much as the whole device. I have had a surprising amount of luck with some items though. Managed to replace the shoulder buttons on my 3ds by finding a replica of the button + ribbon cable + connector used.
Depends on your soldering iron handiwork. If we're talking something large like a switch or a power socket it's usually pretty easy to replace it as it's still through-hole. Fixed some blown caps on an old LCD monitor earlier this year doing exactly that. It's not that hard if it's big.
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Can’t you just go to one of the dozens of windshield replacement businesses in your area? You drive it there and they plop in a new windshield for very reasonable rates. They will often even come to you to fix it.
I have wondered about this between my 2008 Honda and my 2019 Honda. The 2008, I have had the windshield replaced twice, no sweat, once due to a rock from the road and once due to a hailstone. On the 2019, there is a suite of sensors behind the rearview mirror that (I presume) handle lane detection and object avoidance (emergency braking) duties. I don't know what assumptions those sensors (or the software behind them…
" Actually, if any body parts are damaged, you'll have to fabricate them. " I thought car markers provided parts for, like, 30 years.
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Most of the parts on your car are just GM parts. Auto manufacturers don't design a new pump/bearing/condenser/etc... for every make and model of their vehicles, they take one off of the shelf. When it breaks you can find a replacement because there are dozens or hundreds of cars that used the exact same part and supplying one supplies them all. Even when the manufacturer stops making that part (because the last car t…
> With something like those early model Teslas there is a lot of custom one-off parts that are near impossible to find. I guess the question becomes why did Tesla have so many one-off parts? Is it all attributable to being electric rather than gas?
Partly yes, but Tesla didn't have a shelf to go grab parts from in the first place, either. They didn't come out of an existing auto company with an existing parts inventory after all. And for the body & frame they also started with a Lotus which is itself not a mass-market car.
You'll probably find _some_ non-custom common parts in a Roadster, like maybe the A/C system. But the drive train makes up a pretty big chunk of the parts in a car.
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Pretty much. Same deal on the Corolla. Just out of curiosity I checked safelite.com and they don’t even offer a replace option on this year/make/model. Only repair, and this crack is well beyond the repair limit.
In aviation, we stop-drill the ends of cracks in aluminum to stop propagation by diffusing the stress point. If you need to wait 6 months, you might want to investigate doing that.
the Roadster is a Lotus Elise with an EV drivetrain installed by Tesla, there is good parts supply for the original Elise. https://www.elise-shop.com/original-lotus-parts-c-17.html The EV conversion made the car a lot heavier and was a pretty complex conversion https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/09/18/elon-mu...
This guy is great, he found a niche full of customers and became the expert. I wish more startups would do this. With regards to Tesla, it is always interesting to me to see how as companies grow, they become more political, less effective and generally suck more. All the good people, like this guy, get pushed out or leave on their own. Makes me generally not want to build or work for a large company ever again.
Find a niche. Build a profitable business around it. Stay small. Make your customers and your staff happy (make a path to shared ownership for them if that tickles your fancy). Enjoy doing it. You won’t regret it. More money, more problems (my apologies to Mr B.I.G.)
Wow. This is exactly what I'm doing!