I can testify that the Mazda variant will run forever. My ‘94 is still road-worthy with 268,000 miles, though it could stand to be freshened up. I’ve pulled/carried plenty of big loads, even with the little 3.0 v-6.

Here’s one for you. Crop circles from center-pivot irrigation. The irrigated areas are actively growing and the dry areas are not.

Don’t forget the role of LiDAR! Light Detection and Ranging is used to build accurate topographical maps of areas, even in areas with thick forest canopies.

You could explain how these things are generated. It’s called false-color infra-red (FIR). A typical photo uses 3 color bands, Blue (1), Green (2), and Red (3), in order from shorter to longer wavelengths. The next band down the spectrum is near infra-red (4).

The most positive guy I have seen on one of these shows is Dave Kindig (shop - Kindig Designs, show - Bitchin’ Rides).

I wish I could say that I loved this show. I really want to. But the blatant sponsorship and overly cheesy lines just go a bit too far. Every other line is a bad joke. A dad joke. A bad dad joke. I’m a dad who is prone to telling dad jokes and it’s still too much for me!

My wife was a project manager for an A&E firm and that required a lot of on-site work. She was called in one day and accused of logging hours she didn’t work. They could tell because they had no record of her logging into the network with her laptop, despite it being required for her to access a floating license for…

There’s nothing particularly unsafe about kids in a trailer. We never had an incident in the many years I used one.

Moms. They do the darndest things.

Ouch. Had to have been a more catastrophic problem than the tie-rod. The B-Series and Rangers have fairly decent caster in the front-end geometry. Mine rolled fairly straight, but didn’t like my efforts to guide it to the shoulder. The first time it happened was in the middle of a u-turn and I couldn’t complete the…

The latest Explorer pulls trailers just fine. This is my wife’s Explorer on a recent run to my in-laws to pick up some furniture. I pulled that thing 1,200 miles in two days, empty one way, full of furniture the other. It didn’t have anywhere near a full load, but I took the time to load it properly and it tracked…

Twice I have lost a tie-rod connection on my ‘94 B-3000. the first time was due to it being old (over 260,000 miles), but the second time was due to the mechanic who repaired it using the old nut on one of the new tie-rod ends when he replaced them.

My bicycle, of course.

Trees are a renewable crop. Managed forests are harvested for pulp wood after 10 to 15 years, selectively harvested after 25 years, and harvested for lumber after 50 years. Over the cycle, a variety of habitats are created that support many types of wildlife. Sure, it isn’t the old-growth forests that so many people…

At least it wasn’t a Packard Bell... like mine....

“It didn’t make sense for me to call the cops because there’s nothing that they could do to solve the problem”

Save yourself some heartache and keep a basic socket set in the trunk. Nothing fancy, Harbor Freight works fine.

When The Woodlands, Texas (yes, a capitalized “The” is in their official name) was developed, porous paving was required for all parking lots, and surface drainage was minimized. What they forgot about was The Woodlands were aptly named and the city is full of pine trees which produce lots of pine needles. Pine…

The best shotgun I have used was my buddy’s old 12ga side-by-side. I felt like I couldn’t miss with it. Really. We were shooting skeet with more shooters than shotguns. So, we played round-robin style - if you missed, you handed over the gun for someone else to shoot. Once I got my hands on that side-by-side, I stayed…

Biggest problem is a lack of positive yaw control. Small multi-copters depend on differential torque to rotate. This works fine when the vehicle is small, not so well on a large, multi-rotor craft.