[kragen]

As it happens, I've spent a lot of time over the last week talking to a guy in Romania who's trying to fix a sulfated lead-acid battery in his backyard garage. (I don't know if you've been to Romania, but the apocalypse happened 40 years ago there, so his available resources are kind of limited.) I think he's going to succeed, and may eventually progress to being able to recycle the lead into a new battery, but it's not going to be a weekend learning process or even a week-long one.

He reports that it's a "very complex electrochemical device".

The USPTO (?) has assigned the code H01M10/06 to lead-acid battery patents. https://patents.google.com/?q=(H01M10%2f06)&oq=(H01M10%2f06) finds 44'593 patents in this category. You don't need any of them to get a working lead-acid battery, but a significant subset of them are going to be helpful. Some are order-of-magnitude improvements.

[grugagag]

What kind of apocalypse happened in Romania 40 years ago?

[dragontamer]

I presume he's talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union, which caused a huge amount of upheaval in that area.

But I'm a poor student of modern history. Just throwing out a guess for now.

[kragen]

Right, but I got the time interval wrong; it was only 30 years ago.

[grugagag]

That sounds like the opposite of an apocalypse

[dragontamer]

Eventually it was good for Romania but IIRC, the initial collapse was very bad for the locals.

But again, I'd say that Eastern European modern history is my weakest subject by far. I probably should avoid talking about this subject lol.