Meet the Pack Mule

Remember all that time ago when I said, hold me to that? You may not, actually. I don’t blame you really, it was a long time ago at this point. Anyway, refresher: I was upset with the abilities of the new Tacoma in off-road situations, specifically the technical-sounding, not-as-useful solution to faux-lock the front axle ATRAC system (among other off-road shortcomings of the new models). I said I’d go & get a 1^st gen Tacoma & set it up right, hold me to it.

So, uh, yeah. Let me introduce the “Pack Mule.” I know it’s not a sexy name, most guys name their rides after girls. Always fat-sounding girls too, I don’t get that at all. Bertha? Bessie? Really? Eh. I considered naming it Marisa (after Marisa Miller, my favorite not-my-wife woman ever in the history of the world). But the thing is, it’s not a pretty ride. It’s a utilitarian vehicle. It’s specifically for getting us in & out of any situation or place we want to get ourselves into. It’s not Marissa-pretty. It’s Pack Mule efficient. So I figured since that’s what it basically is to us, so shall that be it’s name. You know, like an American Indian name. “Fast as bull.” “Quick like deer.” “Ugly as bison ass.” “Pack Mule.”

I hope no one placed bets against this happening. Ladies & gents, if I say it shall be so, then clearly, it shall be so.

So Pack Mule was bought as just a regular 4wd 4-door. I put the lift on it, tires & new rims to hold the larger tires. Then locked it, front & rear. I also have put on some “Rock Wings” that run along the sides under the cab, to protect these extremely sensitive areas from damage incurred by — well, rocks of course, but also trees or anything else.

As it stands now I am not sure I could actually get myself stuck! The thing’s damned near unstoppable. However, I’m not quite done with the mods. I do plan on placing an armor-type front bumper on it as well as a rear, and additionally a winch. I figure no I have not been stuck yet, but what happens when/if that does happen, thousands of miles from civilization or even, hell, phone reception? Better have a plan, like one that starts with “W” and ends with “inch.”

Anyway, thar she blows. Hopefully I’ll have some adventure pics eventually. When I remember to take a camera with me. Been bad about that lately.

BP. Just, Wow. Wow.

Are we over it yet? I mean, really. Does “Electric vehicles” really sound all that bad now? If this had to happen, I’m glad it happened in the southern states, all the ones who supported the whole “drill baby, drill” schlep. How sad.

Take a look at these pics. Just birds mind you, but can you imagine? What’s it spewing out, 3-5,000k barrels a day of this stuff? This is what happens with corporations, this is what happens when you put profit – a $number in front of the ‘human’ & environmental components – you sully everything around you including your name & your very reason for existence.

I hope British Petroleum burns in oily hell. And I hope all that support “drill baby, drill” above “let’s innovate our way out of oil dependency” get to join them. What’s so bad about being labeled Green? Sure seems to trump being covered in reddish-brown death.

So Long, A-TRAC, and thanks for all the fish. Wait, what?

I have come to the conclusion that technology’s solutions to problems typically fail in comparison to an actual solution to the problem. I rail against things most of the time, yes I admit it. Hey look, going on and on and on about how pretty the flowers are and how lovely the bacon was this morning doesn’t make them any better or worse, and f*ck, it’s boring OK? I complain. That’s what blogs are for. It’s an acronym that stands for Boy i Like cOmplaining, Golly! Really. Look it up.

So what are we railing against today? Active Traction Control. Toyota instituted it in their newer Tacoma models, and they tout it in videos and stuff as the next best thing to sliced cheese. It’s better than anything else ever. It makes an off-road vehicle much much better than all these silly simpler, less technical solutions ever could, like a locker or good tires or something. But it’s not the truth, it’s marketing. It’s $100 worth of technical cost that they can tell you is too complicated for you to understand anyway, but trust us it totally jacks up the price $2,500 and it’s worth it. As if.

