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Now i've taken the car out a few times, all of the squeaks and rattles that I'm not used to yet got me thinking about what i should be carrying "just in case".
So i've got an old Black & Decker zip up bag that i can store behind the passengers seat and my emergency kit so far consists of:
A can of tyre repair mousse
A rubber hammer (for the wheel spinners)
1 flat blade and 1 Phillips screw drivers
An adjustable spanner
Some pipe clips
A roll of self amalgamating tape
A bottle of lead additive for the petrol
A selection of cable ties
I'd be interested to hear what are others carrying, or planning to carry?
Good idea, how about a warning triangle and hi-vis vest - cable ties are a must have. I do hope you only need the 'emergency kit' to assist others and not for your own.
Well maybe not, but a coat hanger, duct/gaffer tape, jubilee clips, bungee cord and some baling twine have got me out of a few predicaments in the past, just transpose cable ties for baling twine for 21 century breakdowns.
- Noticed local Halford's were recently selling 'metal' cable ties, so am adding a few to the emergency kit.
If you do breakdown in mid-summer in the middle of nowhere and it happens to be one of those rare scorchers, a bottle of drinking water and sunscreen might be useful to have in the emergency kit.
- Of course you will probably already have a small hamper on the chrome luggage rack on the boot with suitable nibbles..
'Be Prepared' dib, dib, dob, dob: enough sarcasm from me; but hope there are some helpful hints among the above.
When I did survival training in the RAF we were taught that condoms were for carrying water, but first having put them in a sock to help support them. Mind you I wasn't fast jet, they probably had them to use on all the local babes who would flock around the recent ejection hero....(I'm not really bitter!)
Nope. Carrying water in a condom would be pretty much impossible even in a sock, although they'd possibly be useful for throwing at each other after a really heavy drinking session.
Don't forget to make sure they're the non spermicidal ones! Or as one of my cadets once suggested "can't we use flavored condoms and that way we don't have to carry the orange powder from the rat pack?"
I was thinking condoms just so I could bang the brains out of any pretty young thing who stopped to help. I have a credit card to buy water and have never been attacked by leeches at the side of the road.
When I was 17 I qualified as an RAF Weapons Fitter (plumber) and got posted to an ejection seat servicing workshop stripping down and rebuilding Martin Baker's finest aircraft jettison systems.
The adjoining workshop was where the Safety Equipment fitters (squippers) packed the parachutes into the ejection seat head box and filled the survival packs - yellow fibreglass boxes with cushions on top that became the seat squabs when I then fitted them into the base of the seat.
One day I noticed that in amongst the foil packs of water, tins of sweets, miniflares, knives etc, that was going into the packs was a packet of condoms. Rather curious I asked the squipper ( a nice chap named Del Hall who's still doing the same job I believe 'cause I've seen him on the telly recently) 'Why are you putting condoms in the survival pack?' To which he replied 'Oh, for the leeches'.
I mulled over this for a few days before asking him what to me seemed like the obvious question 'So, why would you want to keep leeches in a condom?' Which is when he rather patiently explained the following:
If you eject into a tropical swamp (which happens all the time, aparrently) a slightly annoying inconvenience is dying of anaemia through blood loss to leeches, who've got nothing better to do all day than hang around in tropical swamps waiting for downed pilots to parachute in.
The approved method for removing leeches to prevent this is to burn the body off with a lit ciggy. This is so painful for the leech that it's about the only simple way of getting them to let go with their 'teeth' (and if you don't get the mouth parts out of the wound you'll die of blood poisoning in a few days anyway).
But it's also pretty painful for the chap holding the ciggy, especially if the leech that the ciggy is being applied to is chowing down on your john thomas, hence the inclusion of condoms to slip over your old chap. In the event of landing in a tropical swamp full of leeches you won't have to burn holes in your fandangle.
I think that your friend has beleived a few of the urban myths that float around. Having done my fair share of survival training, I can assure you that leeches can be removed by simply pulling them off (no, not in that way!) without causing any harm to you or the leech. Condoms have many uses in survival but putting them on my old chap in the middle of a swamp would be quite a way down the list unless my nav was female.
I was only seventeen and quite gullible I suppose but I didn't think he was yanking my chain at the time.
I don't know who your survival instructor was but he's probably died of septicaemia by now if he's ever used the squeeze and pull technique.
The leech will vomit your blood and its toxic stomach contents back into the wound and give you blood poisoning before you can get it off. It'll also whip round and reattach itself to one of your fingers before you can throw it if you give it half a chance. That was the advice I got from the senior medical officer that accompanied us to the bush in Malaysia for the joint special forces jungle warfare exercise 'elang osprey' in 1997. Oh, how I miss those free adventure holidays I used to go on at her Maj's expense...
Anyway, if you keep a condom in the Sammio survival kit you could always use it as a waterproof dizzy cap cover in the rain though.
Im ex SF too, although a little more recent than 97. Im not sure if procedures have changed since then but we were told to just yank them off, which we did quite often without any adverse affects. Infact a few used to play a little game of "can you stick one here" where you would out do the others by placing a leech in places the others wouldnt dare too. The game wasnt for me but ive seen them get pulled away from everything from balls to eye balls.
Im not sure that I could get away with keeping condoms in the car anyway, I dont think my wife would like the excuses of leeches and water in socks for survival when waiting for the AA.
Ha ha! No, I don't think my wife would buy into the 'condoms are part of the breakdown kit' story either.
I retired from the military in January '02 - just before the excrement struck the rotary air recirculation equipment big style in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was pretty fortunate for me as an EOD operator...
Oh, and the maggots are to clean wounds, a technique that the NHS has just rediscovered.
While unlikely that a cruet set would be carried in any survival pack, I was given to understand that salt shaken upon a leech would cause a negative effect to the creature.
(As a humble Air Training Corps cadet who volunteered to assist the engine fitters on Varsities at RAF Finningley during the dock strike in 1972, (when RAF personnel were helping at the docks) I learned very quickly to take anything any ground crew said with a large pinch of cruet..).
hwell: 
