There is never a dull moment here on my little piece of Planet Gearhead. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to wrench on some unusual, bizarre, and unique machines. I can also say the same for the people whom I’ve had the pleasure of working for. My most recent adventure in wrenching turned out to be quite the unexpected challenge and is a story worth sharing. Out of the blue the other day, my buddy Nathan sent me a picture of four custom-fabricated “rock bouncing buggies” that he just got put in charge of selling. They were really awesome machines that had complete tubular chassis/cage, 2.5 ton military axles, hydraulic front and rear steering, massive monster truck tires, and lastly—the icing on the cake—they are LS powered! He had his resident mechanic look them over and try to get them running with no avail. He also asked him to inventory the parts on them to see what they were worth. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out very well, either. I accepted Nathan’s distress signal and took a ride to see these machines up close and personal. They were all identical builds and were missing the same parts. This led me to believe that for liability purposes they were professionally decommissioned so no one would be able to get into one and take an amazing joy ride. What was missing you may ask? Well, there were no seats, safety harnesses, steering wheels, and none of them would start. The resident handyman must have felt threatened by my presence, because his first words to me were, “I spent a lot of time looking them over, and I can’t even get them to crank. They must have been tampered with so no one would start them.”
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