The Man Thread

[haunted]

Yeah, you got considerably more than 300 bucks worth of grill there, haha. Jackpot.

My neighbor has one like that. I still use my old 3-legged round Weber charcoal grill. He probably looks at me like I'm a fucking welfare bum. Fuck a propane, I gots the Kingsford bag, yo. I don't grill fancy, I grill like poor white trash. Actually... ever had turkey smoked in a metal trash can? DID IT! It was damn good too.

Hahaha I love charcoal. I haven't done out of a trashcan but using a gutted gas grill for charcoal is nice. My buddy cooks the best butts this way and filling up cans of beer with Kingsford underneath. Hole in the bottom similar to shotgunning a beer and the top ripped off. Lights the coal through the bottom hole. Works great although burnt beer can may even be worse for you than burnt trash can. Lol.

The grill I got is currently 500 temporarily dropped down from 600. There's 5 other prices online, the next cheapest is 730 and the rest are over 800. So the old lady some how outdid herself after all! Haha. I'd never pay that much normally.

[quadz]

Finally something all-American right off the assembly line that will give any State Patrol car with their after-market pursuit packages installed a legit run for their money.

They're now claiming 9.65 quarter mile stock.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vD6A6NxySQ
<span data-s9e-mediaembed="youtube" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:640px"><span style="display:block;overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" style="background:url(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3vD6A6NxySQ/hqdefault.jpg) 50% 50% / cover;border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3vD6A6NxySQ"></iframe></span></span><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/3vD6A6NxySQ" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/3vD6A6NxySQ</a>

[|iR|Focalor]

Not crazy about the fact that they brought back the "Demon" name without slapping the "Dart" name on the front of it. In the early 70's, the Dart Demon was a redesign of the fastback Plymouth Duster and the beefy high performance 2door coupe variety of the Dart line with a 340 v8, hood scoops, hood stripes, special badges, etc. They never sold that great back then, and have become highly collectible these days, both because of their limited production and somewhat rarity, and also the fact that they are 2-door pure muscle beasts synonymous with everything that IS the classic mopar muscle car. Out of all of the old 60's and 70's Dodge/Plymouth cars that I love and adore, the 1972 Dart Demon is THE ONE above all others, at least for me.

If anything, I'd like to see Dodge take the newer versions of the Dart and redesign it to look like something more reminiscent of the 70's Darts. They don't have money to burn on failures anymore since the bailouts and retooling, so obviously they're making these kinds of moves in small gestures from now on since in general people don't give a shit about "muscle", they want something affordable with fuel economy and safety. The Hellcat wasn't massively produced like other cars, and they ended up selling them all for decent prices and got their investment out of it, and it boosted brand recognition as well. So with the new Demon, obviously they're trying the same tactic. At the very least, it should make owners of original Dart Demons happy and possibly increase the collectibility and value of their cars.

Didn't really watch the video, but just from glancing at it, it looks like a new Charger body with some high performance packages crammed into it just like the Hellcat. And it's kinda shitty in my opinion that they resurrect the Demon, the legendary King of all DARTs, and put it's evil road melting soul into a Charger... But at least the Charger body is more Dart-like than the new Darts, which looked like cheap Japanese Toyota-Honda wannabes. What the fuck was Dodge thinking there? When I first saw the new Darts, I said... "You assholes. What have you done?"

[Sgt. Dick]

My first car was a 1976 Rally Sport Camaro with 350 that had a little extra work done to it.  Me and a couple of my friends were raising hell in the next town over from mine, when we pissed off a guy in a Dodge Dart.  The guy in the Dart tried to run me off the road, so I decided to just leave this guy in my dust.  I was surprised that I did not start to pull away from him until I was going about 125.  After he was pretty far back I eased off, but he must not of, because he came right back behind me.  This time I just pedaled down and let it go.  The speedometer went to 140 on that car, but I started to wrap it back around, so I had to be doing at least 150.  Eventually I saw his headlights disappear so I let off and coasted down, just as I had got down to the speed limit, I met a cop going the other way.  This was over 30 years ago on a 4 lane divided highway, but at 1 AM nobody was out.  I remember going the 15 miles between towns in about 9 minutes.  I was a young reckless kid who pulled a few stunts like that, who luckily survived those years.  Back to the Dart, I had to have a V8, I know it surprised me how fast it was.

