[ExI] restoration-ready

Wed May 26 14:03:01 UTC 2021

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Grigg via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] restoration-ready

William Wallace wrote:

>Spike, the days of the beautiful, big cars are over.  I am driving around and see this little cutoff car and it's a >Lincoln!  Bah and more Bah. 

>>…What about the massive SUV's which I see everywhere? I can't get over how popular they are here in the Philippines…

John I think part of their appeal is that SUVs can be used as temporary homes.  I see plenty of people using them for that purpose around here.  But it isn’t just the usual suspects doing it.

With Tesla and the other mover and shaker companies, we have plenty of cases where a contractor sends people, often a ranking person to work out a deal or do a temporary engineering assignment.  In today’s Silicon Valley pace of life, a prole lives at the office anyway: waking hours are working hours.  Hotels around here are crazy expensive, so they are comped a couple hundred bucks a day for an assignment that might go on for a few weeks.  A typical office has a kitchen, a gym, showers and a place to hang one’s work clothes.  The SUV with a sleeping arrangement is cheap temporary housing for urban campers, and it is super versatile, because it is right out there in the parking lot whenever needed.  Whenever I see a SUV with the windows blacked out, parked in an inconspicuous place, I have a pretty good idea what is going on there. 

>… In this country they lovingly build copies of the classic U.S. Army WW2 jeep, and I just may buy one for just a few thousand dollars. They are known to last forever! 

John

Classic jeeps were made for repairability and manufacturabilty, because they needed to stamp them out by the skerjillions quickly.  They are very easy to repair, and anyone with a few basic metal-working skills can make body parts for them, since they are all nearly all flat-panel with no compound curves on the Willys MB.  If you do repair work on one of those, you will wonder why modern cars aren’t built like the Willys.

Parting shot: I used to belong to a 4WD club in southern Cal (China Lake Naval base.)  After the war, the Defense Department stored several thousand jeeps out there which had never been deployed.  After a year or two, they auctioned them off for a few hundred bucks each.  They were practically new, street legal and pristine except for having spent a coupla years enduring being exposed to the elements, which Jeeps do very well.  I talked to my friend who says the local shop which rebuilds the 2.2 liter inline 4 is still there and there are STILL some of those 75 year old Willys MBs rolling around with olive drab paint and the white star on the hood.  The last original owner has passed on now.  They are worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks now.

spike

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