Your Ideal Doomsday Survival Situation/Prepper Thread

[3catcircus]

Originally Posted by ET2SN

Lucky for me, I did all of the small engine work in my Dad's garage when I was growing up.

Small engines have a bad habit of failing.
If you blew off your end of season maint. on the lawn mower or chain saw, chances were good you would need to see me the next spring.

This was up in northern Maine, where people are supposed to know better.

I got a nice Generac ac/dc unit after we had a freak heavy snow storm followed by an ice storm. Most of the state lost power for four to five days. I had an electrician buddy do the wiring and switches on the house and I did stuff with the generator like using high grade synthetic oil in the crank case and using fuel stabilizer in the fuel I would cycle through to keep it fresh.

The big problem was that the freak storm was just that, a freak. The generator was just sitting around. The biggest hassle was that my folks had modernized the house to being all-electric and tossed out the old wood stove in the living room, which was all we really needed for the emergency.

After a while, I kept the house wiring in place but sold the generator to a carpenter. He used it for a year or two before he burned the piston and trashed the anti-vibration mounts.

The lesson being- don't trust a totem to save your ###.
A portable generator is little more than a nice idea that lets you feel safe.
In practical terms, folks either don't know how to use them or they forget.

Shutting a generator down the right way becomes a pain and the carb gets glazed up with varnish from old gas and the oil turns to sludge. Your modern Briggs and Stratton gas engine is supposed to only last for 2-5 years before it wears out, Honda isn't far behind in terms of quality. Gasoline and oil plus plastic parts is trouble waiting to happen. Its better to build them cheap and sell more. It was designed that way, which is why you see so many junk lawn mowers sitting by the edge of the road during the summer.

Now, before you need to argue that-consider that the old pot-bellied stove was all my folks needed for the emergency.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that we have a veneer of civilization but most people in Western societies will die or become enslaved should a major disaster cause society to fold and we go all Mad Max. We see what lawless maniacs most cityfolk turn into if they lose electricity for more than a few hours... Not many of them know how to grow their own food, hunt, repair an engine, drive in snow, or build a fire.