Truck Camping Photo Thread

Thanks! Yes, the last pic is Hetch Hetchy. The other is the Merced River in the valley. It was gorgeous last weekend. Couldn't screw up a pic of you tried.

 

Super crowded. And then Obama decided to show up last minute for a presser on Saturday morning and turned the valley into a donkey show. 4 hour delays in the valley and they closed most of it to traffic by 10:00 am. Thanks Obama! I wanted to show my kids the waterfalls so we jetted in at 6:30 am and kept moving. Then we took our time once we were on the outbound road. We didn't get hung up anywhere. We evaded Obama like we was Isis. Even had time to submit the Taco to an explosives check by the SS to check out the Awanee where Obama was staying.

The weather was perfect tho.

 

June in New Mexico. Hail for about an hour.

 

Doing some camping on Long Island. Cold water but great waves to take GoPro vids of.

 

Love it!! I hate it when it rains while we're camping. Mainly because it rains the night before we have to pack up.

 

I've thought about that myself. I decided (and I could be completely wrong) that a piece of rubber horse stall mat under the trailer jack wheel and any levelers should be good protection. Prevent a lightning leader from meeting a streamer coming off of anywhere on the trailer. Like being in a car insulated by rubber tires or on a glass leg fire watch tower stool. Now, how to build a rollcage to prevent the tent from getting crushed by a windblown tree.......

 

The trip we had out here in Az.. Where Brian's truck got crushed by the tree.. That was the creepiest sound I have ever heard. It lasted what seemed like forver and the sound kept growing and getting louder. Then the destruction...

 

This is the "Bruzer". 2008, V6, 4x4, 4.5" RCD, 33's, URD Stage 2 Supercharger, etc. SmittyBilt RTT, homemade 6" bars, 1upUSA bike rack, ARB fridge in back seat.

 

Sorry, but no...

Leaders hop by about 50m at a time, a fraction of an inch of rubber is not going to do anything to change its mind about which way to go. There are a lot of myths about lightening!

Lightening safety in a car has nothing to do with the tires, it has everything to do with the body being metal. Cars get struck by lightening all the time and what saves the occupants is that the current follows the metal of the car (much light a Faraday cage) rather than passing through the occupants of the car. Surrounding yourself with metal is what protects you from lightening. In buildings it is usually the plumbing and moisture in wood framing that provides similar protection if the building doesn't have a dedicate lightening protection system installed.

Similarly fire watch towers already have extensive lightening protection - that is conductive paths that surround the interior. So why the insulated stool? Well lightening conducts massive amounts of current quite fast and while the exterior conductors protect the occupants from burns from arcing and conduct *most* of the current away there are still large induced currents everywhere around and inside the structure. It takes very little current to stop your heart and this is why the lightening safety position if stuck outside in a thunderstorm is for your feet to be right next to each other. If you spread your feet you create a path for more dispersing ground current to pass through your body from one foot to another. It is this current that usually kills people, horses and cows while sheltering under trees - not the direct bolt or leader itself but the current dispersing through the ground from the struck tree. So, for extra safety when in a structure you *know* will be struck like a watch tower to make sure the occupants are insulated from the floor. This insulation is totally insufficient to protect you from a direct strike at all, but it is enough to protect you from the much lower induced currents in the floor of the structure. And as a side note watch towers get struck by lightening bolts with much higher currents than the "typical" strike because of their height on mountain tops they experience a large fraction of "positive" strikes which have currents an order of magnitude higher than the more common "negative" strikes. The more common "negative" strikes will hit any terrain and only find the highest terrain feature within about 100 meters. The less common (only about 10% of strikes) "positive" strikes find the highest terrain for miles.

Anyway, long story short, if you are in RTT (or a Flip Pac like mine) and your vehicle is struck you are toast and there is little you can do about it. When thunder comes get the eff inside the vehicle. You will have very high survival rates inside the vehicle. You won't survive in the tent or Flip-Pac.

Last, remember the one in ten people struck by lightening is killed. Seven or eight in ten survive but with permanent disability, often chronic pain or bizarre and severe nervous or neurological disorders. In some sense the one in ten outright killed might be the lucky ones...

 

So much amazing climbing there. Can't wait

 

I just bought a large tarp off of Amazon, some extending poles, and 50' of paracord to tie tautline knots to tent stakes. Works well!

 

Thanks man. This style of lift is a "drop bracket" kit that drops the front differential, steering and lower control arm mount lower to retain near factory driveline and suspension angles in the front. It's actually much less strain on the driveline versus a typical coilover lift. Rear just adds more angle to the driveshaft. Its a 2 piece driveshaft so dropping the carrier bearing distributes the angle increase over 4 joints instead of 2. Again, not much difference from factory.

My friends truck has a 3" icon kit and the lower control arms, front axles and steering arms all have a pretty steep angles. That will definitely wear much faster than what I have.

 

True. Lightning kills way more people than Tornados. An average of 234 people a year get struck. I dated a chick that went to check cows one night during a storm. They blew threw a fence, so she rounded them up and was doing a quick repair of the wire when she said she saw a fuzzy purple ball coming down the wire at her. It blew the boots off her feet, lost all toe nails and finger nails, and her eyes were bloodshot so bad she looked evil. She was not the same person after that. Really, she went from being a fun and happy person to absolutely batshit crazy. Like step out of a moving vehicle for no reason crazy. I'd known her for 15 years, it was sad to see.

 

Thanks for correcting the info @DVexile. Good to know.

 

Sad to hear...

This is why you don't use any appliance plugged into the wall or a wired telephone when there are thunderstorms nearby. You would essentially be holding on to part of a giant lightening catching net. Doing the dishes or taking a shower are two other unexpected ways to convert an otherwise harmless nearby strike into a life altering or ending injury - your house plumbing conducts not only during a direct strike but can have large inductively coupled currents from nearby strikes.

Anyway, be safe camping and outdoors around lightening! In my younger, stupider days I used to take dumb risks photographing lightening. One thing the internet made me realize is there are already way too many nice photos of lightening so I don't need to risk my life adding any more to an already crowded Google image search

 

I work on a klystron that runs on -40,000 volts. Electricity behaves in some weird and magical ways at those voltage levels. I would love to have a chat with Tesla!

 

Did a over night trip to a buddies camp. Quick easy set up and test run before I build my platform.

 

Just built this, this morning. Can't wait to try it out in the mountains, once my shoulder heals.