Art of Pickups - PART 1

During the great depression that followed war war one, money was tight so banks would not lend money to farmers to buy a luxury like a car, but would lend money to a working vehicle like a truck. Farmers could not afford both a car for their families and a truck for their farms. So a farmer or his wife wrote a letter to the managing director of the ford car company stating:

Why don't you build people like me a vehicle in which I can take my family to church on Sunday, and my pigs to town on Monday?

Request was heard and Lewis Bandt at Ford Australia designed the first pickup the 'ute'. No wonder that pickups are popular among folks who have to compromise. Like in my situation, i would have loved to own a defender but had to settle for a hilux aka 'poor manns defender'. When it comes to pickups you can not over emphasize the importance of the word 'compromise'. Not just pickups trucks .. 'compromise' is the key in many a pickup ;)

There are number of meanings pickup.. according to wiki it may refer to:

• Pickup (music), a device which detects vibrations from musical instruments
• Pickup artist, a man who is skilled in meeting, attracting, and seducing women
• Pick-up (gaming), anything that you collect whilst playing a video game
• Pickup group or Pickup band, a musical ensemble brought together for only a few performances
• Pick-up line, intended to be short and easy method of engaging another person for sex or romance
• Pickup truck or pick-up truck, a light truck with an open-top rear cargo area

more on those later..thus the title part 1 ..no not because i was lazy to write all in one post ;)

Do You Have A 'Real' jeep

Most people think anything that have 6 inches of ground clearance and a 4 wheel drive is a jeep. It's a tricky question no doubt. Ask a guy who owns a Defender and he will tell you Landrovers are the real thing and all others are just cheap toys. Of course the word jeep is tricky by itself.
"jeep" ..note uncapitalized..is used for any vehicle of this shape and function. However 'Jeep' is a trademark held by Chrysler Holdings, the most recent successor company to Willys.

The first Jeep prototype was built for the Department of the Army by Bantam, followed by two other competing prototypes produced by Ford and Willys. In these early days it was called many things from GP, Peep, Pygmy and Blitz-Buggy. Early in 1941, Willys demonstrated the vehicle's ability by having it drive up the U.S. Capitol steps, driven by Willy's test driver Irving "Red" Haussman. When asked by syndicated columnist Katherine Hillyer for the Washington Daily News what it was called, Irving answered, "It's a jeep." And the rest is history.

Lesson? Don't ask anyone who rides a jeep, 'what is a jeep?'. Ask a guy with a Hilux double cab and he would tell you.... well..he wont tell you anything..instead he would give this test.. test to find out if you own a real jeep or not..

You call a scratch or a dent, a beauty mark

Your Mom or your sister can't get in without help

You feel nauseous when you see a Rav4

You feel sorry for someone in a Toyota Rav4

Every page of your repair manual has greasy fingerprints

You spend more time under your Jeep than under your significant other

You have a high-water mark "INSIDE" the Jeep

You plan your wedding around the Club's ride schedule

You think that an "airline" is something that connects your differential to your air compressor

You buy parts for your Jeep instead of food for your family

You spend more on car washes than on insurance

Even worse, the car wash won't let you in

IF you said 'yes' to most then you are safe!

For the full test visit http://webejeepin.com/Jeep_Humor/Real-Jeeps.htm

We hate Wasgamuwa

Hating a wildlife park is childish, I know. But everyone has someone or something they hate for no good reason. I know a fellow blogger who hates a person for no reason what so ever. They may have not done anything personally to yous, but you just love to hate this person. You just find them to be the single most annoying, repulsive person on the face of this earth. You would give anything to punch them in their fat face and make them cry. Thats how we feel about wasgamuwa.

We can't just hate someone for no reason at all. Instead, we take some small incident and blow it completely out of proportion. At this point I won’t try to go into details , but I will throw out a few bullet points. First, there was no off-roading. Just miles and miles of bad road that go us no where. It took us almost 12 hours of driving to get there. Comparing with yala which is a pleasant 5 hour ride on good carpet roads this is hell. Ofcource there is no 'Riverston' on the way to yala with its misty hills and breath taking scenery.

