Given the same stimuli, different people will do different things.* Faced with a reduction in the sophistication, resiliency, and efficiency of society, I’m trying to “get my vehicular shit together”.
I came up with a name for it; “project daily driver”. (Not a creative name but I’ve been busy. Throw me a bone.)
A “daily driver” is a machine you can fire up and use right now without drama. If you’ve got a rusty Civic that you drove to work Tuesday and you’re confident it’ll be able to get you to work on Wednesday and thereafter without immediate issues, then it’s a daily driver… even if the radio is broke. For a daily driver, all the important shit is “good enough”, tires, engine, etc…
In 2022 I’m trying to level up so all of my machines are a daily drivers. I’ve never done this before.
Rural redneck cheapskates like me have many non-daily drivers in our lives. One variant is “I can jump start it when the snow melts”. Worse versions are “I’ll fix it someday” and “a tree fell on it but it’s still basically salvageable”. (Note: chainsaws that only start after much swearing or lawnmowers that are always throwing a belt are examples of non-daily drivers.)
Project daily driver isn’t a common reaction to modern times. I take it as a given that inflation, supply chain disruption (either by design or stupidity), and a teetering society drives a moment of action. That which can be done in 2022 is less than can be done in 2019. Will the trend continue in 2023? Who knows? I don’t know. You don’t know. We all have our guesses though. I’m acting on my guesses.
I made the leap from $5 gas and “parts that come from China are routinely stolen from container trains in LA” to “I’d better get my daily driver tuned up”. That’s my opinion. Your choices are yours to make.
The popular alternative is denial; “this inflation is transitory”, “things will get back to ‘normal’ once everyone has a vax”. I suppose another alternative is to freak out; “Musk bought Twitter, free speech is violence!”, “the Supreme court may rule in a way I don’t like, this is the worst thing in the history of all things that suck!” Preppers (at least of the simplest sort) have a steady state. They “stack ammo and gold!” But when does a prepper not stack ammo and metals? Do they stop doing it in good times? In bad? During inflation? During shortages? When do they sell the precious metals they’ve been stacking? What will they buy with it… more ammo?
Me, I want my machines fixed while I still can. I have (limited) access to (almost) competent mechanics, parts are (mostly) in stock, and I can still use greenbacks (of ever decreasing value) to buy both things.
There’s a problem with this. I have never ever managed to have all my machines running reliably at the same time. Most of my life I’ve owned shit. Fixing shit is a way of life. You’re never really done… you’re likely to spend decades treading water.
Also it’s tempting fate to have too many things running at once. Fixing a piece of shit car just means your piece of shit tractor breaks. If you fix the car and the tractor simultaneously, it just means your roto-tiller will catch on fire. There is no winning. In my life I’ve had a certain percentage of my mechanical stuff functioning and it’s always <100%.
Yet that’s my goal right now. I’m tempting fate. I’m burning cash. I’m giving it a shot.
Pray for me!
First step of project daily driver:
I just got my cruiser running. I have a 20+ year old Honda cruiser that’s (as far as I’m considered) “good as new”. Ok that’s a bit optimistic. It’s not really new and it has 10x the miles that the average bar crawler would have put on one of similar age, but it’s not mechanically fucked either.
It’s a simple machine and I didn’t hot rod it. So it’s been amazingly reliable for me. There’s a lesson in this!
Anyway, when I bought my little Yamaha TW200 stump jumper I got distracted. The cruiser was ignored. It never left the garage in 2021. That’s bad! I have sinned. I must repent and atone for my bad behavior.
I started by shoveling through he wall of ice that blocks my garage. It’s still waist high!
Then I addressed the battery which (as predicted) is deader than a door nail. I’d like to be one of those guys that wisely and carefully maintains all their equipment batteries, but I’m just not that cool. I had a battery maintainer but it broke; I meant to replace it and then… didn’t.
I assumed I’d need a new battery (which is a bitch because this bike takes a weird size) but I put it on my charger and the charger resurrected it. I have a sophisticated charger with all sorts of features. It can’t fix all toasted batteries but it can coax life from some that I’d assumed were long dead. Go charger! (I’ll have the battery tested and replace if needed… it’s a daily driver after all!)
I assumed I’d left the carbs all gummed up but they sounded ok. A wise man runs the carbs dry before shutting down. I didn’t remember doing that but maybe I did. Yay me!
Then came the tank. Any gas that’s been sitting 2 years is shit. Especially the modern witches brew they call gas. But I opened her up and it looks like I topped off to the rim with gas. I think it had Sta-Bil in it!
It took a few cranks but eventually she fired. No tools needed!
Holy shit! I never have that kind of luck!
There’s more! I remembered the rear tire was shot. I planned to buy a new tire. But I looked at it and the tire looks fairly new. It’s fine.
She ran pretty well and I took her to a garage for routine maintenance and to check on the electric fan (which I recall didn’t work). I’m waiting on word about that. If I’m lucky I’ll have it up and running to daily driver level for a couple hundred bucks.
Yahoo!
Gift from past self:
This is a gift from my past self. Back in 2020 I must have swapped in a new tire, topped it off with fresh stabilized gas, and run the carbs dry. How awesome is that? I’d like to go back in time and thank myself. It’s like a magic gift from motorcycle Santa… but it’s really a gift to me / from me!
