The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Driving Preparedness

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

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Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravely. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic and here's your show. So not only is Nick not in the intro, but Andrew's not here. Andrew is currently dying from a migraine. So forgive the title saying Night Vision Nerds strike again. We're going

to do a very quick pivot to a secondary topic and we'll have to save Night Vision Nerds for when Andrew can come and join us. Well, that way at least two-thirds of us have night vision to talk about. Hey, I am one half hour away from meeting your wife and encouraging you to make horrible financial decisions. Yeah, I mean, I'm getting close on the old fun fund, but it's going to be a minute. I mean, I see a lathe in the back that you probably could have sold for a nice set of knives.

Oh, I will not sell this lathe. This lathe is a family heirloom at this point. I mean, I've got, thanks to Sugar Daddy Trump, I've got the night vision capable helmet, but I'm missing the PIC-15 and the PVS-14s, but we'll get there eventually.

Yeah. Well, hopefully, Andrew, I can give you some things to think about when we get there, because within that whole realm of night vision, getting the night observation device,

or getting your PBS-14 or your binos is just the first step down the rabbit hole of financial malfeasance. Because every, every, every, everything, even sideways related to night vision, is a couple

hundred bucks. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's freaking stupid. You know what? Warhammer, guns, PCs all my hobbies are stupid expensive why not make shooting and night vision another one so what I'm hearing

is that the old adage is true that men do not grow up they just get more expensive toys oh absolutely yes I don't know why our wives put up with this. I'm sure there's some reason that it's escaping me right this moment. Night vision's cool. I will say this much.

At the Matterfax camping trip, we did see a meteor flying across the sky. And it wasn't visible to the naked eye. You could only see it with night that's really it was like and you know normally when you see a shooting star it like it blasts through the atmosphere really fast it's like in and out in a couple of seconds this thing was the perfect angle that it was visible for about three minutes and it i mean it had to just like barely skipped across the top of the atmosphere because it left

a tail like it left this long long long streaking tail as it went but the only reason i saw it was because i was so before we get to topic i was sitting there bs with andrew we were on the back porch of the the cabin and i was checking out his night vision because he's got binos and I have a PBS 14 and it's just it's a little different and I'm talking to him while he's looking you know I'm looking at him talking to him and over his shoulder I see it and I'm like holy Christ is that a meteor and he turns around says I don't see it so I grabbed his helmet off my head did this and shoved it on his head turn around and grab mine and put mine back on. And we're sitting there nerding out over this meteor. And then I'm like,

my wife is a science nerd. She will flip her freaking lid. So I bolt into the cabin. I'm like, babe, there's a meteor out here. And she looks up. She's like, I don't see it. And put the night vision on and then she can see it. And I managed to get a picture of it because

the iPhone the 4, i know the 15 pro because that's what this is and i think the 14 pros and maybe the standard 14s and 15s all have a long exposure mode on the camera oh sure yeah the night basically the night camera yeah well that just managed to catch that meteor in the sky but but you still couldn't see it with the unaided eye. It was the perfect way to cap off the camping trip and, in my mind, justify a not healthy amount of money spent on a night vision unit. Yeah, but where else do you get to have that kind of fun for that kind of money? Cocaine. I mean where else do you get to have that kind of fun for that kind of money hmm cocaine well I mean yeah but that's not a one time investment

no so I thought despite the title if everybody will forgive me I thought we would talk about preparedness around driving or driving preparedness so this is going to be a mix of this is going to be a mix of, this is going to be a mix of like

over the road recovery, pre-trip checks, how to stay out of trouble and what to do in your vehicle if you get into trouble. So I'm going to pull from like, you know, some general preparedness knowledge, like air up your tires and check your oil and nonsense like that, that everybody ought to know. And I'm even going to dig nice and deep about 20 years back into my history when I took combat convoy training, which is basically teaching idiot soldiers how to use Humvees like loaded weapons. It's the exact opposite of defensive driving.

Defensive driving is don't hit stuff with your vehicle and don't get hit by other vehicles. And combat convoy training is you're sitting in a 5,000 pound weapon. You might as well use it. You might as well use it or somebody else is going to. So let's start with something that might be a touch difficult to watch. It's on our Instagram. For those who saw me share it the other day, it was a road rage incident.

But it's like very indicative of one of the things I bring up when I talk about preparedness around your vehicle. Like, you know, it's the fact of the matter is there's crazy people out there. They do crazy things. And, you know, like I know Nick that like down here in the New Orleans area, carjackings went through the ceiling in the past 24 months. Property crimes are through the roof. A lot of people are in their vehicles and like, I don't know why it is we behave the way we do in our vehicles, but we totally lose sight of the fact that we're sitting in a hardened shelter and that shelter is mobile. Well, I think two big things about that. Most people do not want to run a person over with their car. I think that's a big part of it. You've been spending your entire adult history driving,

trying not to run over people, animals, random debris in the road, hitting other cars. I mean, your natural impulse is to do the exact opposite of using your vehicle as a self-defense tool. I might, I'll give you that one. I'll chalk that up to kind of like- Conditioning. Yeah. I was going to say social programming, but same thing. But yeah. Yeah. It's just standard classical conditioning. I mean, if you look at even just the look, look at what happens anytime you do anything involving an insurance claim on your house or your car, what happens? You get punished for it by higher

insurance premiums. And so what you do is you have a classic negative, uh, what is it? No way. Technically that'd be a positive positive reinforcement strategy where you are punished every time you damage your vehicle and you're punished anytime you hit anything with your vehicle you might have been thinking negative feedback loop do something consequences are negative yes negative it's a negative feedback loop trying to get you to avoid doing exactly what would probably be the easiest and most expedient solution. Which under normal circumstances, I would say are fair until you get to this, which is not normal. Not normal, but common. I don't think I got to grab the audio with this,

which is unfortunate, but it almost doesn't matter. Like what you have here is there's a little bit of the audio. Yeah. What you have here is somebody who is absolutely beating the crap out of vehicle, acting irrational and probably scaring the holy hell out of the driver in the process. More than likely, you know, this,

this is very similar with one key difference to another one. You guys, you shared most recently and i wasn't sure which clip you were going to bring up the there was a guy that gets out of a car with a pistol and starts angrily approaching another vehicle strikes the vehicle multiple times transitions the pistol from his dominant hand to his non-dominant hand and then pulls up his dominant hand to punch the window and he eats two in the dome we talked about it once on here already yep um situation could have ended the same way you know if you've got family in the car now

granted this car had a clear roadway ahead of them why are you sitting there now granted there's some there are some people that fight flight flight, or freeze, they freeze. And in some circumstances, one is better than the other. But I had almost this exact situation happen when I was 16 and driving to high school on an icy morning. I made a turn, lost it a little bit on the turn, got a little close to the vehicle in the other lane. That driver, instead of realizing that I had lost control of my vehicle a little bit, I didn't hit them, but I got close to them in their lane and they pulled a U-turn and started following me to school. When I got to a stoplight, I did not realize they were following me. They pulled in