[|iR|Focalor]

See, everyone had a cooler first car than me. My first car was a Pontiac Bonneville. And not one of those cool classy looking ones either. I wouldn't mind cruising around in something like '59 Bonneville done up in classy tuxedo black, white, and chrome. Or a mean looking '63 Bonneville either, those were nice too. But hell no, I had a late 80's Bonneville, the thing that looked like your standard issue GM/Buick form-molded shat-out piece of shit that your grandma would drive. And what a piece of shit it truly was. When was something NOT broke on it? It was a bottomless hole where half my money disappeared every month.

Not sure about later models, but earlier Darts mostly came with 198 or 225 slant six motors, nothing particularly impressive about them. The V8's were either 318 or 340 ci. The Dart Demons with the Demon 340 engine had a 4-speed transmission, 4-barrel carb, electronic ignition, dual exhaust, harder and beefier forged crankshaft rather than cast steel to handle the extra torque without as many "oopsie" moments, etc. Like I said, the Dart Demons were purely muscle minded inside and out. But nah, doubtful one would have much for something like a Rally Sport Camaro, which had a bigger engine than any of the Darts. Although, from what I've heard, the 305 and 350 stock Camaro motors back then performed about the same. Dunno if the 305 had some weird quirk about the chambers or pistons to improve the compression, but you'd think a 45ci difference would equate to more.

But yeah, those old Darts with V8's weren't the absolute fastest thing around, but they were pretty close, especially the Demon 340's.

edit:

This is a 59 Bonneville. Really nice looking car. The 58's still had that kinda Chevy Bel-Air look to them, and the 59's were that were sweet spot where they started looking like the slimmer lower Bonnevilles of the 60's but still had those nice deco batmobile-lookin' fins from the late 50's. Not crazy about the color of it. It'd look much more tits in either black or white.


And this guy has done an AWESOME job turning this 63 Bonnie into a road brute. Love those mean-ass wheels he's got on there. Changes the whole attitude of the car instantly. I believe they came stock with lace-up wheels with a small cap over the lugs. They looked nice and classy, but definitely didn't look muscley like these.

[Booya]

This may be old but it def belongs here.

https://youtu.be/FnC1oLdIy5o

say it again! This old man will woop yar ass!

[|iR|Focalor]

This may be old but it def belongs here.

https://youtu.be/FnC1oLdIy5o

say it again! This old man will woop yar ass!

And then Danny Trejo stars in 3 movies about it.

[haunted]

Steak. It's manly. Stocking your chest freezer with reasonably priced flash frozen black angus is cool. Unfortunately it's not from a buddy of mine that slaughtered a steer or something but I'm pleased. Off a meat truck that supplies Omaha steaks. On top of this I got 15 lbs of green tails(frozen in water) and 5lbs of dry scallops off Nova Scotia. And 4 king crab clusters. Surf and turf galore. trying to get my garden in full force to accompany all of this, but I need to do more with that. I have a little bit of everything but the impressive produce I have are my sweet taters. Come September I'll have a massive sweet potato harvest. I'm starting to steer more towards the garden section than the man thread but whatever. I picked around 80 muscadine grapes off a single small portion of a vine in my yard yesterday morning. Washed them, ate some. I'm going to look into making my own wine. My black walnut tree is flourishing too.

[|iR|Focalor]

My grandpa used to make muscadine wine. He died a few days after my 8th birthday though, so I obviously never got to try any. But I always heard about it from my grandma, so I decided to try some once at one of the wineries up in Helen GA. HOLY SHIT! IT'S AWFUL! Like battery acid and stomach bile with rotten berries. I suppose as a wine, it's typically on the extremely dry end of the spectrum, and I hate those kinds of wines anyway. But that aside, muscadines are just gross by themselves, and even more disgusting when fermented. Dunno if you've ever tasted a muscadine before. If not, try one (with a garbage can nearby for the puke). Then imagine after you spit it out into the garbage can, coming back a month later and eating that same spit-out muscadine all gnawed up and rotten. That's muscadine wine.

I've experimented a little with different things. I'd always recommend grapes over anything else, but that's a no brainer. You can mix things too, which is what I usually do. I typically always used green seedless or red grapes for a base, but in the past I've also added things like pressed watermelon juice or pressed cantaloupe juice. I really couldn't tell much difference in the taste adding either one. But one time I did make a batch of "white" wine from nothing but watermelon (it wasn't pink colored like watermelon at all, it was yellowish). It didn't work so great. It fermented, but it was pretty low alcohol, probably like 5% or less, barely tasted like wine at all, just tasted like old watermelon.

