You might like the Matt’s Off-Road Recovery channel on YouTube. They do vehicle recovery in Southern Utah near Zion National Park and they just seem like a great bunch of guys. It’s also a great place to watch real-life off-road / overland recoveries in action and learn a thing or two.
This video seems to cover all of the bases for a method of cutting down waste and refilling those green, 1-lb. propane bottles. An adapter is needed to do the job but there’s a link to it in the video description.
Be sure and check local laws as far as the legality of this goes in your area.
What happens if you break your winch rope out on the trail? Here’s how to fix it.
My partner’s partner, Nathan, introduced me to a YouTube channel called MotoTrek recently, which looks like a great place to learn skills and techniques related to off-road adventure riding. Bret Tkacs, the guy doing the instructing, gives clear overviews of the techniques and explains the basic physics involved. Check out this video of him showing how to tackle deep river rock. What he can do with a motorcycle is impressive stuff.
If you have a Jeep and haven’t done this upgrade, keep reading. This wiring harness enables your truck to send power directly from the battery to the headlights via a couple of relays instead of routing the electricity into the dash and through the light switch. In Jeeps I’ve been told routing the electricity through the switch robs a lot of power and causes dim headlights.
In this excellent video from YouTube user BleepinJeep, he finds that this $25 upgrade more than doubled the light output from his stock headlights. That was even better performance than he got from his upgraded LED lights on the new harness (and the LEDs didn’t put out enough heat to keep themselves free of snow). He takes you through the whole install.
You can get this harness from a place called K Suspension Fab but they were backordered at the time of this post. Here’s a link where you can find it on Amazon. That link is for H4 headlights. Check first to see what kind of headlights you have.
Thanks to my good friend Nathan for the tip!
The overlanding worlds’s favorite sometimes-prickly off-road expert, Andrew St.Pierre White takes you on a deep dive into the realm of 4×4 driving skills in this full-length, vintage video. Driving in all terrain types is covered, as well as driving a classic 4×4 set-up and how it differs from more modern, computer-controlled 4x4s.
Here’s quick and strong way to splice two wires, the linesman splice. Brought to you by Canadian workshop guru and avid YouTuber, AvE.
And an image for quick reference.
It’s spring and you’re probably getting ready for a camping trip or two. In case you’re wondering what to bring, I’ll share our camp list, our checklist for everything we bring.
First though a word on how we pack. I have a drawer system in the truck and a lot of the tools and recovery gear live in there. In the flat area above the drawers we have room for three plastic bins (like the ones in the photo above) and one cooler. That makes four solid items that can easily be strapped down. Always secure your load inside the vehicle. You don’t want that stuff shifting on the trail, or worse, flying around in an accident. All of the soft stuff (blankets, sleeping bags and the like) go between the space left over along side the bins. Usually I can get us packed and still see out of the rear window.
For longer trips, I take out the back seat of the truck and bolt a couple of D-rings to the floor of the truck where the seat bolts go. In that space, low and central, I’ll strap down 21 gallons of water in 3 plastic jugs. That’s enough for a maximum of 10 days for my wife and I at a rate of 1 gallon per person per day for drinking, cooking, and dishes.
You can see one of the water containers in the picture below. Read the rest of this entry »