front of me, stopped just close enough that I couldn't move my car between the car behind me and this now new car in front of me, and started beating on the side of my Jeep Wrangler. Now, I just waited until they hurt themselves enough or got cold enough that they left, because thankfully this person wasn't strong enough to break through my side window. that they left because thankfully this person wasn't strong enough to break through my side window but i mean really it's an icy road in the winter in illinois people lose lose control of their cars a little bit all the time now first off why are you getting that enraged that you follow someone you don't know who that person is in the car it might be the guy that's in this video here who just sits there and lets you beat up their car but it might be the other guy in the other vehicle that decides okay this is a deadly threat and I'm going to assume they are trying to kill me and then fight back accordingly

trying to kill me and then fight back accordingly you know so i guess let's unpack like your situation and what was shown in this video like first and foremost before the altercation even begins and i'm going to speak from a bit of personal experience because some of this is stuff like i was taught in defensive driving some of the stuff that i was taught by the army and it is all things I've talked to my wife about and to a lesser degree, my daughter, because she's not quite a driving age yet, but I'm trying to like, I'm trying to stack the things in her brain pan that she's going to need eventually. Get it started. She's not far off. Yeah. And the first thing I tell everybody is if you're driving, I encourage everybody to have your windows up. I mean,

that's not that much of an issue down here in South Louisiana where it's 100 and FU outside most of the year, and most people have their windows up and their AC on, you know, anyway. But I encourage people to have your windows up. That gives you some shelter. Have your doors locked while you're in motion.

A lot of people, some vehicles spoil people, and as soon as you put it into driver reverse you know it locks all the doors some of us drive toyotas and toyota doesn't believe in doing anything automatically for their you know drivers you have to do everything manually which i prefer honestly i like i like my truck stupid and me smart like it just makes me feel better but lock your doors roll up your windows you're now sitting in a 3,000 to 5,000-pound hardened shelter that, as you've already said, is not easy to break into. So that's number one.

Two is, you know, like most of us were taught when we first learned to drive. Like, you know you're not supposed to just stare straight through the windshield. You're supposed to, like, look down at your your gauges which you should do for various reasons every so often you should check your mirrors you should maintain situational awareness of everything outside your vehicle that rear view mirror is there for a reason the side mirrors are there for reasons and if you see the same grill for a period of time, that's something I pay attention to. I've gone so far. Like if someone follows me through multiple turns, you know, again, I've had some interesting life experiences growing up.

Time to start reading license plate numbers. No, very simply, I make three right turns. I make three right turns. There you go. I make three right turns. I make three right turns. There you go. And if you follow me through three right turns, the odds of you making three right turns and getting back out on the road going the same direction are exactly not happening. So if you make that series of right turns with me, you are 100% following me.

And that is going to substantially alter the way I drive, I deal with things, I proceed along my path. The first thing it's going to do is that I'm not going to allow myself to get boxed in. To your point, you stopped at a stop sign, didn't realize he was following you. He whipped around you and cut you off. Stoplight, but yeah. Stoplight. Yeah, same principle applies. Yeah.

Now, sometimes you're not going to have an opportunity to kind of see that coming. You're going to get boxed in or someone's going to follow you and you just can't help it. I'm just giving people like tools in the toolbox to try to avoid it. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I definitely made mistakes, and I'll talk about them when you get through yours. Yeah. But like I said, watch your rearview mirror. Check if somebody's following you.

If you think someone is following you, do what I just talked about. Make a couple of turns. Get right back. Go in the same direction you are. If they follow you through all that, they are following you. Period. End discussion. my home. If I'm going to a friend's house, not going to my friend's house anymore. I'm not leading that person to another person who's going to have to deal with their crazy. I am probably going to go to the nearest police station, and you follow me into that parking lot if God wills it. Or I'm going to head to a very public place with lots of bystanders, and that way I have witnesses for whatever's about to happen or security cameras yeah but i am not going to i'm going to alter my path and behavior because

now someone's obviously following me um another thing i tell my wife all the time is that if you are in if you were on a three lane road if you're on a two lane road i like to be on the right lane because i have a side road i have an emergency emergency lane, I have a curb, I have somewhere to go to escape. If I am in the left lane and someone pulls up next to me and boxes me in and my only option is driving oncoming traffic to get away from a violent encounter, I haven't left myself a lot of good options. I like the right lane. If you're in a three-lane road, I like the far right lane. If I'm in the center lane, I'm going to, I'm going to eat that and be a little more vigilant of my surroundings because I don't have as many escape options. The other thing, and this is a really simple trick, and it's, it's good to prevent you from having an accident, but it's even better for preventing someone from being able to box you in.

The absolute best thing you can do to guard yourself against getting boxed in by somebody is when you pull up on the vehicle in front of you, you stop when the highest point of your vehicle you can see, which is like the top of your hood, the top of your grill, when that touches the bottom of the tires in front of you, that one trick works on almost every vehicle I've ever been in, and it leaves about a third of a car length between you and the vehicle in front of you. That is enough room

to cut your wheel hard right or hard left and get out from behind that vehicle without having to hit them. That is enough room to cut your wheel hard right or hard left and get out from behind the vehicle without having to hit them. It is enough room to gain momentum to push another vehicle if you have to. It is room to maneuver and it works across all vehicles. Trucks are higher off the ground

so you stop further back. They have wider turning radiuses. This simple trick works across the board. What it's designed to do is to make sure that if I have to cut my wheel hard right or hard left and I have to move, I don't have to push the vehicle in front of me to do it. Yeah.

What else? We talked about escape routes. We've talked about leaving room. We've talked about momentum. Oh, speed is safety. Yeah. The most dangerous time for you in a vehicle is when you are stopped. That is when you are the most vulnerable. It's when you have the least mass speed momentum.

It is when there is a greater likelihood that somebody on foot can approach your vehicle and attempt to pull you out of it. Speed is life. If you feel threatened, even to the point where if you're pulling up on a red light, it's been red for a minute, start slowing down prematurely. And yeah, you'll piss off the guy behind you. He'll get over himself. But try to roll up on that stoplight and time it so that you spend the least amount of time stopped as possible. Or potentially, if you drag your ass just a little bit, light might be green by the time you get there, and then you don't have to stop at all.