My favorite is red grapes pressed as a base, then I add a little Welchs CranGrape juice just to make the end result a little sweeter and kinda tart. Don't use REAL cranberry juice for anything though. It's fucking nasty and overpowers everything in the entire world. I'll typically do about 1/8 grapes pressed, 1/8 crangrape, then add my sugar, then add warm water until the fermenting jug is little over 3/4 full, dump in the yeast, put the airlock on, and let it ferment a total of 17 to 21 days when it almost completely stops fizzing. Bottle it up for at least 6 months before serving, but longer is a little better. You "can" drink it right away, but I've found that it tastes kinda odd unless it has time to sit and age a bit. Dunno why that is, but it's the difference between it tasting like some homebrewed stuff a redneck did in his garage and tasting like something you bought at a store made by people who actually KNOW how to make wine, lol.

Certain kinds of wine you can drink pretty much right away and it'll taste fine. Mead for example. There's all kinds of recipes for mead, so I dunno if I can really describe it since god only knows what you'd ever find at any random liquor store. But typically it tastes kinda like champagne, bubbles ever so slightly like champagne, and has a very sweet taste to it, mostly because the majority of it tends to be honey. It's typically a Christmas time drink, and that's usually the best time to find it in stores. I dunno if they make it anymore, but the shit I used to get was Lurgashall Mead. It was hard as FUCK to find though, I used to have to buy it from the bar I used to haunt in college, so I ended up paying BAR prices for every bottle, which was probably 2/3 higher than what you'd buy it for at a liquor store. It was great stuff though. I tried other cheaper brands from various liquor stores around town, but they all tasted like cheap shit compared to the Lurgashall.

Another thing I do that I dunno is "good" or not... I usually take the airlock off every day or two and blow across the mouth of the jug to blow off and evacuate all the gas off the top of the liquid in the jug. I've found that if I don't do that religiously every day or two, that old gas sits there and festers like a bad fart and skunks up the batch, making it smell horrible and taste funky. From everything I've ever read, you're NOT supposed to do that, because it can let bacteria in. But,... I've been doing it for years now, and I've never once gotten sick from it or noticed anything growing inside the containers while it's fermenting.

[|iR|Focalor]

DOUBLE BARREL POSTING.

Sweet taters... ew. I don't like em. I wonder if you could make vodka from sweet taters though. I bet it would taste super fucking weird and probably nasty as hell, haha! Spoiled sweet taters smell horrible, so that's what sweet tater clear liquor would probably taste like.

If you're looking for interesting and PROFITABLE things to grow, consider strawberries. They are kinda labor intensive because of the space they occupy and the weeds that pop up. But you can sell little baskets of the fuckers for 5 bucks. Picking them is pretty tedious and time consuming though. And then once you do, they're kinda like tomatoes, touching them spreads mold and makes the leaves start turning black more and more over the next month or two. You can definitely make wine with them though, and it's fucking good too. Pretty much any really sweet fruit is gonna make a nice sweet tasting wine. I've mentioned it before, but I sometimes make orange wine/orange "hooch" to use for making overly-alcoholic screwdrivers. But sometimes I'll add a splash of Sprite or 7up too, so that kinda waters it back down to normal. I've heard of people using pineapples to make wine, but honestly, that sounds horrible to me. I've heard of banana wine, but that sounds fucking weird. Rotten nanner beer? Not me.

Wanna make some serious money though? CORN, DUDE! Easy to harvest, easy to grow, and you can get southern folks ANYWHERE to jerk their front ends outta alignment pulling over to come buy some outta the back of your truck for $1.50/ear. I grow buttloads of sweet corn every year, mostly to lure in the deer for hunting season. But I also make some decent play money slinging ears of it to the yuppies at the pool house at the front of the neighborhood or the impromptu farmers market in town... which consists of a few local rednecks trucks lined up in the elementary school parking lot in the evenings. There's even a damn vietnamese woman that sells homegrown RICE up there once or twice a week, lol. White yuppie douchebags pay her 2x what they'd pay at Publix for better quality rice, DERP! It's ORGANIC!

I also make whiskey from ground corn meal I make from it too. I used to distill like 40 or 50 gallons of the shit every year and then sell it to friends. I would've just given it away, but I had to charge them something to pay for all the oak casks I had to order to age the shit in. So if you ever wanna graduate from making wine to distilling spirits, be advised that it can be quite expensive. I'm paying 50 bucks per 1gal barrel, but I used to pay 90 bucks from a brick and mortar store before I started ordering them online.

I don't make as much as I used to though. I got tired of spending days and days on end distilling things for other people. It took LOTS of room to hold all the buckets of mash of different shit too. My whole house would smell like ferment funk. Sometimes I'll do vodka, but only from the little red potatoes from the store. For some reason, the end result from the red potatoes always tastes cleaner than the russets. I could grow taters to make vodka with, and I used to at one time, but it just takes up too much real estate that I use for corn now. It's hardly worth the effort though. Honestly the storebought stuff is filtered WAY better, and the homemade shit doesn't taste better or worse than retail. It all tastes like rubbing alcohol... unless it's the cheap bottom shelf hobo shit.

