Just need to vent...

Nice, that worked!

There's my old M9 truck.....she had power NOTHING...and no A/C.....turning her used up some real testosterone and don't you dare keeping the hands on the steering wheel when coming out of a turn.....it'll break your fingers! Two 50-gallon diesel tanks and she got 3-6 mpg's so you're stopping a lot to refuel which was just as well....we'd stock up on cold soda and ice cream as we were in Las Vegas in the summertime.

We were driving through West Texas once on our way to Vegas (in July) and I got a flat on an inside tire so jacking her up and changing tires was a fun job....slept REAL good that night....

 

Our old Mercedes Class C was a dually. Would always carry the 2 gallon Craftsman compressor with a ¾“ rattle gun for just such occasions. It'd rattle 3 or 4 loose - then wait for compressed tank to refill. Rinse & repeat

 

Yeah the larger military convoys would have a dedicated team from the post car-pool maintainers but we were just a small, Air Force squadron with no maintainers assigned. (We'd just drove over to the base motor pool when they needed maintenance or had issues.)

We'd just have one or two M9's, with generators, and one or two Chevy or Ford 6-pack trucks and we'd take turns driving as the trucks had A/C. (But they were military-spec trucks so, other than A/C, they didn't have anything....Chevy/Ford even went so far as to replace carpeting with cheap rubber mats, AM radio only, manual window controls....whatever maximized their profit when selling to the gubmint...I hated those things.

 

Way back story. 1959 Ford F600 DIY camper conversion with dual rear wheels. Vehicle weight did not justify 4 rear tires but I left them on for 'soft' traction. It was used a lot on unimproved roads.

However I saved a lot of tolls on NY Throughway by removing the 'inners'.

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The right-side wheels were reverse threaded and that was a hard lesson to learn

 

One thing that impressed me (of very few things) about driving the old, about-to-be-replaced-by-Silvie-based-ISV/Heavies, High-Mobil... HMM... Humvee was how easy that twice-as-big-as-a-Mutt was to drive. I'm talking the real ones -- ironically not the civvies ones based on... yep, Silvies.

Takes decades but even the US Army can learn from getting its doctrine lunch eaten by third-world-funded, 'wrong'-sided asymmetrics

As wide as those things were... just cake to drive ime. All-wheel indy suspension and wheels pretty far out on the corners made them bulky, but not cumbersome or spine-crushing like deuces and 5Ts were, and not as prone to sliding on ice, getting stuck or breaking down, as the (Blazer-based) CUCVs were -- again ironically, doesn't apply to our just-obsoleted Mutts in '89. All ideas come back around, I guess...

Parking with a trailer was also easy as long as you've got two brain cells to rub together (yep, more than exception than the rule ). Then again, my rather friendly but strict E-6 road test grader (not driving instructor, I'd stress) took me down into the local German town with hard stone arches and walls to auto-fail you, were you a f***up... and directed me to a 90º turn under a narrowing arch with another 90º in the opposite direction to exit, to conclude my roadtest -- haha, passed with no contact. Took 3 or so mins, but that staff wasn't gonna fail this automotive enthusiast

Had to drive my CO towing a generator when we went to Graf once; much, much nicer exp than getting an inch shorter every roadtrip in a 5T or deuce -- backing up in mud, even more diff

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* esp since he had a father who shouted nearly constantly in his right ear about how useless he was, months learning how to drive, on the elder's schedule