It's a lot of really simple tricks to maintain your safety while you're in a vehicle. And the most important thing to remember, the thing that would have saved this driver a lot of pain and aggravation, is if you have a clear lane in front of you and you have a violent person outside the vehicle, there's this skinny pedal on the right side of the floor. Stomp it and leave. Stomp it and leave. Especially if they leave the door open, take the door and keep going. If they didn't leave the door open, sideswipe the side of the vehicle and keep going.

and keep going. If they didn't leave the door open, sideswipe the side of the vehicle and keep going. There's an old saying in the self-defense world, I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6. I would rather go stand in front of a judge and explain why I pinned this guy between my vehicle and his vehicle after he was beating the crap out of the side of my truck than have him potentially break a window and enter my vehicle and harm me or harm my wife and daughter. I will go stand in front of the judge and say, hey, especially if I got dash cam footage

or I got witnesses. Oh, yeah. Discussion over. Judge, your honor, with all respect, he was beating on my window trying to get into my vehicle, so I cut the wheel hard right and I hit him. And he stopped. Problem solved. Especially, especially if you have a minor in the vehicle with you, because now it's, it is not your safety. That is the priority. It is the safety of the minor. Yep. And, and good luck finding a jury. That's gonna, that's gonna disagree with you. Especially if it happened to be instead of you driving the vehicle, your wife.

What jury is going is on the plan is going to throw the book at a mother protecting her child from a violent aggressor using the vehicle. The thing that she, the only thing she had, nobody, nobody's going to. And odds are it wouldn't even get that far because the DA is going to look at it look at his conviction rate and go yeah this is a loser free to go and if if we live in a place with common sense the da is also going to look at that situation and say i don't want to be the one to put a mother up on trial for this oh exactly it just it just looks bad for them with any luck that that person who got hit that who got hit would get laughed at of every personal injury lawyer in the area because they're going to say, okay, you got out of your vehicle. You were kicking their door. You were beating on their windows.

They hit you. You want me to sue them because you had a case of road rage you couldn't control. Well, that would still have a potential for winning in my state unfortunately yeah but again it would because all they have to prove is that they had is that yeah so what is it um it it takes away reasonable doubt when it's a civil case they they only have to prove that you have another possible i think it is yeah yeah you had there's a preponderance of evidence that you had another possible option of action. So, for instance, if that lane was clear ahead of you and you chose to swerve and hit the person, you could probably get sued and you're probably going to end up paying some money.

Well, your insurance company is probably going to end up paying a bunch of money if you're not criminally liable. Torque steer. My alignment was off. Yeah. My right front brake caliper was hanging. Oops. Oops. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure you could, you could maybe squeeze your way out of it depending on your state and depending on the judge you got. But I mean, if there's a clear lane, bam, it's a car. Okay. He dented your car up. Yeah, and understand for the audience, I am not criticizing this driver.

This is a hundred... People freeze, and it's involuntary. Yeah, well, I mean, and I hate to say it this way, but we know this from the veteran community. This is well known in the first responder community. No one knows how they're going to react faced with violence until the day comes. And by then, you know, whatever is about to happen is about to happen. You can do certain things, though, to build kind of like mental, emotional shortcuts in your brain to try to circumvent that. And that's why I Monday morning quarterback these kinds of things.

Exactly. And that's why I Monday morning quarterback these kinds of things. Exactly. That's why I talk about these kinds of things on the show occasionally because what I want is I want people to understand that if you're faced with this, you have an alternative. You have a plan. Yep. And you can execute the plan without fear as a reaction. The greatest example I use for this is that my daughter is 12. reaction. The greatest example I use for this is that my daughter's 12. She was taught, I don't know, like six, seven, eight years old, fairly young. That's what I'm sure most people teach

their kids, or I hope they do. If you hear the fire alarm go off, you run to the mailbox. Mailbox is far enough away that you ought to be safe there. And I told her, if you get to the mailbox and you feel the heat of the fire on your face, you go across street to the neighbor's house. Cause that's twice the distance. And if you can still feel the heat of the fire from the neighbor's house, we have a whole different set of problems, but you know,

like that's your plan. And the thing she asked me was, what about you mom? And I said, my responsibility is to get you out of the house. My responsibility is to get mom out of the house. my responsibility is to get mom out of the house my responsibility is to get me out of the house what i need you to do is to make my life simpler by knowing you you're not hiding under your bed you're not hiding in your closet you're at the mailbox so when i get to the mailbox and you're there we're golden and

i don't have to run back into the house to find you because I will, but I'd rather not. Exactly. Well, my, uh, my brother-in-law and my sister were over hanging out with us one evening. They were cooking in the kitchen. I swear to God, when somebody invents a fire alarm that shuts up, if you holler, I'm just cooking, there'll be a freaking billionaire. But something got a little smoky and the fire alarm went off. but something got a little smoky and the fire alarm went off. My daughter asked zero questions. She didn't question anything.

She didn't stop. She bolted through the house, ran right behind my wife and my brother-in-law out the front door and didn't stop until she got to the mailbox. Perfect. And left my wife, left my wife standing there. Now my sister is a paramedic. My brother-in-law is a sheriff's deputy. As soon as the fire alarm went off and she bolted out the house, they both knew what

happened. And they were like, you taught that kid right. Like there was no, there was no fear. There was no panic. She wasn't scared. She just knew fire alarm went off, go to the mailbox. I'll ask questions when I get to the mailbox. So that's why I talk about these kinds of things, because the point is if the fire alarm goes off and you have to ask what the plan is, that's when people freeze. But if you have a plan, if you know what your options are, if you're thinking about this ahead of time, then when the fire alarm goes off, you run to the mailbox because that's what you've already kind of like predisposition your brain to do. And you don't breeze, hopefully.

Exactly. Well, that's why we do fire drills in schools. And that's why maybe a thing you should consider if you are teaching someone to drive is a drill regarding an aggressive driver or a drill regarding a violent person getting out of their car or a carjacking. Now, you mentioned New Orleans has a lot of carjackings right now. Chicago does too. Rockford, another major city by me, they do too. If you guys follow the news around there, a lot of the shootings in Chicago happen in around and near vehicles, sometimes done via drive by sometimes done by people walking.

But I mean, it's Chicago. There's always some traffic going by and the safest place you can be in a, in a gang involved shooting when you're not the target is moving as quickly as possible because less, less time you're in the environment. You know, my mistake that I made, I didn't realize the person was following me. It was morning. I was tired. I was focused on getting to class.

I was a teenager that wasn't paying attention. But you were also a teenager who was contending with icy roads. So your focus was on keeping control. Exactly. I was doing the safe driver thing of trying to maintain control of the vehicle. I was not paying attention to the person that was driving probably pretty aggressively behind me, judging by the fact that they, that they, um, got in between me and a car in front of me at a stoplight in a turn lane. So probably we're following pretty close.

Should I have noticed it? Absolutely. I stopped far enough back that I thought that I would have probably been able to get out had they not dove the car in between us. But, you know, you can't account for all variables. You really can't. And, you know, I did the right thing and didn't, uh, didn't engage or agitate them further. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, it's one of the situations where it's like with the benefit of hindsight, which is always 2020. Now you can, now you can look back at the situation and be like, Oh, I have extra tools in the toolbox for next time.