Then how about wild life in wasgamuwa? Well all we saw was couple of elephants. couple of hundreds to be exact but when you see one you have seen them all, am I right? speaking of 'couples' we did see couple of tuskers as well as couple of 'happy' (don't get it , don't bother :P ) elephants too. Almost forgot the jackal , the mongoose couple , peacocks and deer we saw. But we saw them when we were in our bungalow not in safari so I guess it doesn't count.

Of course the bungalow was terrible. We would have got more privacy if it was on gall road. But nothing beats the drunken signing bungalow keepers we got last time. But this trip was much better than the last one. There dj's jeep broke 100m from when we took off, lost breaks and hit a bus. Then we had to wait hours till the insurance guy came. In the mean time we took the jeep to repair only to get bitten by dog. Hold on there is more, and no I didn't take this from some movie. So we had to send one guy to hospital. When he got there doctors were on strike.

But we held our nerve and kept going. It was almost ten in the night to when we reach the bungalow. When we got there we found out the bungalow keepers in a jolly mood. Then we had half cooked rice with uncooked veggies given by our jolly cook. Almost forgot. My friend DJ blacked out after drinking sprite. 'Sprite?' Yep, when have you ever heard anyone getting sick after drinking Sprite. It only happens in wasgamuwa.

Well I could go on and on about how all our jeeps got stuck in mud the first time and how we had no mud at all in the second. But that's not important. All you need is a small of opportunity to justify hate. We really hate wasgamuwa. That's why we have to go there again.

Love Thy Jeep

How many times have we heard the famous quotation 'love thy neighbor'. But very rearly have we heard the other part which is 'hate thine enemy'. Maybe hate like love has many diffrent forms. Well the Greeks considered there to be four quite different forms of love..(see wiki)

• eros - erotic love
• stergein - brotherly/familial love
• philia - deep affection
• agape - the other kind, its meaning being somewhat disputed
  

Similarly there are different levels people love there jeep. I guess every jeep driver loves his jeep, if not they would drive a car. I came across a poem while searching through forums for a good winch which i think describe the utmsot love one can have for something made of steel. This is a poem is by Randel J Thomas (and bit edited by me..sorry i dont have the link for the original). Hope u see my point.

I love my jeep for resons unseen
I love it esp when its not clean
I love my jeep with all my hart
I love it even when its falling apart

I love my jeep for things it can do
crashing through the mud, not sticking in the goo
It goes where ever i want to go
get me there with hardly ever a tow


my girl told me, its her or the truck
poor thing she never had much luck
i told her i cant imagine being with my jeep with out one single day
this jeep is mine with AND with me it will stay

By Randel J Thomas

Following the Dream

In Off road driving it is a matter of common sense not to have more than one vehicle crossing an obstacle. It is always tempting to not to slow down and to drive right through a mud patch with the lead vehicle. Expedition driving is all about repeating these few command. WAIT CROSS WAIT. You wait till the lead clears the obstacle. Then you cross. Wait at the other end till the one behind you cross. Rinse and repeat till you achieve your goal. It takes patience to wait till the lead clears the obstacle and again wait for the next guy to cross at the other end.

It is kind of like the story of “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. Key theme of the book focuses on how we follow our dreams. The Alchemist is a bestseller that was first published in 1988. It is the most famous work of author Paulo Coelho. It is a symbolic story that urges its readers to follow their dreams. He begins by recounting story of a guy was so into himself that he knelt beside a lake to stare at his reflection ,felled in and died. Idea was taken from a short poem by Oscar Wilde called 'The Disciple'. Itself a modified version of the old Greek myth of the guy who falls deeply in love with his own self and sits there forever.

I guess something similar happens to off roaders who forget the golden rule. I should know, I was there at wasgamuwa. Though it wasn’t exactly eternity, it sure felt such for the eleven guys of team extreme who were there.

Red Bull Energy

The original Red Bull recipe was developed by a Thai businessman, sold under the name Krating Daeng (Thai for Red Bull) and had about three times as much caffeine as many leading cola drinks. Caffeine isn't energy in the sense of calories. But energy comes in different forms.

