Built to purpose or purpose to build?

[legendaryandrew]

Get your knee replacement surgeries early, when healing up is easy.

Only half kidding. Got screws and a cadaver ACL in one of mine. And a plate and 14 pins and screws in the ankle and fibula of the other leg. 51 and already feeling every step. I'm building to purpose AND reliability, cause I'm not hiking out of anywhere.

I just got a cadaver ligament for my ACL too! Back in Nov. Still recovering a bit. To add to that, no screws, but 4 or 5 fractured vertibrae on top of a couple punctured lungs and a dozen and a half broken rips and should bones over the years...I'll probably be in sad shape when I hit 40 7 years from now.

 

[bknudtsen]

Sadly, I'm a builder more than a user, my whole life. I've gone through several import sports cars, and just the last few years got into trucks/offroad/camping. To date, I've spent well over 100k on parts alone for the various vehicles I've built. I build them, and don't use them much, then move on. Weird unfortunate cycle, which by this point I should be getting paid to do (or at least a smarter person would be, I'm quite good at it). So in comes the Suburban. I bought it to have a back up to my Evo at the time. I'm one of those guys who always wants the 'biggest and best' of anything I buy, and if I settle it eats at me until I'm just not happy with my decision.

Same history here, but I'm much older than you, so the $$$ has really added up. My friends coined the termed "Bradification", which is the art of taking something that is perfectly good and making it better. I'm pretty much over the whole ExPo thing, but I have a lot of time invested here, and I like the people, so I stick around. My current truck is getting reliability mods, but I am not really interested in doing much more to it. If I get the bug to go out and explore, I think I'll just buy a couple of quads or a UTV rather than trying to build a rig that can do everything.

Brad

 

[amgvr4]

I have always built my cars and trucks with purpose and out of the box thinking. My F250 has been the best example of that yet. I though long and hard about what kind of truck I wanted, and when I finally decided on a crew cab, short bed, manual, diesel it left me with only one factory option I could afford as I did not want to deal with a major project to get that combo. I then spent the next year looking for one that I liked enough to actually buy.

Over the last two and a half years I have built it to do literally everything a full sized truck can. I wheel it, camp with it, tow my 18' car trailer with it, take it on long family road trips, oh and daily drive it. All the while I do not have to change any settings or alter much of anything to accomplish all those tasks. I have also built most of my stuff to be modular so I can mix and match different configurations depending on what I need.

I still have a lot I want to do to my truck and as time and money allow I will slowly chip away at the long list. It really helps when you can build it all yourself as it saves so much money that you can get a lot more awesome for a lot less scrilla.