Exactly. Exactly. But you still didn't make the situation worse, which you very easily could have. Yeah. Dumb teenage boy who's into weightlifting. I could have mouthed off. I could open the car door.

I mean, come on. Teenage boys do all kinds of stupid stuff. I did all kinds of stupid stuff. Just not that morning. Thank Christ that cell phones didn't have cameras when you and i were younger oh they did though i had i had the the the razor with the camera on it when it first came out uh my my there's a youtube video of me somewhere getting

lit on fire when i was lighting off some thermite my first my first cell phone was the brick the no the the one piece nokia that will survive a nuclear blast? I had one. Yeah, those things were fantastic and they got better signal due to their longer antenna than a lot of modern phones. And you couldn't break them. Exactly. They were very difficult to break.

I'm going to tell anybody that's a younger millennial or a Zoomer that ever watches this that never had the joy of having one of those old school Nokia's. I'm going to tell you, they could not be broken. If, if a nuclear war,

if a nuclear war ever ends, the human race, the only thing left will be like, you know, radioactive snow, cockroaches, and just a mountain of old Nokia's wherever they piled them all up when they stopped selling them. Like, they will survive anything.

Can't say they were the most high-tech things on Earth, but, you know, they would take a beating. They would, they did, they worked phenomenally, and their battery life was amazing. But, you know, that kind of brings us me back around to thinking about a topic road recovery. You know, when I first started driving, I did not have a cell phone. I'm sure you didn't either when you first started driving. I didn't get a cell phone, I think, until I was

17. But I'm about to go on a road trip. I was 19 when I got my first phone. Okay. Yeah, so, you know, pretty close close you had a couple years driving under your belt where you didn't have an easy phone call to make um we're gonna be making i think it's like a 560 mile drive uh starting at four o'clock in the morning this saturday so um not gonna go into specifics on it it a freeway drive. Most of the way we'll be towing the trailer.

Okay. Uh, on this, we do, my family does this trip every year, uh, have been for the last, actually, I want to say more than 40 years now. Um, but twice now on the trip up to this location, uh, we've lost a wheel bearing on a trailer. Uh, all right. Wheel bearing is a very time sensitive thing to have go wrong. And I'm sure as a mechanic,

you're familiar with that. Basically your wheels can fall off if your wheel bearing goes bad enough, long enough. Yeah. So my dad has put together a toolkit for himself because 4.30 in the morning, four o'clock in the morning, there's not too many towing companies that are operating. There's not too many garages open. Napa's not open and we're going on a Saturday. So later in the day, everything's closed. You can pull a wheel bearing on the roadside. If you have a basic jack,

you can get the wheel off and you have a few basic bearing puller tools three jaw puller probably yeah three jaw puller i think on this one it's a three jaw puller and then a three jaw press uh so you can grab behind the hub and pull it back on yeah you know you're talking about a probably not a probably i mean not probably not a solidly sprung axle on the trailer, but a solid axle. Yeah, solid axle. So the wheel bearing system is pretty simple. Pretty basic.

Super basic. It's a boat trailer. It's a hell of a lot nicer than anything on a vehicle these days, or a hell of a lot easier to work on. You know, it's basically two washers, a non-press fit bearing, and a bunch of grease. a non-press fit bearing and a bunch of grease so what we've gone to uh at least on this trip is in addition to our normal pre-road trip checks which we'll talk about after this my dad makes sure in his toolkit he has everything he needs to reap to pull and repack those bearings two full sets of bearings the bearing i think the bearing races are pullable as well. And the washers that go either side of those bearings,

because those, when those bearings tend to go bad, those washers tend to warp. And then suddenly everything doesn't fit anymore. Yeah. Cause it tends to get awful hot and smoky. So now out of curiosity, I don't want to derail you.

What about a torque wrench? Or do you do the old school way where it's like keep tightening while rotating the wheel until it drags and then back it off a little bit? You know, we... Or German torque it. Yeah, it's kind of German torque. You know, just windage torque. Drive a couple miles, check it and retorque it. If it, if it starts loosening up, I mean, you know, it's, it's one of those things that me and him have never really used torque wrenches.

We're tool makers. We just kind of, we just kind of windage it and hope for the best. Nick, Nick. I got torque wrenches for my guns, but I don't have torque wrenches for my car. I shouldn't be the one rubbing my temples at that statement. Because I was just the grease monkey. You're the machinist. Oh, I am.

But see, the beautiful thing about that is most of the stuff I build does not have torque specs. It really doesn't. It doesn't have torque specs. I mean, when I'm working on a CNC machine doing repair work on that, yeah, we have to use torque specs and stuff like that. But for a roadside repair to get you up and running and to get you the last 50 miles, 75 miles, 100 miles. So if you've got to stop two or three more times and check the tension on things, it's not really that big of a deal. At home in the toolkit, absolutely, there's torque wrenches. At home in the toolkit, absolutely there's torque wrenches.

But torque wrenches are one of those precision instruments that you're not supposed to let bang around in the back of a truck on a 600-mile road trip. Yeah. Yeah, they don't take impact super great. So I shouldn't use mine as an impact device. I mean, you can once. Well, technically you can use it as many times that way as you want. It just may not be accurate afterwards. Right, not if you want the torque spec to be maintained.

I mean, in it, single, single solid axle trailers, the torque spec is pretty wide on those. It's basically just torque it down so that it doesn't come loose. I mean, yes,

if you over torque it, could you, could you shear off those studs? Yes. But you're probably not going to do it unless you're putting a cheater bar on i mean i've never managed to but i'm sure there's somebody that could i'm sure so what is the saying you've used before everything if you use anything wrong enough oh yeah yeah if you you can you can use anything wrong enough and start a fire or if you use it wrong enough. Yeah. Yeah. Most things work that way. But like, you know, if you've changed a tire in your life, you can probably with the help of a YouTube video, figure out how to pull a wheel bearing on a very simple trailer like that.

But for a lot of people on road trips, they're not going to be towing a trailer. Or if they are, it'll be like a camper trailer. In which case, yeah, you're going to need to pack a heavier duty jack. You're probably going to need heavier duty torque wrench tools like that. And you'll have the space to do that. But if you're not pulling a trailer, what's your standard vehicle checks? I'm not a mechanic. I don't do most of my standard vehicle checks. I have a trusted mechanic that before I do a road trip. So like if I'm just going across the state, okay, I'm not too worried about it. I'll do my normal tire pressure checks, all the various fluid checks, check my battery voltage, make sure my spare is inflated, stuff like that. But if I'm going on a multi-state trip or a couple of four or 500 mile trip,

I take my truck to the mechanic a week beforehand. A guy that I've known and been doing business with the entire time I've been driving. And I tell him, hey, I'm going on a road trip, do a full once over my vehicle. If it needs a tire rotation, if it needs an alignment, if it needs wipers, whatever. I don't care. Do it. Most it's ever cost me is like 500 bucks because two of my brake rotors need to be redone. But then I didn't end up doing 70 miles an hour on the freeway with roached out brake rotors.

