General > General Technical Chat
I wonder how long these fellows last
james_s:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on October 22, 2021, 10:28:31 pm ---Very crude and labor intensive. Factory made batteries must either be unavailable in Pakistan or very expensive to make this work profitable.
--- End quote ---
Probably both. I don't know what a typical wage is in rural Pakistan but it could be something like 50 cents to a few dollars a day. A brand new truck battery might cost $500 so this could easily be cost effective in that environment, it might even be a livable wage. It doesn't actually look all that difficult to do, and it's a way of recycling materials that are probably expensive and in short supply.
I remember melting down lead fishing weights in a tin can with a blowtorch and casting things when I was a kid. I played with mercury a few times too, and did lots of other stuff that a lot of people would be appalled by today. I'm still here.
Edit: I just looked it up, the average wage in Pakistan is USD$498 a month, so about $25 per weekday if you compare it to a Western 5 day work week. A typical truck battery is pushing up on $300 new https://www.interstatebatteries.com/products/8d-mhd, so that's about 3 weeks wages for a brand new battery, vs however long it takes to do a complete rebuild. Looks worth it to me.
G7PSK:
Back in the 70's there was a local company called "Cambridge Battery Services" that would repair a battery for you, I had one or two repaired there myself as did my father. They would dismantle a battery and replace one cell for you at the fraction of the price of a new battery but the cells and the complete new batteries they sold that they made were never as good as the one like Oldham or Lucas and other mass produced brands of the time due to the paste in the plates not being packed in as hard, they just knocked the paste into the grids with a piece of wood and the cells rapidly sludged up so repairs only got something like another useful year from a battery.
Psi:
As with most metals the real danger is the salts of the metal.
Raw elemental metal isn't that bad, even mercury.
But if someone hands you a container full of a mercury salt, I would carefully put it down and run, then wash your hands a few times with the vigor of a doctor about to perform surgery :phew:
james_s:
I'm reminded of this incident. https://www.science.org/content/article/mercury-poisoning-kills-lab-chemist
Not a salt, but another compound of mercury. I'd rather swim in a vat of pure mercury than get in the same room as a few ml of that stuff.
xrunner:
I just watched it. I think you could say I just had a "It's a Wonderful Life" experience for myself. :phew:
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