What they don’t tell you is the truth: while it’s better than nothing, it’s worse than an actual solution. It stinks. It’s twice the cost and half the effectiveness of the simpler, less technical solutions.

I had the time to try it out in all it’s glory last weekend. I’ve had it engage before from time to time off-roading, but never had I felt that I was in a situation that required it. But no sooner than I find myself in that situation, it fails. Coincidence? We had gone up to the mountains to play in the snow, and doggone it, if there wasn’t snow. White, wet, icy, traction-challenged snow. Lots of it. Of course 4-wheel drive became a must, hell they had signs posted “chains required, NO EXCEPTIONS” even, but I’m lazy and a figured I have decent tires, and a well-equipped Toyota 4x4; it has ATRAC after all!

We made it to our destination without any fuss. No problems to report. But again, I wasn’t relying on the traction control anyway, I was relying on good tires & prudent, awesome driving skills (“mad skillz,” as the kids say). We eventually landed at a makeshift parking lot filled with people who recognized that continuing along a road with 4’ of snow over it was probably not going to happen, and everyone was skiing, sledding, hiking, and had at least 1.5 dogs with them (we brought 3). It was fun.

As we were getting ready to leave, we saw some big, lifted, new Chevy’s try to arrive. I want to emphasize try here, OK? All the trucks that had arrived at this spot were either a) older models with good tires, b) small trucks, c) AWD cars, d) Toyotas, or e) some logical combination of the above. What we saw out of this big poser truck was some crazy slippage that was not under control. And I chided to The Girl, so much for spending $40K on the truck & $10K on the lift and tires, there’s no fix for quality components & lighter weight.” As we exited down the road a bit later, a turn or two away just in case so we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves, I hit the gas hard to see if even trying, I could get slippage like that poser Chevy was having trouble with.

Eventually, we came to rest against a snowbank.

It’s not quite like it sounds. We actually didn’t get the truck to slip the tires and lose control with the gas, it was just that since it didn’t slip, we gained all that energy as forward motion and momentum, which sort of f*cked us coming downhill into that turn we were headed to.

So the thing was, 2-½ wheels were firmly planted on the pavement at first. I locked the rear and managed to get THREE whole wheels on the pavement; all but the passenger front were on solid ground. That passenger front though, was on the shoulder, slightly lower and snow-covered. And ATRAC failed me.

It’s supposed to brake the wheel that’s spinning and divert torque to the other side, so in my case it would brake the passenger front so that the driver front would turn — the one that was on the pavement — and pull me out. However, it uses the ABS system to function and relies on braking power to perform. So, when the brakes get hot, the whole system stops functioning at all. I was stuck like this, with three tires having as firm a grip on snow-covered pavement as they could, and the wheel that would get me out of the mess, my driver front, wouldn’t turn because ATRAC wouldn’t let it. Because it was an overly-technical solution to a simple problem: how do you get the tires with grip to turn?

The simple answer is that you lock the differential, so that no matter what, when you hit the gas, both wheels turn at the same speed. It’s simple, but here’s the thing: it’s f*cking failproof. It works. It doesn’t need all this technical mumbo-jumbo, it doesn’t have a million links in its system that could cause failure, the differential simply turns both because it mechanically has to.

The complicated answer, is you apply a computer that has no eyes or ears to be in charge of determining when what tire should be turning or being braked, in order to do what YOU want it to do, regardless that you have no way to communicate with it what your needs & intentions are. This computer will rely on sensors to tell it which tire is spinning and then brake the wheel for a set amount of time to get the other wheel spinning. It of course will have to let go because you can’t go forward too far with a non-turning wheel, and it has to let it go so it can again gauge to see if the wheel is indeed still slipping or not, which if it is, then oh well, you just lost traction again for a second while it tried to figure that out.

What it amounts to is the computer generational equivalent of a Rube Goldberg contraption: a big, convoluted, messy, jumbled, confusing, failure-inducing contraption that solves in 20 forehead-slapping steps what a simple stick could do in one. And I’m through with it.