Yeah. So, I mean, would it have been a problem probably not but say you happen to be going down the highway in the winter and one of those semis gets a crosswind hitting it on an icy patch and now it's suddenly blown sideways across the highway and you're in the middle of what's starting to be a 50 car pileup. Yeah. Having good breaks might suddenly become the most important thing in your life. And, and I guess from my perspective, like what, what you're really doing with the trusted mechanic or in my case, I am the trusted mechanic.

Exactly. But what you're really doing is you're trying to sacrifice a little bit of time and or money to prevent a little bit of time and or money to prevent a probable problem. And I say problem, not potential because you're right. The brake rotors probably would have got you through the trip, but probably,

but the problem is the average driver pays so little attention to their vehicle that if it doesn't screw you, this trip is going to screw you next trip. So it's always the, yeah. So it's always the idea that like if you don't have that trusted mechanic or if you're the kind of person that likes that diys are on maintenance because like in the last year i've done a four-wheel brake job on my wife's

jeep grand cherokee which by the way has the heaviest damned brakes i've ever felt in my life by the way, has the heaviest damned brakes I've ever felt in my life. Cherokees are overbuilt. Yeah. Front brakes on my truck, suspension upgrade on my truck. That might have been it just for this year. But anyway. Oh, you did the battery upgrade, didn't you?

Haven't done the battery upgrade. We ran wiring for like the power panel. That's right. That's right. You ran all that wiring. But I did a four-wheel suspension job on the truck. Like I do a lot of my own work. You know, I'm actually. You have that knowledge and expertise.

Yeah. I'm probably going to be doing spark plugs in the very near future if I can ever get to quit raining around here. But, you know, like I do a lot of that, but I have, I have like my own little system of checks, which really is just everything. Because again, I do my own, I do my own changes. I do my own maintenance. So I'm usually pretty in tune with what needs to be done on either one of these vehicles before we put them on the road for extended period of time. I'm checking everything that should be fine. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. If I have a ball joint or a tie rod end loosened up on my truck, I usually know about it because I drive the thing.

Yeah, you can usually feel something like that. My wife knows that if the Jeep starts making a weird noise or something feels wrong, you need to let me know so I can go jump in and check it out or jack it up and check it out. So I'm checking things like the oil level. Absolute, absolute simplest thing you can ever do is find your oil dipstick, pull it out, wipe it on a towel, shove it back in, wait 30 seconds, pull it out and check to see where the level is. If it ain't where it's supposed to be, fix that right quick. Check all your fluids. Every one of those reservoirs either has a dipstick or it has a mark somewhere on the side

of it where you should be able to very quickly ask. Probably have to wipe it off to read it. Potentially, yeah. But the point remains, if nothing else, pop the cap open. Make sure there's fluid in there. Because even if the fluid's old, even if it needs to be flushed, even if it's wrong, it's better than being dry. So just check everything. Look under the hood and see if anything looks like it's out of place.

Almost every engine has a belt running around either the side of it or the front of it that drives all your accessories. If that belt looks frayed, that's bad. Go get that dealt with. If the vehicle's making weird antisocial, I call them expensive noises like screeching, grinding, banging, go get all that fixed. Check, make sure your tires are at the right pressure. Single greatest thing other than make sure your oil level is right that you can do to make sure you have a smooth, hassle-free trip. Get all your tires at the right air pressure.

Check your tires to make sure they don't have any bumps, knobs, or anything funny looking. I mean, like... Dry rot. Yeah. Well, and this is another thing. Most people don't realize this. So when I used to work as a tire guy, when I was putting myself through college, I used to

have this argument all the time with... I hate to make the generalization, but i'm going to usually it was with older customers who would bring in like their lincoln their crown big their enormous land yacht on a pair of michelins that i know damn good well last 80 000 miles at 105 no no they would have like 10000 miles on them because they don't drive. They go from home to church to the grocery store and home. That's it.

That's all they do. They don't go on long trips. They don't drive to work every day. They don't drive a lot. So I'm having to explain to them why their tires need to be replaced when they only have 10,000 miles on an 80,000-mile warranty tire. And the tread's still good. The tread looks great except for all the cracks down between the blocks because most people don't realize but on one side of the tire or the other there is a

stamped in code and that code is the first two digits is the week 152 that the the tire popped out of the mold the last two are the year the nTSA says that when tires are five years old from the date of manufacture, not the date of sale, because you run into this sometimes if it's a tire that sat on the shelf for a year because it's a weird size or it's just not a commonly sold brand or maybe it's a secondary shop that bought somebody else's stock from the date of manufacture, five years, and NHTSA says replace those tires. I'm going to tell you that by the time a tire gets five years old of sitting in the ozone and letting the sun eat it up, I don't care how much tread that tire has left. It needs to be yanked off the vehicle and replaced.

Absolutely. I've had that happen on my truck twice. That's also why you see so many... I'm getting to that point again. That's also why every spring you see so many boat trailers on the side of the road. Because the tires got low on pressure,

leaking away in somebody's driveway, and the tires are old, because they don't spin a lot, they just sit there, and then as soon as you get them out on the road, get them nice and hot, they pop. Yeah, there's no quicker way to flip your vehicle than having a tire blow out at 70. Yeah.

Well, if you've got a half-ton truck dragging a decent-sized boat on a trailer, like a tire blowout, it shouldn't be a world-ending experience, but it will be an exciting one, especially if you're dealing with a person who doesn't spend a lot of time towing a load behind their vehicle. The feeling of that trailer suddenly grabbing and yanking that vehicle will be eye-opening. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Especially if, say, you know, you see a lot of this anymore nowadays is small and mid-sized suvs towing 18 20 foot bass boats vehicles they

have no right i mean yeah vehicles that have no right by by the weight they can technically technically yeah the trouble is is by the mass of your car versus the mass of the boat the boat is suddenly directing traffic. Yeah. I'm going to tell you that I had this conversation with my wife fairly recently because she noticed another Grand Cherokee similar to hers that had a trailer, a hitch receiver on the back of it. Absolutely. Well, hers doesn't. And she asked me, why didn't I get that?

