My personal experience with the Hummers military and civilian. My instruction was training the Special forces, Recon and similar groups. The military has their own trainers and for any military vehicle you needed to be trained on that vehicle. I would get the students after they got the military training class. The first thing was I had to correct the training they were given. Now before I get carried away the training they get includes combat operations and this is far from our recreation use.
Little things like when your wheels start spinning they were taught to slam on the brake to lock up the differentials. Take a moment and think about the disk brakes mounted outside of the differentials. The tires and wheels the spinning wheels rotating fast with all of that spinning power and you lock up the disk brakes. The stress put on the axles and "U"joints. The weak links are the axles and "U"joints. Woops! Another week point is the front drive shaft. "U"joints. With the military we broke many. When the "U"joints brake apart the same thing was the needle bearings were dry from lack of grease. They never made a sling to searound the drive shaft. So when it broke it would takeout the oil filter.
Remember they were built for warfare. There are times that when you being targeted you need to forget finesse, and get you back side out of there.
When the Marines got the G wagons they were getting torn up because of the military training. They called me in to get them properly trained, the commanding officers were less then pleased with the way the people were destroying them. After some of the troops came back from the middle east with their vehicles all shot up, they decided to leave them over seas. The later classes we used the shot up vehicles for training. Bullet holes through roll bars and sheet metal. They ran out of the G-Wagons for us to train with here and we had to switch to the Hummers for training.
When the H-1 came out the civilians Ron B. contacted me to take and use it and make suggestions for them for the non-military use. The noise was big complaint that they got. Their solution was more sound deadening was pile on more insulation for the hump between the driver and front passenger foot well. This gave little foot room for the passenger.
There are more details, but you get the point. My opinion, the Hummers make a good war machine! If you buy one at auction be aware you know how it was used.
As a side note; I really enjoyed the many years I got training the military. I have been retired 14 years now and this was some of my best times with the military! Vietnam the 3+ years was not so much fun.
