Photo: Paul Guillien
As you’re prepping for rides this spring and summer, it might be worth having a look at these adventure bike tips compiled by four-time Baja 1000 champion Quinn Cody for the website ADV Pulse. He covers planning, prep, gear, as well as riding tips. Good to know.
Link:
Quinn Cody’s Off-Road Safety Tips for Adventure Riders » ADV Pulse.
How cool is this? What a great trick to add to your list of camp kitchen skills. Give it a try during your next off-road adventure. Greg, I’m looking at you! 🙂
Thanks to my lovely wife, Natalie, for the tip!
I’ve published a few Fire Skills posts in the past to give readers a few options in making their evening camp fires. We’ve experimented with a few fire set-ups in order to see which ones last the longest. The set-up in this video from Sigma 3 Survival School is claimed to burn for 40 hours. That’s quite a claim.
Their technique is to build a pyramid fire (each layer’s tightly spaced logs are a little shorter, a little thinner, and laid perpendicularly on the logs underneath). Their winning tip is to pack the gaps between the logs with dirt or clay. If you do this for every level, the embers won’t be able to fall down and ignite lower levels of wood prematurely.
Even if it doesn’t last 40 hours, this looks like a good candidate for at least an all-night fire, something we’ve never been able to manage with previous campfires. Next time we’re going to give this a try.
Here’s a beautiful video showing how a Damascus steel knife is hand forged. The blade gets folded and hammered flat over 300 times. The sheath is handmade too. Gorgeous video.
I’ll admit I didn’t know there was more than one way to lace up a hiking boot. This video shows techniques for really locking the boot to your ankle to prevent heal chafe, as well as different lacing styles for people with high arches or flat feet.
My feet are slightly different sizes so I love the idea of getting a more custom fit depending on how I lace up. Good stuff.
Although I haven’t been so great at keeping on the blog lately (though I will be changing that), I have been good at keeping my Pinterest account up. And through a fluke of nature (which was Pinterest recommending one of my boards to new users), I now have over 20,000 followers. Whoa.
If you like your overland, off-road, camp, and adventure information in bite sized chunks, check out my Pinterest page. I have boards on camping, truck mods, Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, Skills, and a bunch of other stuff too.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, you’ll probably dig it.
Links:
Here are all of the WCXC boards.
And here are all of the pins.
It’s a bit ’80s, but there’s some good stuff here. The video covers pretty much everything: how to cross muddy slopes, ditches, water fording, hills, v-shaped gullies, towing, driving ruts and rocky terrain. All of the sections are done by two Defenders, one doing the right thing, the other the wrong thing.
As an added bonus, the video shows what has been selected in vehicles’ transfer case and transmission via a little Atarti-style graphic.
The other day I posted about enduro riding techniques. This post is all about adventure riding skills. One set of resources is the video viewer above. It contains an entire playlist of 26 videos on adventure motorcycle riding brought to you by Offroad Fanatic, which seems to be the YouTube face of South African driver development school, ADA.
I’ll also add a throttle control tip that I learned from former AMA national champion, Rich Oliver, who runs Mystery School, a training facility in central California. Hold the throttle like you hold a screwdriver. This will give you greater precision and enable you to roll the power on in finer increments. It will also force your elbows out and up, which will give you better control.
All the videos in the above playlist are listed (with links) after the jump. So you can either use the list as a guide and skip through videos in the viewer above or use the links to open the videos individually in new browser windows.
Btw, I spent a couple of days at Mystery School a few years ago and found it well worth it. Read the rest of this entry »
On a recent trip, my friend Greg and I figured out something interesting about driving over bumps. If you preload the suspension by briefly applying the brake right before the bump, and then get on the throttle to power over the bump, it really smooths things out and makes the bump less jarring. Motorcyclists will know this move well.
Briefly braking right before the bump compresses the suspension. This is called “preloading.” Then immediately getting on the throttle, as the front tires go over the bump, shifts the weight towards the back of the truck. This lightens the front end and the front suspension rebounds, helping to lift the front tires over the bump. Moving the weight toward the back also preloads the rear suspension. Keeping the throttle on as the rear tires go over the bump keeps the rear suspension taught. This is what you want, as an unloaded rear suspension would otherwise rebound as the rear tires clear the bump causing and uncomfortable bucking motion.
The above picture oversells it a bit. This doesn’t have to be a wheels-in-the-air maneuver. Just shifting the weight a bit is enough to make a difference.
Give it a try the next time you’re out on the trail and encounter a berm or some other relatively smooth obstacle. I bet you’ll notice a difference.
How to use a fire steel. There’s a bit of art to it…
