There’s something about Utah…
Matt’s Recovery is also in Utah… I’ve not yet figured out what the Morrvair… is…
Somehow, some way, I see a “Diesel Pusher” in my future…
Don’t know if I’ll ever get a 4×4 bus with rear & front dual steering but you never know… ;-)
There’s something about American Redneck that’s just a juice to the testosterone and makes me wanna doit… (hey, I’ve jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, more than once, so I think I have my creds…) Just a matter or wanting enough…
Diesel, Big Iron, Open land. What’s missing? Oh, I know, guns & “beverage of your choice”…
I think I can arrange that!
Freedom! It’s a wonderful thing…
Musings from the Chiefio 
Of course you’ll need the appropriate T-shirt if you go full redneck, E.M. 😜
Replying to E.M.Smith posted on 27 August 2021 at 6:01 am GMT [*]:
For readers who remember the Olympia Brewing jingle (alas, poor Oly!):
Sand alongside paved roads in much of the desert Red-Rock Country [🎨] of Utah has reportedly unexpected properties, notably a lack of the surface friction needed for a vehicle’s brakes to do their jobs of stopping “now!“ [☇] A lot like fresh-but-light accumulation of snow on even the slightest downhillish stretch of roadway.
Once caught, any powered turning of the wheels to escape just spins out deeper & deeper sand.
——–
Note * : “When RedNecks Have Too Much Money…”: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/when-rednecks-have-too-much-money/.
Note 🎨 : Never mind the color in the tourism-marketing name; it’s the orange color that’s visually correct–nearly perfectly so–in “Big Bus Burried to the Frame”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lj641mO0M.
Note ☇ : The reason for a former girlfriend’s angry complaint from the passenger seat to the driver, a newbie for Utah, trying to escape from an 18-wheeler who’d been riding his ass for a long time, then took the same da#n exit!
@CompuGator:
That orange color, along with the fine powder look of it, and having seen it make mud in videos of Matt pulling folks out after a rain, leads me to conclude that the “sand” is not quartz granule sand as folks think of sand, but is in fact “clay dust” to a large extent. Feldspar and mica like things that make plates and slip over each other, making mud that’s slick and “sand” that’s dusty solid acting like a liquid if disturbed.
I’ve been in similar near The River in my home town. Very tricky stuff.
I saw a show about the first mechanical tractors. They were steam engines. And weighed TONS! Thus the dilemma. They tended to sink when plowing the fields. One company came up with a novel solution – tracks. That company never did much selling farm tractors, but later became Caterpillar!!!
These videos reminded me of that documentary.
@Compu Gator – Olympia Beer. Oly! That was my absolute favorite outdoor-in-hot-weather beer when I was wasting my youth on the Left Coast.
The stuff is nearly as thin as water, but still has a great beer taste. No disappointment in taste. I’m guessing the alcohol content is about 4.2% +/-. Not wimpy, but not IPA kick-ass either.
The lyrics to the jingle were dead simple.
♯♪♫Oly, Oly oh…
Oly, Oly oh.
Oly, Oly oh…
Oly, Oly oh..♪♫
.♪♫It’s the water, oh,
that makes Olympia!
It’s the water oh, and a lot mooore..♪♫
(Fading .♪♫(Oly, Oly, oh… Oly, Oly, ohh… Oly, Oly, ohh……♪♫)
Made from Tum Water!
I’d be drinking that by the case in warm weather if it was available in the East. That is the best ever play volleyball/softball at the picnic beer.
@PhilJourdan:
Every year in April, about Tax Day, my alma mater (UCD an Ag School) has an Antique Tractor Parade. The school has a canonical collection from over their years of teaching, and other folks join in. One is a GIANT steam thing… with about 10 HP… Chuf…. Chuff….Chuff… About one chuff per second. Or 60 RPM.
There’s a whole lot of others too. All manner of interesting equipment from eras gone by.
My one regret about school is not taking “Tractor Driving”. It was a 3 unit course that a lot of folks took as essentially an “Easy A” elective. Me? I thought “I was driving a tractor at 8 or 9 years old, what’s the point?”… Turns out you got to play with more gear than just a tractor. Oh Well.
The local John Dear Dealer had some old 2 cylinder tractors on the lot. I was in the shop (painting lines on the floor for not much per hour…) while they were working on one. These things had about a 2 gallon cylinder for each piston. Stroke was from front of tractor to rear with the working gear slung under the gas tank fore / aft. They, too, did a chuff chuff chuff chuff but about two per second.
Such fun stuff to play with ;-)
@H.R.:
Oly was my first beer ever, at some age about 8 to 10 under the legal… Still miss it.
As a kid, it was a nice gentle introduction to beer. Lots of nice flavors and a bit of nose, but still easy drinking and no “OMG what is that in my mouth?!” like you get with heavily hopped IPAs.
Morrvair is a modified version of a corvair. Just MORE!
Looks like the “Morrvair” is a Corvair in name only… The shell of a Corvair wagon was used, but the engine is now a water cooled V8 in front, it has a transfer case and Dana Axels Front & Rear…
On, and a lot of strengthening of the “frame”…
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40554/that-lifted-chevy-corvair-wagon-built-for-off-road-recoveries-is-finally-finished
Let’s face it, extremes of all sorts are fun. Back in the day, BBC TV showed a race, from a standing start, between (IIRC) a race-tuned Ford Escort Mexico (pretty hot at the time) and the unmodified cab unit of an articulated lorry. It was unforgettable. The truck cab shot into the lead from the off and the Mexico stayed in its dust all the way, losing by several lengths. NO contest!
You can have a lot of fun with lightweights too. When I was young and immortal, a friend let me “have a go” in his beach buggy. VW floor pan with the trusty old air cooled engine, light fibreglass body, 10″ tyres on the front and 15″ on the back, all at about 5-6psi because at the time there were no official figures for tyre pressure for beach buggies. Probably the most responsive thing I’ve ever driven.
There’s a sharp bend near where we were – within the urban 30mph limit – where, no matter what you were driving, you’d slow down and go down a gear to get round it. We (the owner was encouraging me from the passenger seat) went round that bend in the Bug at about 55 mph on the inside of the curve, and I had to correct the steering very smartly as we came out of the bend because the darn thing was heading into the kerb. Oh, the adrenaline!
We survived 8-D
@Steve C:
My “Rice Rocket” (or “Crotch Rocket”…) was a Kawasaki 250 two stroke twin. About the same HP as a 500 CC 4 stroke in a package that was lighter than my Honda 175… In 1st, 2nd, or 3rd gears, I had to hike out over the handle bars (to various degrees) IF I opened the throttle wide open; in order to keep the front wheel on the ground.
In 5th gear, cruising the highway at 70 mph, the plugs would start to carbon up. The “cure” was to downshift to 4th for a while to burn off the carbon, or open it up to about 90 for a while ;-) Peak of the power band in 5th was about 100+ mph IIRC.
From just north of Sacramento to Medford Oregon one August evening (about midnight to 2:30 AM) a buddy and I rode our bikes… AVERAGING just over 100 MPH… including one stop for “gas and to lose a cop”… That was through the mountains on I-5. It is a special kind of excitement to be doing that fast on winding mountain road with a cliff on one side… We often used all lanes in a corner doing the racing bit of picking a line to gentle the curve… and often ended up a little close to the guard rail at those speeds. All under glorious stars and on a just the right warm of night.
An experience I hope to never have again ;-)
Mountain Curves on a bike… some special kind of adrenaline there…