I also make spiced and clear rum. Doing it "properly" is a little harder than whiskey or vodka, but it DEFINITELY tastes better than any of the storebought bullshit you've ever had, no matter how good it claimed to be. If you make whiskey like I do, you can reuse the old whiskey barrels for aging darker versions of rum. But after it's had rum in it, it's pretty much done after that, I burn them in the firepit by the creek. But the good news is if you wanna make rum, you don't necessarily NEED oak aging casks, you can do the same thing with charred oak chunks stuffed in the aging vessel. However, it does taste a little better aged in a whiskey cask, especially if the whiskey it held was good quality shit.

[haunted]

A lot of useful information. Some I didn't ask for or expect but truly appreciate it.

Concerning muscadines apparently theres 3 different kinds. Ones that turn dark purple/blackish, ones that turn bronze-ish, and the sub group scuppernogs.  I've heard similar views as yours on muscadines. I actually can eat mine and they remind me of a normal grape. Maybe one of these kinds are better than the others? Probably, but I'm no expert.

In regards to you being from Georgia and not liking sweet potatoes..................... I'll let that one slide. The best sweet taters are grown in sandy ground. They end up being skinnier but way sweeter and more flavorful. You're out of your mind if ya don't like them. I have to go, wife is waiting on me, hopefully the steak pic will attach now.

[|iR|Focalor]

Haha! Jesus, looks like you robbed the meat department!

From what I remember, the muscadines at my grandpas old house were those ugly brownish yellowish ones. So whatever the hell variety those happen to be, get thee hence from them. They're super acidic and bitter as fuck tasting, almost like they aren't quite ripe even though they probably are.

I can eat sweet taters, I just prefer butternut squash more, which are pretty similar tasting. Butternut squash keeps way better than sweet potatoes too. I can grow one or two vines of it and have 40 or more squashes which will keep all winter and into next summer without needing to be frozen. I also don't want to grow anything I'll have to dig up. Too much work. And I also kinda have an uncontrollable mole/vole problem. They stay away from everything I grow so far, but I'm pretty sure they'd decimate anything under the dirt. Not a fucking thing I can do about them either. I've tried traps and caught several. I even dug one out by hand once while planting new bushes out front of my house last summer. Slammed it on the pavement after it bit me, then used him as fertilizer under one of the new bushes.

[haunted]

Yeah I got a bunch of meat now that's for sure. It sounds like you're talking about the "bronze" colored muscadines. I have no experience with these. Mine turn dark purple/almost black when they're ready. I'll attach a picture of a few below. So mine are either scuppernongs or the general dark muscadines, I guess.

[haunted]

Butternut squash is great too, I love it. Right now I'm growing things that kind of thrive in sand. Corn would probably do well also although I've never grown it. Back where I grew up I could always till and mix seaweed and fish carcasses for the best soil ever, I just don't have those resources readily available here. Red chiles grow GREAT in sandy material. I have loads of those. so far I'm just drying them in jars which I'll eventually use as a crushed red pepper substitute or whatever.

I have a crazy mole population, damn I hope they don't eat my root Vegas up. I have carrots, onions, beats and radishes also.

[|iR|Focalor]

See, I didn't know scuppernongs were the same thing as muscadines. I knew they looked similar, but... anyway. I know I've tasted scuppernong wine before. Like I mentioned, there's several wineries around the Helen and Mount Yonah area, and one has a little shop right in the Helen Swiss Alpine village where you can taste and buy their shit by the bottle. Probably half of what they have on the shelves is the non-traditional shit, like NOT made from just grapes. I remember they had a cherry honeysuckle scuppernong wine, which wasn't half bad. Wasn't the best thing I've ever tasted, but it wasn't awful like I expected either. Very dry tasting, but a slightly sweet aftertaste kinda like marsala.

If you have a lot, might be worthwhile to hit up a winemaking store and buy proper supplies. I don't use proper shit. I use repurposed milk jugs and Home Depot buckets for fermenting mash, haha! I also use tap water. I'm not sure, but it'd probably be better to use some storebought distilled water so there won't be ANY chlorine or city water additives in there that might inhibit the yeast. Oh yeah... I also use shitty Fleishmans cooking yeast rather than proper brewers yeast. My stuff turns out drinkable, but I'm a lazy bastard unwilling to ride an extra 15 miles down the highway to the homebrew store.