charliemagpie

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I noticed on a flyover the other day, a container being delivered to the Cybertruck area with 'ITALIA' on it. I thought it potentially could be a delivery from IDRA.
 

Klaxon

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Looks like our excitement is proportional to the weight of Tesla equipment.
So will anybody jump from the software progress?
 


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Makes sense. They're going to need a big surplus of castings to begin production, right?
 

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Makes sense. They're going to need a big surplus of castings to begin production, right?
Once production starts going, they don’t want much inventory lying around. Ideally they pull it from the gigapress and 45 minutes later it rolls off as a truck. Cooling times might slow that a bit, but they don’t want big piles of anything half-finished lying around, thats just stuff to break and stuff to manage.

There are usually piles of test castings lying around prior to production as they get the process dialed in.
 

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Once production starts going, they don’t want much inventory lying around. Ideally they pull it from the gigapress and 45 minutes later it rolls off as a truck. Cooling times might slow that a bit, but they don’t want big piles of anything half-finished lying around, thats just stuff to break and stuff to manage.

There are usually piles of test castings lying around prior to production as they get the process dialed in.
I hope the metal doesn't require aging like the big pigs of cast iron that were rusting for a year before going to production
 

Ogre

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I hope the metal doesn't require aging like the big pigs of cast iron that were rusting for a year before going to production
This is absolutely not the case. They would need massive warehouses on site for that. I seriously doubt the cast assemblies are around for more than 8 hours before they are rolling around in a car.

If you see piles of them lying around, they are from test runs.
 

Crissa

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When they started using them at Fremont, they did have big piles of them sitting around. Even if you have a 10% success rate, those successes are still building up while you're not using them!

It may be just as their cast failure rate goes down, they build up a pile of casts that were fine, and start production before the casting process is 1:1 with their assembly line.

With Austin, it should be a much lower rate... but also they've been filling the empty halls of the plant with castings. Photos have surfaced of them stacking up.

-Crissa
 


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Can the rejects just be melted down and used again, or must they be recycled? It's possible the casting process alters the chemistry enough that the material cannot be directly re-used without degradation.
 

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Can the rejects just be melted down and used again, or must they be recycled? It's possible the casting process alters the chemistry enough that the material cannot be directly re-used without degradation.
I think in Fremont they have a piece of equipment which chunks them back up for recycling, but its possible the alloy changes a bit chemically when it solidifies and would need to be processed somehow. Pure speculation, I am not a metallurgist. I do like Megadeth but that doesn’t qualify.
 

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Can the rejects just be melted down and used again, or must they be recycled? It's possible the casting process alters the chemistry enough that the material cannot be directly re-used without degradation.
I don't know about what CAN be done. But just yesterday or the day before I saw an article quoting someone who worked at a recycling plant talking about showing up to work the other day and finding a large stack of what looked like Tesla front and rear castings that were there to be recycled. The article had an included picture too.

Can't seem to find it right at the moment. But supposedly in this instance at least, Tesla just sent the castings that didn't pass QC on to a recycling plant.
 

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1643142988848.png





2022 limited production is still on the menu. Speculation of course!
Again hopefully next year- 2023 as 2024 Model. But don't rule out 2024 as 2025 Model. Nothing new.
 

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Can the rejects just be melted down and used again, or must they be recycled? It's possible the casting process alters the chemistry enough that the material cannot be directly re-used without degradation.
Well, no and yes.

No, you can't just melt it down and reuse it. The proportions of the elements in it changes when cast. That needs to be rebalanced to reuse it.

But yes, it can be recycled, and Tesla has prior said they plan to have on-site recycling at some point. Once you know what elements get consumed at what rates and create easy ways to test the metal that it's meeting these, you can plan and reform the metal with minimal inputs.

That point isn't now, though. Right now it needs to go back, be chopped, melted, tested, elements rebalanced, remelted, and return to the factory as billets.

-Crissa
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