--Chad Love

So you really want an ATV for your hunting spot, but just don't have the money to buy one. You could keep hoofing it, which would keep you healthy. You could steal one, which would probably land you in the klink, or you could do what this guy did and just make your own.

From this story (Lost in Translation Warning: The grammar in the linked story reads a bit like a cheap toy instruction manual.) on chinahush.com:

Chinese folks have always had the self-entertaining mindset to compare little things to big renowned things even just for the slightest resemblance. We had a post last year talking about a homemade knockoff Lamborghini by a 25 years old guy. Recently a chef from Zigong City, Sichuan Province became famous on the Internet for spending only about 4000 yuan in designing and handcrafting what netizens called a knockoff “Hummer."
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By Michael R. Shea

The trailers broke. They broke bad.

The metal ribs that held box to axel snapped clean off Jim’s trailer. In nearly the same place, on my trailer, the welds broke free. One minute, I was rolling over mountainscape, the next minute I was pulling a sleigh.

To Jim’s credit, he thought he could fix his trailer. (I scrapped mine in a cache of hiker, biker, camper detritus--a little monument, it seemed, to those beaten by the trail.) And I must admit, I was a little skeptical of Jim’s plan--and the time it would take--but of all the repair jobs we attempted in the bush, none were more successful.

Jim’s plan was simple: attach spruce poles to the axel, plane larger trees to boards, plank boards in the trailer box and screw spruce poles to the boards. Without proper repair gear, three tools made this possible: a knife, an axe and a saw. This trifecta of backcountry basics saved our tails time and again.
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By Jim Baird

High in the Mackenzie Mountains, we spent two nights in the same camp. It was a hard, but necessary, decision to make.

We had been on this adventure less than a few hours when I wrecked my winch. Winding it in without tension quickly formed a bird’s nest of heavy steel cable. Our trailers were also looking a little worse for the wear. Rated to 2,000 pounds, I figured they could take all Canol could throw at them. I was sorely mistaken. Only a few days in and the rubber bins were bending, the axel welds were coming apart and the dump truck-like release in the hitch was completely broken.

We’d need two days at the same camp just to manage these repairs.
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by Slaton L. White

Ten years ago I went on a week-long salmon safari in Alaska, living out of a slide-in camper in a Silverado equipped with a Duramax 6.6-liter V8 turbo diesel. It was an epic adventure, and looking at my old notes I see I raved about the truck’s performance. “Moved well from a dead stop. Quiet, even at full throttle. MPG: averaged between 11 to 14 mpg.”

A lot has happened to GM since then. After teetering on the brink of insolvency for years, it finally plunged into bankruptcy two years ago. What many people don’t know was that the company came perilously close to Chapter 11 in the 1990s. But they got a stay of execution. Know why? The Silverado. It was just about the only GM product people wanted to buy...and they bought enough of them to help keep the company afloat.

The Silverado was good then...and it’s good now.

I can say that after logging 900 miles in one recently. The 2500 4WD Crew Cab is a stout build, and boasts a maximum towing rating of 17,000 pounds. That means that when you drive it without a trailer or with an empty bed, it’s a bit rough. But when you get some weight on those rear wheels, it tames down nicely.
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by Hal Herring

In my last post for The Conservationist, I wrote about the so-called Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act, H. R. 1581, a bill written by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, which promised to open to motorized use several million acres of America’s remaining roadless public lands.

H.R. 1581 is an extreme piece of legislation, described by Bob Abbey, director of the Bureau of Land Management, as “a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, that fails to reflect local conditions and community-based interests." In an interview with the New York Times, Abbey compared the bill to “shooting a small rabbit with a large gun, leaving almost no meat on the bone” (read the New York Times story here).

The Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association came out in support of H.R.1581, which was surprising to many sportsmen, since SCI is an organization that celebrates trophy big game hunting, and for most hunters, the only, or at least the best, opportunity they will ever have to pursue a trophy-size elk or deer will be on remote, difficult to access, public lands. The NRA’s support of motorized access to these last remote public lands was baffling as well, since such land management policy debates would seem to have nothing at all to do with our embattled Second Amendment rights. [ Read Full Post ]

By Editors

Keeping today’s ATVs in top running condition isn’t difficult. However, neglect can be the downfall of any machine asked to pass beyond its maintenance boundaries.

Click through this gallery for a 10-minute check list you can follow to make sure your quad is running healthy.

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