Cool.  Good to hear, Mike

I'll be interested to hear how you get on with bolts.  If you have found a grade of bolt that is tough & durable, I'd be very interested to hear what it is so as to consider using it in other applications

Whereabouts are you located with that bad weather, Mike?

Cheers

My own off-the-cuff diagnosis - FWIW - is maybe you haven't got a bolt problem . . .

Maybe there's a load problem, in that if there is imbalance in the flywheels, the forces they are generating as the imbalance rotates - maybe lateral, maybe vertical, maybe tangential - but all forces wanting to lift/move the base off its mounts . . . maybe those forces are greater than the bolts can withstand

If that is the case, imbalance may have to be addressed?

just my $0.02

Shower water is a good candidate too - especially if one has teenage daughters - as there is so much of it.  If the shower waste comes through the wall in a 40mm or 32mm pvc pipe & elbow to a gully trap it's easy to divert, depending on elevation above a lawn or garden . . .

Guilty as charged on topic-slip, yes

And +1 on "thanks Ade" too

Community stuff is good.  Will be interesting to see if folks appreciate it or abuse it.  You might start something great - one of those community things where people trade scones with whipped cream-and-jam for lawn-mowings . . .

It's a lonely world Tefs

Natasha & Nadia have stopped sending me nude photos of their six-foot, blonde, curvaceous selves and asking me about help with their immigration processes.  Ngamutu from Nigeria no longer asks for my assistance with his currency-moving issues.  Even the little-blue-pill peddlers seem to have given me up as a bad job

THey warned me old age was going to be cold & lonely . . .

I'm less of a pessimist than Glort et al re the EVs (not to say that I may well be proved wrong and they may well be proved right . . .) I'm just more glass-half-full about that sort of thing

That Blog is fascinating as it's a real-world guy driving at 130 km/h (end up in handcuffs here if you do that, sadly) and using the heater and lights and enjoying the performance of his car in real-world conditions such as snow, and accepting that you normally break a trip for lunch or whatever somewhere anyway

For a great many people like me an EV would be a perfect service vehicle if there was a fast charger at my work - and if suitable vehicles were available.  Our team of seven engineers have daily commutes ranging from 80Ks (mine) down to 8Ks.  Our normal travel-to-job-and-back is usually about an 80K round-trip for 90% of jobs and up to maybe 250Ks for the farthest one or two sites.  I get a $100 fill of diesel one-and-a-half or two times a week. Sometimes three times a week if we are busy

Our small country has old-but-acceptable electrical infrastructure and we are 85%+ renewable.  Our government says that projected infrastructure upgrades are showing a faster growth in the provision of electricity availability than would be needed with even the most optimistic EV uptake projections

We also have big proportions of our population who are 3/4-hour one-way-trip commuters twice a day on routes that don't have good public transport.  EVs would probably serve many of them well

FWIW the Toyota Hiluxes and Isuzu DMaxes we use are $50K vehicles but the Indian and Chinese equivalents (reliability still to be proven) are only around half that $$ as fleet purchases.  In the future, I suspect that if there's a demand, there may well be Chinese-built EV service vehicles in the pipeline

I'm optimistic about the contribution tech can make to the challenges around EVs

What I'm less optimistic about is local and national government leading by example, moving their fleets to EVs, and contributing to a pool of secondhand Leafs or similar as the years go by and government vehicle fleets "rollover" every three years

NZ government fleet is conservatively estimated at 25,000 units, with local government fleets possibly adding a similar figure.  Some of these are buses and rubbish trucks etc; but if just half were suitable (say 24,000 cos it's an easy number) and if a third of them were rolled-over annually - that'd be 8000 2nd-hand EVs on the market every year

Kiwis register something like 700 Corollas, 200 i30s and Mazda3s plus another 400-odd similar-sized vehicles every month.  Maybe, in very crude terms, you could say we register 1300 vehicles every month that could be readily replaced by small/mid-sized EVs IF THEY WERE AVAILABLE.  Call it 16,000 a year for ease of maths and you could see the contribution that ex-govt-fleet of 8000 EVs would make if our governments had some balls

We could generate and reticulate the electricity with ease if there was a governmental will.  If the average diesel/petrol tanker holds 28,000 litres, and my Hilux uses 7,500 litres of diesel a year, every half-dozen comparable vehicles or, say, 15 "Corolla"-sized cars replaced by EVs might take a tanker-and-trailer off the road

Should I hold my breath?