For example take static energy and kinetic energy. Kinetic energy can be defined as mass * height * gravity. The easiest example for this is a seemingly harmless bucket full of bolts and spares stored on the top shelf in your garage, being full of static energy. As long as it stays there, it is completely harmless. BUT when this innocent looking bucket of bolts is put in motion, static energy in this bucket is immediately transformed into Kinetic Energy, which can be a killer. Ever had a bucket full of bolts fall on your empty, bald and worthless skull.

Another definition of Kinetic Energy is m/2 * velocity^2. Example: the cricket ball that your neighbor hit through your dining room window and straight onto your still empty skull. Owch. Yes. See ? We are slowly getting there.

Some time ago I had the pleasure to ride with my friends on an expedition to Yala block two. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Good weather, lots of wildlife and plenty of mud .Nice little playground with sand and water where I witnessed some of the most wonderful attempts at Kinetic Energy Recovery (K.E.R.) that I ever saw. It was almost noon and stinking hot when Vino's Mitsubishi j24 (j24 is short wheel base while j44 is the longer version ) got stuck it was up to the trusted land rover defender to bail it out.

First thing remember when practicing K.E.R. is NOT to break transmission parts. The Land Rover drive train is as good as any and better than most, but it is designed to move the vehicle under its own power over any terrain. It is NOT designed to absorb the massive shock loads incurred in K.E.R. So it was no wonder that our brute force attempts at recovering, almost broke the defender and made the poor Vino's jeep a j44.

The philosophy of K.E.R. is to utilize the energy stored in a moving vehicle by transferring it to a stuck vehicle by means of a rope, applying a shock load to the rope and the stuck vehicle, through the ROPE, not through your transmission. This means that you give your tow rope as much slack as possible, launch your vehicle (the puller) at the maximum speed obtainable within the length of your tow rope and applying the momentum, gained by the mass of the pulling vehicle to the one stuck. This is only theoretically good,.

So how do you recover a bogged jeep safely. Try this method which i found on www.landroverclub.net. "Attach your vehicle to 'the sad looking guys' vehicle in the bog by means of a tow rope. Drive backwards as near as possible to the stuck vehicle and then slowly stretch your tow rope by advancing your vehicle. When the rope is stretched, look for a recognizable mark on the ground just below your side window, or make a mark with your boot yourself. Now you know when and where the rope will be stretched. Back up your vehicle as far as possible again and launch it at the maximum speed you can get. BUT, before reaching that mark on the ground, push in your clutch pedal as fast as you can and as far as it will go, so that when the load is applied to your vehicle, it is not going to your transmission. Then you will be using the kinetic energy stored in your vehicle only and you may make some substantial savings on half-shafts, central diffs and gearboxes in general."

Ok what if the above does not work. You can 'try' to find a winch and ‘try’ winching the sucker out. And if this does not even work, leave it where it is, take the top off and plant some nice trees. On the other hand you can give a can of 'red bull' to the owner in hope he might find some 'bull' energy to get him out of mud.

A picture is worth a thousand words

A picture is worth a thousand words is a proverb that refers to the idea that complex stories can be told with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. It also aptly characterizes the goals of visualization where large amounts of data must be absorbed quickly.

It is believed that the modern use of the phrase stems from an article by Fred R. Barnard in the advertising trade journal Printers' Ink, promoting the use of images in advertisements that appeared on the sides of streetcars. The December 8, 1921 issue carries an ad entitled, "One Look is Worth A Thousand Words."

The quote is sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who said "Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours," or "A good sketch is better than a long speech". At the turn of the nineteenth century, over the course of little more than a decade, the armies of France under his command fought almost every European power and acquired control of most of continental Europe by conquest or alliance. The disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 marked a turning point in Napoleon.

On 22 June 1812, Napoleon's invasion of Russia commenced.The Russians under Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly ingeniously avoided a decisive engagement which Napoleon longed for, preferring to retreat ever deeper into the heart of Russia.When the army progressed further, serious problems in foraging surfaced, aggravated by the scorched earth tactics of the Russian army.The main body of Napoleon's Grande Armée diminished by half during the first eight weeks of his invasion before the major battle of the campaign.The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000. This decrease was partly due to garrisoning supply centres. Perhaps he should have listem to the old saying.. 'go prepared'