Innholdsfortegnelse for Gear Guide 2011 i Overland Journal

Over Easter break, 2011, a small, intrepid group of explorers will follow routes across the Sahara Desert originally used by the legendary Long Range Desert Group during World War Two. Major Ralph Bagnold used his extensive desert exploration knowledge to assemble this small but elite force of men to wreak havoc on the enemy in North Africa, by attacking from the direction they least expected—across the desert. In the 1920s and 1930s, Bagnold and his fellow expatriate Brits used Model T Fords to venture where cars had never been before, and both mapped and surveyed large areas of the eastern Sahara. When WWII started Bagnold gathered the same group of friends and equipped them with specially outfitted 30-cwt (1 1/2-ton) Chevrolet and Ford trucks, joined later by Jeeps when their…

We all have favorites among our equipment—items of gear that have been with us for years, provided yeoman service, or that simply bring back memories of good trips and beautiful places. Such gear doesn’t necessarily have to be the best; in fact it doesn’t even have to be very good—it just has to be thought of fondly, and it must be something one wouldn’t sell even if offered many times its actual cash value. I think of my old Marmot Taku tent, which provided cozy, stormproof shelter on dozens of journeys, or the Puma Trapper’s Companion knife that was my unattainable, unaffordable ($32) dream knife when I was a kid, an example of which I finally found and purchased years later, and use resolutely and delightedly despite its insane collector…

I had to grit my teeth to buy something called an ‘SUV Tuff Bin.’ It wasn’t the ‘SUV’ part that bothered me as much as the ‘Tuff ’ part. What’s wrong with ‘Tough’? But enough editorializing. The Contico seems to represent a bargain at $26 for 2.5 cubic feet of storage—the lowest cost per unit of volume in the test. The structural-foam construction is surprisingly rigid—it’s perfectly capable of taking a ratchet strap, and looks good too. Molded-in handles on each end make carrying comfortable for one or two people. There are no latches, but matching holes in body and lid can be clipped or locked. The lid, which pivots on two six-inch hinges, stays erect when open, rather than flopping over backwards. There is no lid gasket whatsoever, but…

Caribou Cargo Box Systems carries cases made by Pelican (smaller sizes) and SKB—but the company’s claim to fame is its innovative mounting system, which allows any of the cases, from a compact Pelican 1500 up to the spacious SKB 7300 here (or, in fact, ammunition cans or virtually any other boxy container) to be instantly and securely fastened to almost any flat surface, or to a set of Thule or Yakima-type roof-rack crossbars—thus dispensing with the need for ratchet straps or cargo nets, and allowing easy access to the case contents while ensuring cargo-area safety. First let’s look at the SKB case. It’s injection-molded of a copolymer polypropylene with a handsome satin black finish. The 7300 furnished by Caribou is the largest case in the test by interior volume, at…

I’ve noticed something interesting—if utterly irrelevant to this discussion—in the several years I’ve been using Zarges cases: They’ve become the container-of-choice in numerous Bourne/Salt/Mission Impossible-type flicks, glimpsed in the background being loaded into cargo ships and helicopters and the equally ubiquitous SUV-of-choice of such movies, black Chevy Suburbans. That says more about the consummately professional yet vaguely covert appearance of Zarges cases—they just look like something in which Executive Outcomes would ship contraband Stingers or M4s—than it does about their utility. But, stardom aside, Zarges cases are very utilitarian indeed. The 40678 case here (even the designations sound Top Secret) is one of 27 models in Zarges’s K470 line—and there are at least eight other lines in the company’s inventory, from simple shipping boxes to vapor-proof aluminum vaults designed for…

The R8 is a fair-dinkum supercar to rival anything Ferrari, Maserati, or Porsche can put up. Get on your computer and Google some statistics on Australia. You’ll see that its landmass is 2,966,140 square miles—roughly the size of the continental U.S., or about 5.7 percent of the land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Population? A mere 22.5 million—versus America’s 310 million. If you’re lucky your Australian web map will have one of those ipsy-cutesy coloured population maps showing all the tinted intensity around the coast, with a faint blip in the centre where Alice Springs is located. Australians don’t just live on the coast because they like surfing. Fact is that most of the interior is desert or semi-desert. Where there’s little or no population, there’s little or no infrastructure because…

Now, of course, you need a way to carry everything with you when you want to get away from it all. Kidding aside, whether you sleep in a two-person Bibler tent and cook over a three-ounce Snow Peak backpacking stove, or luxuriate in an Overland Chair inside a Springbar while sauce Béarnaise simmers on a two-burner Partner Steel, it’s axiomatic that the more organized your gear, the quicker you can be relaxing in a fully pitched camp at the end of the day, the faster you can be on the road the next, and the safer you’ll be with various weighty and/or pointy implements and appliances stored in larger containers which themselves can be secured via tie-down straps. Your gear will be protected from dirt and moisture, it can be…

Paul May of Equipt Expedition Outfitters alerted me to the Alu-Box after I’d already assembled all the cases for the review. He struggled mightily to get a medium-sized sample shipped to me from Denmark in time to be included. Unfortunately the shipment disappeared off the face of the earth—the official UPS response said, no joke, “Your package has suffered an exception.” So Paul loaned me the case he had brought back from the All-Rad show. Unfortunately it is the company’s smallest, 20-liter, size—just .59 cubic feet—which means it suffers mightily in objective ratings such as weight efficiency and cost per unit of volume, both of which improve with case size. So view the Alu-Box’s numerical rating with that in mind. When I lifted the Alu-Box out of the shipping container,…