Simple is better. A locker is better. Good tires are better. I’m through with the hype. I’m going to find me a 1^st generation Tacoma, and make it simple and great. Hold me to that.

Hey! Earthquake!

So, I said I’d be back here & again to post updates when big stuff happened. Does a 6.5 earthquake count? It does? Good.

Just over a week ago we were rocked by that 6.5 earthquake I mentioned not two seconds ago. I was at work, with two hours left to go, and suddenly the world shook. I’ve seen the security tape, and all I have to say is, it’s amazing the amount of thoughts you can have in such a short amount of time, because in reality the “major” shaking lasted a whopping 5 seconds at best. And anyway I lied; I have more to say than just that.

First thing I thought of? “Why didn’t I get that earthquake insurance on the house. it was offered to us as the house was turned over to us, and we turned it down. At the time we figured the house had already stood strongly for 70 years and survived some big quakes, it seemed like money wasted. But during the shaking, that was suddenly a bad idea. Turns out though, that there’s a good reason we didn’t get it: deductibles of $40-50K. Yeah. You pay the monthly premium, and then you get to pay out-of-pocket $50K before they pitch in. Quite the deal, right?

It makes you realize the fragility of our “modern” society, though. One quick disaster, and everything about us halts. No power? Then no commerce. No gas at the station. Food in the supermarkets & your fridge go bad, and if you don’t have your own self-sustaining supply (read: garden, animals for harvest) then you’re going to be hungry until it’s restored. I could write a whole book on the absurdity of our “modern” existence, about how we’re so disconnected from all that sustains us that it’s not even funny, and that in reality a large percentage of the population is dependent upon technologies they don’t understand to give them things that are so simple they should be doing it themselves, and that one disaster later (a BIG disaster) their very lives are in danger.

Instead, I will just say that I realized that we had been being frugal to a fault. Now, I have no plans to spend more money, but as everyone was freaking out about the possibility of a tsunami coming next, and as I told The Girl to take my truck, load the dogs, and just be prepared to drive “up,” I was thinking about how much gas I had in the tank: less than a quarter-tank. Her truck that she left with me? Less than a quarter tank. Because all these ages ago, we decided to just fill up with the amount of gas we’re actually going to use in our monthly budget. Doesn’t make sense, I argued at the time, to put in $60 of gas near the end of the month if I only plan to do $10 of driving. Because then I’ve killed my budget by $50, and what’s more, now I feel as though I have free gas to burn.

I still plan on doing half-tank driving, but it dawned on me that perhaps the other half-tank is the one to be using; from now on, we’ll be driving on the top-half of the tank, filling up when it gets do half, so there’s always a reserve. 

You know, in case of emergencies. Like 6.5 quakes and possible tsunamis.

New Year's resolution: F*ck the internet

It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s not that I don’t plan to use it still. Hey, a guy needs his porn. Anyway, for me it’s just that I don’t feel like I’m getting my time out of it. 

The internet & Football are the same in that they invariably just suck you in; there you are, on the precipice of doing something wholly productive, and the next thing you know you’re 3 hours into the future and haven’t done a damned thing. And that sucks.

I like to write. But it feels like I have an obligation to it or something when I make myself concerned for the internet. Who cares? My site gets this much traffic a day: 2-7 visits. Wow. And I’m not selling anything. I don’t have anything on the line. And I’m not going to gain in popularity. One common thread I notice among “popular” websites & blogs especially, is that they all focus solely on one, single, solitary thing. I can’t do that. I mean, hey guys & gals, I like my porn, right? I can’t blog about nothing but porn. I’m a ‘jack of all trades’ personality, even in writing.

So my New Year’s resolution is to be less involved in the internet. I may put up a post or two, if I have nothing else to do, my legs are broken, and I’m sick. But otherwise, I think that this time — for real though — I am pretty much saying bon voyage to the dear ol’ internet. You wanna know what the Bob is up to? Gimme a call man. Or Babe (if you’re hot).