Equipment Change Proposal

Haven't done one of these in awhile.

I'm gonna try real hard to keep this somewhat clean.

The latest thing that has my blood boiling is my YORK gas furnace. It seems the engineers at YORK haven't the slightest frickin' clue as to the magical force known as gravity.

Way back in the mid 90's when my house was built, YORK engineers were too busy playing D&D and smoking pencil shavings to actually pick up the part about gravity in school. Apparently on their first job, they decided to put the condensation drain outlet on the furnaces they were designing four feet off the ground, so that when the outlet jams up with crud it leaks all over the fucking furnace and gets all over the floor. Also, the outlet is positioned so that the PVC pipe that you stick on to it to allow it to drain can't be tilted downward to give that gravity a chance to work.

Keep in mind that in the mid 90's we had ICBMs that could rain death on hundreds of millions of people, and there were space stations in space. Mankind could build all of that, but can't place a drain on a gas furnace in a spot that lets gravity work. I guess those that can, build space stations, and those that can't build furnaces.

The next thing that engineers have jacked up is the "Limited Slip Differential," known to those who have actually been offroad as the "Un-limited Slip Differential." What it all boils down to is car manufacturers are a bunch of cheap-ass swindlers.

Stop me if you've seen this before: your bad ass four wheel drive truck right off the show room floor, in all its 35" tire glory, with all its skid plates and Z20-something "off road" shocks bought as part of that "SVT/NISMO/SR5/Goat Hoof Ninja Traction "racing package," gets hung the fuck up in a wet grassy field with a 5 degree pitch because the "Limited Slip Differential" lets the right rear tire spin at will, while the left rear tire is. . . . .limited?

Seen it before, haven't you? There is an amazing piece of technology that is finally, Finally being incorporated in brand new cars so that you don't have to buy one yourself and pay thousands to have someone install for you. This technology is called a "Locker" and it lets the driver lock the differential at will so that both wheels spin with equal traction. One cannot spin more than another, because they are locked together. They don't work so well on the street where you have to take corners and all, so that is why lockers are activated by the driver when needed.

Every single time I have ever been hung up in the mud, and every single time I have witnessed someone else hung up in the mud, without exception, was because one wheel in the front and one wheel in the back are spinning their little asses off, while the other two wheels do nothing. Limited Slip is for every day driving on the street, and absolutely useless for serious off road. It kills me to see the truck industry pushing these so called "off road" packages with winches, shocks, skid plates, and shiny stickers, and then equipping both axles with FAIL so that the very moment you get into six inches of mud, you essentially have a two wheel drive truck with a glowing light on the dash saying you're in four wheel drive.

My XTerra was not equipped with lockers, although the newer ones have lockers in the rear differential. It's criminal that manufacturers do not equip both axles standard with lockers on newer trucks. And before you bring up cost and how silly it is to add such a simple and cheap device to a truck, let me ask you, do you have "traction control" on your truck? These devices apply brakes to the wheels that are spinning, with the idea that the wheel not spinning will somehow get motivated and actually do something. While traction control may have some worthy application on sports cars and minivans, in my opinion they are a shitty gimmick for off road vehicles, and they are much more expensive.

I mean, that's the answer for the ol' "one wheel drive" problem? Install some complicated computer controlled doohickey that slows down the wheel without traction? Why not install something that works from the very start, and stop screwing the consumers with your pathetic junk.

I've got three kids in diapers and I'm gone at work for eleven hours most days, so when I've finally acquired the two hours to go out and do some shooting, I don't have the time to be dicking around with a fucking shovel trying to dig my truck outta the mud because you douchebag engineers at Nissan don't have the common sense to build axles that lock.

Lockers. Live them. Love them. Install them on every automobile so that we may not get stuck when the going gets rough.