To follow up on A Drop of Hell’s comment, some deserts form a hard crust similar to pavement. Once you drive on it, the pavement is broken and the soils below start eroding away. If you look at the Sonoran desert, you’ll see that the trails through the desert are below the desert floor. In some of the areas we went,…

Hero!

The same issues affect all large equipment. A friend of mine bought a new bulldozer for his dirt business. The dozer has all of the same electronic gizmos and associated limitations. Late on a payment? Watch them remotely disable the very machine that you need to make money to make the payment.

Coleco Telstar Combat

My parents set the stage early. We had two Mustangs, a ‘65 and a ‘66, one hardtop, one convertible.

A mechanic friend of mine refers to his planes (three ultralights, an LSA, and a Tri Pacer) as flying lawnmowers. There’s some truth to that. The engine uses basically the same technology as a lawn mower. The airframes for many general aviation aircraft have changed little since their original design back in the ‘50s…

Well... sort of. If you can get an A&P to oversee your work, you can overhaul an engine yourself. A friend of mine is a truck mechanic and has rebuilt several engines for his personal aircraft with an A&P reviewing his work. He even took a course on how to install fabric so he could re-skin his vintage Tri-Pacer.

In my area, the local airport has a long waiting list for hangar space and the construction of new hangar space has been delayed by weather issues. (Frankly, I think the airport managers are buffoons and have no business managing construction projects.) The nearest airport with hangar space is over an hour away. That…

That goes for most of our physical infrastructure too. We’ve spent a great deal of time and money trying to digitize it before most of the old guys retire. The map shows the gas main over here... “Nope. That’s just that way on the map so you can see it. The actual location is ten feet to the right.”

Some of the companies go a step further. It is possible to order custom textbooks with chapters pulled from any of the other textbooks in their catalog, arrange them to your liking, and print them up with custom covers. E-publishing tools automatically take care of the TOC and index.

It’s even common for one company to buy product from another company and relabel it as their own. When I worked at a petrochemical plant, we would occasionally put our product in someone else’s packaging. The joke was on them - we were required to put adhesive labels with our quality results on each and every bag, so…

You might get a kick out of truck-towing hang gliders.

No.

There’s one station where I have to leave my car at the pump nearly every time I fill up there. The problem? The pump doesn’t deliver a receipt. While it’s generally good practice to get a receipt, it’s an absolute necessity when the receipt is required to get reimbursement from your company. While I would be…

That’s what our Explorer had. The pad on the truck is the same technology, different implementation.

“With PIN to Drive, you have to enter a four-digit code before you can drive, which makes it sort of like all those old Fords and Lincolns with numeric keypads I’ve never seen anyone use, and all of this seems like a much bigger ass-pain than putting a damn key into a hole and twisting.”

Reminds me of the old Gravely tractors. My uncle had a walk-behind mower/brush-hog with a sulky. It’s the same basic idea - an engine with wheels plus a variety of attachments.

This fellow thinks your little toy truck is “cute.”

Those are real arrow points. That bottom one is meant for decapitating turkeys. You make a little noise to get them to lift their head up high then let the arrow fly. 

I had a 2018 Maxima for a rental for a couple of months last year. I have to admit, I was surprised to discover that it has a CVT. It was so much better than the CVT in our Outback. It rarely hunted for the proper gear ratio and didn’t suffer any kick-down hesitation like an auto does when you step hard on the gas. It…