In case you’re wondering, I plan a 3-5K mile road trip this summer. Not anywhere photogenic or fun, just a place I’ve got to go so I can do a thing that needs doing. But gas is expensive so I’m going on 2 wheels. Why not? There’s no reason to sit at home bitching about fuel prices now that I’ve got a high MPG daily driver! Plus, motorcycles are fun.
Anyway, that’s my lucky day. How’re y’all doing?
A.C.
*This is why socialism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism always fail. All force “one size fits all” solutions on human beings. Humans aren’t widgets, they’re varied. If you like vanilla ice cream and I like chocolate and the guy across the street likes strawberry, socialists would force us to fight it out. In the end, we’d all get banana flavored ice cream and be forced to pretend we like it. The strawberry guy would get his teeth kicked in as a lesson to the rest of us. Chocolate ice cream would be a black market luxury good. It would be smuggled in from some better place and served to politically powerful people who enjoy it more because I can’t have any. The vanilla guy would be allergic to bananas and break out in hives. Also the banana ice cream would have dogshit mixed in, because the people’s ice cream factory is run by people who are basically serfs. Beaten workers who don’t care about ice cream would get paid the same even if there’s a dog living in the mixing plant.
How much you have prepared / stored just tells you how long you can survive if society collapses. No collapse? You’ve got a giant stash you can bequeath to your heirs when you kick the bucket.
Also, there’s never a situation where a stack of stuff (ammo, gold, food, etc…) is bad. Especially if it’s organized and well stored. I even get all happy when I’ve got a monster pile of firewood on hand.
Daily driver, oh yes.
All three of our road vehicles need one thing or another… my Prius needs a new 12V battery (I need to contact a local-ish dealer to see if the new model battery has come in yet), mainly because it hasn’t been driven daily. My wife’s Prius is overdue for routine maintenance, but doesn’t have anything obviously wrong aside from TPMS giving spurious warnings. The Tundra has a couple of fiddly things that need to be addressed (not DIY things, for me at least) and also is due for routine maintenance on the basis of the calendar (not a lot of miles on it the past couple of years).
The tractor is on fully-operational status, and I figure on keeping it that way (and have laid in a stock of replacement filters, hydraulic fluid, and whatnot). The lawnmower… starts and runs fine, but has a penchant for losing parts. I need to scare up some spares, and should definitely have at least two spares on hand for each of the two belts (plus lots more spare blades, because the “lawn” here has all manner of hazards lurking in it).
I’m gradually learning how much lead time some things have. Usable farmland, for one. Starting from neglected hayfield, it seems to take around 3 years (here, and not resorting to full-on industrial methods) to get to something truly garden-worthy. Then there’s the time to ramp up composting.
Planting is running late this year, owing to various complications, but we had some late frost, so having tomatoes and such planted out at the nominal time would not have turned out well. I’m spacing the plants out much more this year than last (learning the difference between a 400-square-foot garden and a quarter-acre garden), and taking various measures to facilitate weed control, so there seems a decent chance of a bountiful harvest.
We’ve been putting money into home repairs, and there’s more to be done – better now than when things deteriorate further and prices for materials get even higher. Planning to finish the pond project this summer, get an ecosystem going, and add edible-type fish. Starting a chicken farm is a less likely undertaking.
With everything moving in slow motion (what with the labor shortage and other factors), getting workspace prepared for setting up a machine shop, SMT assembly line, and other means-of-production stuff is not, alas, happening right away. But I have been laying in supplies of sundry electronic components for which I anticipate having need the next year or so, as availability allows.
Sounds like you’ve got your shit together. Well done!
Thinking along the same lines. Rode the Himalayan most of last year. Just pulled the maintenance on the Star XV250. Won’t get anywhere freeway fast but at near 90 MPG it will be the daily driver this year.
Those Royal Enfield bikes look sweet.
I’ve been getting reacquainted with my cruiser. After a couple years buzzing around on my little Yamaha TW200, a “normal sized” cruiser feels like an aircraft carrier.
Wanna help me with the 64 Benz that has been sitting for 30 years? And no, the past me did not prep the tank, or the carbs or anything else. If it ever quits raining and gets above 50F I am going to tackle that one.
I’m no help with stuff like that. I mean well but I’m a pretty clueless mechanic.
If I had any skill at all I’d attack projects right at my homestead. I have a cool ‘90 Chevy suburban 4×4 DIESEL in my yard. I loved it but it’s kaput and I need to “cull the herd”. Time to let that piece of yard art go. A neighbor offered $300 and accepted while feeling like I was going to barf. I’ll spend it all on liquor to make myself forget my good old Suburban.
Ah, Honda cruisers. I kind of regret letting the 99 Valk go last summer, but I’m getting to the age where any kind of departure could be catastrophic. It took me a year and more to get over a simple trip and fall. The possible consequences of a motorcycle accident…. shudder. An older former riding buddy showed the way with two falls not far apart – the second happening while turning around in a gravel parking lot at a walking pace and resulting in a broken ankle. Time to hang up the helmets. We had a good run and lived through it. Time to savor the time left in less risky ways.