why don't why didn't i get that and my response was because i looked up the max towing the max the max pull load of your jeep and it's 3 500 pounds maximum and i was unwilling to put a would that be a class two hitch class three hitch i think it's only one and a half inch receiver but i was unwilling to put that i'm not familiar i was unwilling to put that behind your jeep and then have your jeep do the carolina squad every time you put a load on the back of it because your rear suspension is sprung for having weight inside the inside the hatch not gimballing off the back of the jeep as opposed to a pickup truck that can pull 6,500 pounds and now has enough rear spring to actually do it. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, it's not even just rear spring. It is weight of your vehicle. Brakes. Because the problem is what a lot of, well, yeah, brakes too, for sure. But the ratio of weight of trailer you are pulling to weight of your vehicle. Once you get to the point where you're one-to-one or greater than the weight of your vehicle, now that trailer is going to be determining what your vehicle does instead of the other way around. Yeah, you can get away with it with some of the heavier duty trucks and whatnot with trailer

brakes, but you can't with a light duty vehicle. And what people forget to take into account is the weight of the shit they put in the boat. Because if you're towing a boat and you've got a covered trailer and basically is what it turns into because now you've got the topper on the boat to keep all the rain and bugs and debris out. Well, it would be sure nice to have a little more room in the back of the suv for the kids so they're a little less cramped so we put all the crap in the boat all right how much does a family of fives random vacation crap way guarantee you haven't weighed it so you don't know now you're over your towing limit. Yeah. And on top of all that,

like I encourage anybody that is, that makes that jump towards like pulling a trailer or pulling a boat, God forbid. Jim Rawls said that there was no notification when this, when this went live. I'm not shocked by that at all. Not a bit. I put a post up on Instagram the

other day that, okay. So Nick, you're a little bit familiar with Instagram, right? Uh, yeah. I put up a post. Now, you know, normally when you put up a post, depending on like the SEO and everything, like you'll get a certain percentage goes to your followers and a certain percentage goes to people that have searched similar things in the past, it's the reason why I keep getting... Have you ever seen 100% followers, 0% non-followers? Ever. I've never made a post on Instagram that I remember. I need to see if I actually saved that, because I was absolutely shocked when I realized that... I don't think that's shadow banningning anymore that's just outright barring

oh yeah here we go oh it's just all flared out oh there it goes oh wow that's impressive yeah that is yeah i'm on the show and i don't get notifications that we're going live that is that is meta giving me the great big old middle finger when they say... I don't need them. I don't either. I just think it's hilarious. So Jim, to your point, I'm sorry you didn't get the notification. It ain't just you.

Nope. But I'm hoping that if we keep doing this on Thursdays at 5pm Central and 6pm Eastern, it'll become a habit. And the fact that we're shadow banned to hell and back won't matter as much. I've been banned before. I have never been kicked off of meta.

I've never been kicked off Facebook. Well, I've been kicked off Facebook a bunch. I've been kicked off Facebook a bunch. Apparently, sarcastically asking the president to drone bomb you harder is a bannable offense on Facebook. Holy Moses. Because they were doing a bit of extra drone bombing oh nick yeah well you know what are they gonna do they only drone bomb american citizens in foreign countries not in america so far so far that would be the president that got the nobel peace prize before he ever took office yeah anyway i won't read about that one on his wikipedia page but like i was going to say before jim sidetracked me um you know the only thing i say about is if you're going to be pulling a trailer

pulling a boat like yes to nick's point please please pay attention to the glow to the uh your towing limit pay attention to the weight of load that's behind you and also keep in mind if you see your vehicle doing the carolina squad there's a couple of things happening first of all you have no rear spitch travel you're resting on the bump stops or the overload leaves the second thing is that your brakes your brake proportioning front to rear was built assuming your vehicle was at standard right height so when it's like this and all of the weight is on the back axle when you hit the brakes you don't have as much weight pushing down the front tires which that difference in weight distribution because you have so much of the vehicle you have you have the because the vehicle is postured up like that completely screws up your front

brake force which is going to make you take even longer to brake than it would have otherwise were that big old trailer boat, not pushing you down the interstate. Cause now you have X amount of break and double the weight to stop. So like, this is just all me saying, if you're, if you put a load on the back of your vehicle,

make sure it's not too much for the vehicle. Consider something like a weight distribution hitch or something else to kind of like correct for that. Pay very freaking close attention to your tongue weight because a properly loaded trailer should not have a crap ton of weight on the front tongue it should be kind of even leaning a little bit forward so that if it if the if the trailer disconnects from the vehicle it doesn't do a backflip and then go through somebody's windshield. You want it to kind of like drop down onto the emergency chains. Like I am by no means an expert in towing stuff other than what the DOD taught me.

And I've never, never gone wrong following all that knowledge. Well, you know, I was, I was trained old school with how to tow trailers. They started me off on a lawn tractor. And then I was towing trailers behind tractors down the road and then towing trailers behind trucks. You want to have enough tongue weight that you see the truck bed start to drop a little bit and then you're good. I mean, if you get to know your vehicle, you'll know when too much is too much and just adjust your load accordingly. I mean, everybody that owns a truck is overloaded at least once.

I mean, you're going to do it to find out where the limits are. Just don't do it on a 600-mile road trip. You say this to the person that put a 700-pound TIG welder in the back of a 94 Toyota pickup. It'll be fine. Oh, it was fine. But except for the fact that you're familiar with those vehicles, I'm assuming. They're kind of small. They're on the diminutive side.

Well, the TIG welder was a foot and a half taller than the cab of the truck was. Fantastic. That sounds like my kind of welder the fantastic part was like having to like really put the pedal down hard to get up to the state of 70 miles an hour because i felt like the truck had a sail i'd seriously felt like i was dragging a parachute the whole way back home like it was ridiculous yeah you know that's know, that's a thing that a lot of people don't consider is the aerodynamics of what you're towing or pulling.

And that can be huge. Yeah, I mean, it'll screw up your gas mileage for sure, but it's also going to make your engine work harder. It's going to make your cooling package work harder. It's going to demand you pay a little bit more attention to the temperature gauge. It's going to demand you make sure... Transcooler? Huh? Does your truck have a transmission radiator? attention to the temperature gauge. It's going to demand that you make sure. Huh?

Does your truck have a transmission radiator? Transcooler? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. If you're going to, if you're going to have a towing package, that's, that's, it's not a must have, but it helps. It helps a lot.

And if you're going to be doing a lot of towing and your vehicle doesn't have a separate trans cooler, it almost certainly has has one of those goofy little loops in the front radiator at a minimum. And it's not hard to take those two hoses off and then mount somewhere in the front of the vehicle a little auxiliary. They make an aftermarket one that's easy to mount. And if you're not comfortable doing it,

find a shop that will do it. I mean, they're not expensive and they're not difficult to put on. But I'm going to tell you that, like, so my truck has, like, the factory trans core, which is a radiator about yay big. Yeah. Not gigantic, but certainly helps. Oh, it does. And even I have given thought to upgrading that to an even larger cooler.

But mostly, I've got a little meter called ScanGauge that plugs in my OBD2 port, and it lets me watch my water temps and my trans temps in real time. Yeah, I've got that native in my dash. Yeah. Oh, Toyota. Toyota sees those things as flippant luxuries to put on Lexuses, not Toyotas. To be fair, on my truck, it is a flippant luxury.