Completely stock, the new offerings from Land Rover allowed a luxurious, relaxed, and easy ride over some challenging terrain. Land Rover has a long and illustrious history as a leader in the off-highway market, and arguably created the luxury SUV craze with the 1989 introduction of the Range Rover into North America, and the subsequent highly publicized Great Divide Expedition. Recent Land Rover vehicles have pushed many technological envelopes in the sophistication of their four-wheel drive systems and suspension design, but from an overlanding point of view, the most coveted horse in the Land Rover stable, the Defender, is no longer available in North America. The new iterations of the Discovery (the LR4) and the Range Rover are very different beasts from those used in classic overland adventures such as…

The year was 1982, and my parents packed up my sister and me in the car and headed north. It was a typical family road-trip vacation to my knowledge at the time, and it would be many years before I found out it could be done any differently. Leaving the city by the major highway, we motored north and west, watching for speed traps and smelling acrid smoke from continual grass burns on the verge. Eventually we left the highway and moved to secondary roads as we approached the border. North of the line, the roads degraded until, at a small town called Molepolole, we hit dirt and, after a very cold night camping by the side of the road, set off into the Kalahari Desert. Moving north on dirt…

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, The Poisonwood Bible, Cry the Beloved Country… Africa is a continent that generates vibrant, compelling, and universally acclaimed stories. This is only fitting: As the cradle of mankind and home to the discovery of fire, one can only assume that we humans spent our first two million years or so perfecting the craft of storytelling around campfires. When our ancestors migrated up to Europe and the rest of the world, they brought those storytelling traditions with them. As an African (or, as I like to call myself, an African-American, since I now have a Green Card and live in America) who spends quite a bit of time back home, I’ve discovered that the story-telling apple hasn’t fallen far from…

The Rubbermaid Action Packer is widely available at big-box stores around the country, and comes in three sizes, from eight gallons to 35. It’s blow-molded in the U.S. from polyethylene, and closes with two generously sized plastic snap latches, which double as comfortable carrying handles and can be secured with a small padlock to prevent casual pilferage. It’s a handsome case with its two-toned color scheme and red latches, and looks more expensive than it is. The Action Packer’s very thin material, and the radical reinforcement molding and double-walled lid subsequently necessary to provide adequate rigidity, place it in the odd position of having the worst volumetric efficiency in the test—at 53 percent barely over half its exterior volume is available as interior storage—while at the same time boasting the…

The original military footlocker was designed to hold all of one recruit’s personal gear. Why not extend the concept to vehicular storage? ECS’s take on the footlocker, rotomolded from low-density linear polyethylene (which is recyclable), incorporates a generous bottom compartment and two large removable top trays. It’s big enough (4.1 cubic feet) to store a lot of stuff, if perhaps not quite everything one might need on a long trip. The trays, each 17 by 14 by 4 inches, sit on molded-in blocks, and are excellent for storing miscellaneous items or things one wants frequently. The trays fit fairly loosely, but are held in place snugly when the lid is closed by a reticulated foam pad glued to the inside of the lid—which unfortunately reduces interior volume somewhat. I experimented…

Storm, formerly of Hardigg, is now branded by Pelican (which bought Hardigg but split it off with different products—got that?). This further blurs the already hazy differences between the two case lines, which are superficially almost identical. I had the company send me the same size Pelican and Storm models so I could determine once and for all just what, if anything, differentiates the two. As it turns out, there are significant differences. The most telling is weight: The Storm iM2700 tips the scales at 11.2 pounds, compared to the Pelican 1600’s 12.2. This is mostly due to the Storm’s lighter construction of what the company calls HPX Resin, a molded polycarbonate with a slick surface that contrasts with Pelican’s textured finish. The difference in rigidity takes no dial indicator…

I was immediately impressed with the simple and rugged honesty of this aluminum box, originally designed for river rafting. It’s welded in China of heavy-walled, .080-inch-thick aluminum, with a welded lid sealed by two thick rubber gaskets backed up by an overlapping lip. The welds are cosmetically a bit crude but undeniably stout, and despite the thick material and a total weight of 15 pounds, the Captain’s Box beats the Zarges for weight efficiency, at 6.2 pounds per cubic foot compared to 7.0. It also boasts the best volumetric efficiency of all the products here, at 83 percent interior to exterior space. Hardware on the box is a mix of stainless Phillips stuff you could find at any hardware store—which must be considered a good thing. The twin latches and…

We have to thank the Egyptians for the J8. Throughout the past 30 years, the Egyptian military has been an impetus for several important iterations of the Jeep, going all the way back to the CJ-6 and the iconic TJL. These vehicles have been mostly built in Egypt for that market by Arab American Vehicles (AAV), but the U.S. consumer has also benefited from the tooling and engineering of these small production runs, resulting in the availability of a highly capable option. The J8 was born from similar roots, though its application has become global with sales into nearly every continent on the globe. The success of the J8 is a result of limited and aging competition. Most of the vehicles the J8 competes with for military and peacekeeping contracts…

“On that?” The ranger in the North Rim Ranger Station stopped filling in my backcountry camping permit and gestured out the window with his pen, where the green and gold Royal Enfield Bullet 500 sat, dusty, loaded down with panniers and duffel bags, waiting to tackle the 17-mile trail to Point Sublime. “You do know it’s a four-wheel-drive route?” I assured him I did, and explained where I’d already been and was headed on several remote roads along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. One eyebrow arched toward his hairline, and he said, “Well . . . you obviously know what you’re doing.” He was gaining points rapidly. “But . . . isn’t that a Harley or something?” He was losing points rapidly. I was here to continue my experiment to…