I Bought A Firetruck
geckodesigns.kinja.com
I Bought A Firetruck
1–10 of 284 posts
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#2Don’t you guys have voluntary fire brigades or volunteer-driven agencies for technical relief[0] over there? Sure, you can’t get your groceries with one of their trucks, but driving them is still pretty fun I was told. Plus you don’t have to park them in your driveway.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#3To be fair it's not really that much more impractical than driving a HUM-V around in urban areas (which is frighteningly common), and definitely way cooler!
Does it have a built-in telescoping ladder - that could actually be quite a lot more useful than the firehose...
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#4Edit: I guess I've been banned.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#5Don’t you guys have voluntary fire brigades or volunteer-driven agencies for technical relief[0] over there? Sure, you can’t get your groceries with one of their trucks, but driving them is still pretty fun I was told. Plus you don’t have to park them in your driveway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technisches_Hilfswerk
Depends on where you live. In this guy's case, it looks like he lives in a smallish Montana town, so yeah, it's pretty likely that his local fire department is volunteer-run, and joining it would be an alternate way to get this experience. Could be more commitment than he wants, though, since you typically have to take training courses, not to mention actually commit to responding to fires and other calls (a large percentage of fire-department calls are medical responses rather than fires). That's a bit different than just buying a truck. On the plus side, that could itself be interesting, and would be the way to go if you wanted to really learn to operate firefighting equipment.
Some numbers [1]: about 70% of U.S. firefighters are volunteer while 30% are career jobs, but the vast majority of the volunteer firefighters (94% of them) serve communities with under 25,000 people. Medium-sized towns and above typically have a professionally staffed department.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#6Does anyone remember the two-seater firetruck arcade game? That thing ruled.
edit: this! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Truck_(video_game)
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#7WHAT AN AMAZING STORY ABOUT HACKING!
Seriously, HN needs to see if there is a service out there that spams these type of sites with these horribly uninteresting reddit/digg/boingboing/hurrderp stories.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#8I'm coming down to Missoula for Barcamp in April. I expect a ride on this thing.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#9"Even though it's 31 years old and technically qualifies as an antique"
What makes something technically and antique? I was under the impression that 50+ years was measure of antiqueness but I can't remember why I think that.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#10Maybe I missed it, but how did he get it shipped to Montana?