I don't tow stuff very much, but when I do, it's very heavy. Yeah, I mean, I don't tow stuff ever. Like, I don't tow stuff. I haven't gotten to that point. But all the weight you put in for camping. You had to upgrade your suspension, yeah? 600, 700 pounds. Okay, 600, 700 pounds in you had to upgrade your suspension. Yeah. Six, 700 pounds. Okay.

Six, 700 pounds in a light duty pickup. You had to upgrade the suspension. So the truck wasn't squatting. Trans is working harder. It's going to be getting hotter. Oh yeah. I can, I can tell you definitively that like two years ago, coming home from prepper camp, I was, there was a point at which i was watching those

because we were going through like a hillier area which yeah might sound funny to y'all but like i live down here where there's no such thing as hills so hills are still a novelty to me but i was watching and my water temp would creep up like you know 100 like 188 190 191 193 it gets about. It'd get up to about 195 going uphill, and then as soon as we pressed top of the hill and started coming down, it'd start ticking back down. But the transtem was doing the same thing. And again, I've got 5, 6, 700 pounds in the back of the truck, plus two passengers.

So, like, you know, it just all bears in mind. It's not inconsiderable. Yeah. Like, you know, it just, it all bears in mind. It's not inconsiderable. Yeah. Now, I think that was right before I did a full coolant flush thermostat and trans flush on the truck. Okay.

Which hasn't really changed much, except it changed the operating temperature of the truck ever so slightly just because it was a brand new thermostat. And they're all, you know, they all have like a range. Yeah, they're each different. Yeah. And they're all, you know, they all have like a range. Yeah, they're each different. Yeah. I mean, I'm not that familiar with thermostats on a truck, but thermocouples in a 3D printer, you have to calibrate your temperature readout to certain temperature resistivities across the thermocouple. I'm sure a car's is the same way.

Yeah. Well, I mean, everything has a manufacturing tolerance, but the point is. Exactly. The point isn't that the truck stays two degrees hotter, two degrees cooler with the new thermostat. The point is I went through the whole cooling package and trans package on the truck and refreshed everything.

And you probably made it a little bit more efficient. Quite possibly. But for me, it goes back to the whole thing of like, did you have to get your brake rotors changed right then or not? And the answer is no, but sooner or later, you were going to have to. And sooner or later, the way I use

my truck is that, like, yeah, I do a bit of, like, around town and every now and then I commute to the office in it, but like, it's my daily driver. But I'm going to tell you that 90% of the time when that truck comes out of the driveway, it is because I am loading it to the gills and we're going camping

and it's going to be working its butt off the entire way there and the entire way home and potentially we might be like you know doing lots of really short trips around the campsite which by the way are horrible for vehicles is to like start it not let it run up to operating

temperature and then shut it back down. But you wind up doing that because you're driving people to and from the bathroom. That's too far away to walk. Well, it's a lot of people's commutes, honestly. Yeah. So it really just comes down to like doing all that preemptively, preventatively having that trusted mechanic, doing all those pre-flight checks.

It is all about minimizing the number of things that can screw you over on the trip. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you take any of the possible problems out of the equation, you just make your life easier. And man, I'm all about making life easier because you can be as prepared as you want. But if you're ignoring basic safety conditions, like when we get to talking about basic homeowners preparedness, fire extinguishers. The number of people I know that own houses two and three times more expensive than mine that have not a single fire extinguisher is insane. They cost less than a hundred dollars

for a big one. Like there's one sitting in the shop, in the, one of those drawers of the lathe behind me. I can't get to the point where you can see it but you know i what am i going to burn down my 200 000 house because of not having a 40 fire extinguisher that's ridiculously insane yeah but it's the same thing with not taking your car to a mechanic look we can all only be experts in so many things we only have so much space in our brain. You've had the wonderful history of becoming a mechanic through the military and through your profession for a while. I'm a machinist.

Man, I can take apart a bridge port. I can take apart that lathe, no problem, whatever. I know precious little about small engines. And what little I do know is enough to keep my lawnmower functioning on most days. But even then I know where my limits are. I'm not going to push it past that limit. I'm not going to let things get maintenance wise to the point where I can't handle it without calling in an expert. Because if I need to mow my lawn on a Thursday, great. The grass is going to get taller.

Now it's got to go to a shop. Now it's going to be two weeks to get it fixed and get it back. Now I got to either beg one of my neighbors to do it or hire somebody else to do it. It's just more expensive. The same thing with your car. The longer you let problems go unattended, the more expensive they get. I mean, how often have you seen a blowout on the side of the road, Phil? Probably a couple of times a year you see somebody stuck with a blowout on a road trip.

Yeah, pretty much every road trip you go on, you see shreds of tire blown out along the road. Well, guess what happens when a front tire blows up when you're doing 70 miles an hour? It's probably going to take out your quarter panel. At the very least, it's taken out the front quarter panel. Worst case, it taken out the front quarter panel worst case it takes out something in your engine because a piece of that tire goes through that little plastic fender well covered and goes into your belt pops the belt off and now hopefully you don't have an interference engine because if you do now your valves are all smashed and that is the extent of my mechanics knowledge yeah well i mean to me interference engines with no belt is very

bad extremely but i mean you know just kind of round this all out it really just comes down to like you know it it really is the age old is the age old idea of like an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and especially if we're talking about being on like you're going to be i'm, with your spouse. Nope. Actually, she's staying home. This is a guy's trip. Okay.

But you're going to be going. I'll be with my family. My brother, my dad, unfortunately not my grandfather because of his hospitalization, but two of my uncles and one of their sons. But the point remains, you would much rather spend your time with family hanging out than on the side of the road cursing yourself for what you should have fixed in your driveway exactly and especially because what's a set of tires 1200 bucks yeah you know pedro garcia pointed out uh maybe it blows out your fender well maybe you flip your car now you've totaled what is probably a $40,000 vehicle with modern pricing. Yeah. That you'll have to replace it. What would have been $1,000 of tires. That you'll have to replace it. What? 7% to 12% interest.

Yeah. I think, let's see, we bought my wife a new car recently and I think they were saying the average interest rate, not what we paid, but the average interest rate was going to be something in the neighborhood of 8%. They said, just be prepared because the interest rates have gone up. The average rate's about 8%. No, not at all. And that's, you know, you and I mention it all the time. Personal finance is very important. Manage your personal finances, manage your credit appropriately, because then you can,

you can go away and find someone that will give you better. Yeah. You know, but you know, it's the same thing with finding a good mechanic. If you have, if you keep your vehicle in good condition and you notice a problem beginning, you have the time to go to that mechanic, the mechanic down the road, and the mechanic a little bit on the other side of town to have three different people assess the problem, give you your three opinions and your three costs aggregated together and figure out who's more than likely telling you the truth and which one of them is giving you the better price.

And the other thing being proactive gives you, because I ran into this recently, our dishwasher is misbehaving and it wasn't completely, it's still not completely dead, but we're choosing not to use it because I'm afraid of what's going to happen when it finally blows up. Water damage is expensive. But my wife and I went ahead of what's going to happen when it finally blows up. Water damage is expensive. But my wife and I went ahead and, like, preemptively said, it's not broken yet. It hasn't flooded the kitchen. Let's go ahead and go get a replacement on order so we can get what we want.

We can get it delivered. We can get this problem dealt with. And being proactive means you have the time ahead of the day you're supposed to leave on your trip to go shop multiple mechanics and get the work done and so on and so forth. Exactly. It's an engineering saying, if you do not engineer a failure point, the item will engineer it for you. There's a maintenance saying that's very common with that as well. If you don't make time for maintenance maintenance will make time for itself yes it will it will i mean 100 if you neglect anything long enough it will always misbehave and it will misbehave at the least opportune time humanly possible not that i would

probably the most expensive way yeah more times than i would like to admit when i was younger and stupid or i i've been working on a vehicle on a weekend before I had to go out of town. But I learned eventually. You know what's a good one, too? Hmm. The week before your road trip, not the day before, fill up with gas and make sure your fuel gauge is still working. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. fill up with gas and make sure your fuel gauge is still working oh no oh yeah i well see i had the l i had a slightly different problem i filled up the day i was going on a road trip and that

happened to be what killed my fuel filter on a uh an early 90s uh chevy s10 pickup guess where the fuel filter is located phil above the uh fuel tank on the uh frame rail uh-huh oh guess how you change the fuel filter you either take the bed off or you lower the gas tank i uh borrowed a sawzall you installed an inspection panel i installed an inspection panel in my S10. Did you do it the right way? Did you do it the right way with hinges and everything? No, you just cut a hole. Oh, God, no.

No, no, I just cut a hole in it and then finished driving where I was going and fixed it on the back end by putting a bed liner over top of it. I can't even be upset about that because, like... Look, I bought that pickup for a load of scrap that my grandpa traded to the guy and about a grand and a half. That pickup was fine with the inspection panel as it was. Sounds like an appropriate fix for a... An appropriate first truck fix.

Yes. Yeah, but anything you can do ahead of time to assess the condition of your vehicle or assess the condition of a vehicle accessory, heck, check and make sure that you actually put your wrench set back in the truck after last time you rotated your tires. Because I was going to a gun show with a buddy of mine about 10 or 12 years ago. We were in his vehicle. He got a flat. No problem. Easy fix. We swap out the flat for the spare, go to the gun show, come back home. About two weeks later, he calls me and says hey man do you know what happened to my lug wrench guess where that got left the bed of the truck either on the bed on the bumper or the side of the road we've never seen it again he had another flat going somewhere else i don't remember where but but it didn't have its luggage or any of the other tools

because one of us, probably me, knowing me, I'm scatterbrained, left that thing on the side of the road or the back of the truck and drove away. Also, a pro gamer tip, if buying a used vehicle, or hell, even a new vehicle, make sure you have all of your tools because let's just say i might have seen more than one used vehicle in my life the lug wrench listen i'm telling you especially at least the locking key especially those new those new things yeah especially especially used vehicles you have to check for that because i'm gonna tell you that the dealership almost certainly didn't when they bought it and the detailer sure didn't. And if it got detailed at

all, and if you don't check either, then, so here's the thing is if you check and you knows it's missing, you're probably not going to get it. You might be able to argue a couple of bucks off, but you need to go fix that problem. Or you know what? Tell them, hey, throw it in. It makes the sale. They'll spend the $40 to buy the kit. Actually, it'll probably be cheaper for them. It'll probably be $20, and they'll throw it in. Yeah.

I mean, worst come to worst, go to a junkyard, find a vehicle just like yours. I can almost promise you the spare tire tools are still in it. They are still under the driver's seat or in the back. Yes, 110%. So the point remains, just make sure you have all those things. And if you're driving a beat-up old thing like I

used to way back in the day, and even for my current vehicle, I have lots of water in the truck in case we get stuck, and it can go in the radiator if it absolutely has to. And I also have a quart of oil and a little thing of brake fluid and so on and so forth. Like it just pays to have all that stuff on hand.

Especially if you're going on a 500 or 600 mile road trip or a 1,000 mile road trip. Or heaven forbid you're going on a cross-country road trip like you used to see in the movies everyone do. I don't actually know anyone that's done that. I to one day right you always hear that you know college kids oh it'd be cool to go do that like they see in the movies i don't know that i've ever seen anyone do that if anybody has shoot us a message on the patreon chat or in the comments no interesting to hear how that went for you my wife and I have talked about maybe when Piper's a little bit older and it's just the two of us, go do about a two-week tour through the Midwest and make a big old circuit through that area and then come back home and just book spots at campgrounds and do that whole thing.

I mean, you could do it with nothing but KOAs. I mean, my God, those things are everywhere. But we're 10 minutes over, and I do need to wrap this up. That's all right. It was a good conversation. I mean, you know, we started with Phil's interesting military experience that I hope nobody ever has to fall back on. And if you do, then it's been a really bad day. And I hope we've ended with some good pre-flight

checks you can do before a road trip because, you know, some of us are about to be going to Saluda, North Carolina in a couple of weeks, and let's call it what it is. Everybody gets on the road sooner or later, and when you do, the last thing you want to do is be stuck on the side of the road between

Picksknuckle and Bumfuck in the middle of nowhere, having to figure out how to deal with a problem you should have dealt with in your driveway. Exactly. Murphy's always going to come knocking at the worst time. Come on. If you haven't met Private Murphy yet, consider your life

You know, I actually know a guy whose last name is Murphy. He's in the Air Force. Remind me later, I'll tell you about Murphy. That dude has the worst luck of anybody I've ever met, and the perfect name.

I mean, the perfect name if you're an airman with bad luck. Oh yeah, and he is. Alright, let's go ahead and punt this one out the door. So for those of you who are watching the stream, Oh yeah, and he is. be here but two weeks from today we will be back live and i wish i could tell you what we're going to talk about but i'm not there yet and prepper camp is coming up very quickly it's one two three weeks from today i'll be on the road and y'all may have to wait until late friday morning to get your normal normal podcast episode because Andrew and I are probably going to record it at Prepper Camp in the middle of nowhere.

And then I'm going to test the cell phone towers and see if I get lucky enough to get an upload out. Last year behaved itself. We put out a morning show Friday, Saturday, and Sunday that weekend at Prepper Camp. It was a ton of fun. And hopefully we're going to be able to pull it off again. Should be great. All right. Well,

matter of fact, podcast heading out the door. Good night, everybody. Keep the shiny side up, keep the tires on the ground and watch out for Murphy. Bye everybody. Later. We'll be right back. Thank you. I'll see you next time.