The Demo Site

HUMMER

The swan song (or would that be swan hummer?) has come for HUMMER's involvement with Rod Hall Racing. HUMMER has announced it's ending sponsorship of the team that has brought it numerous race championships and victories. Last year's accolades include first in the stock full class in the Baja 1000, and season championship honors in SCORE's stock mini and stock full class, and the Best in the Desert series.

With General Motors a little light right now on the cash front, and with HUMMER up for sale, the move had to be expected. We had a chance to ride with Chad Hall in last year's Baja 500, and we can tell you that the Hall family and the trucks they drive are first class. The H1 and H2 SUT trucks are up for sale, so if you're keen to get in the dirt with some proven tech, there's probably no better place to start.

homemade HUMMER H1

Life is stranger than fiction. If anyone tries to tell you differently, simply point to the Canadian man who built the truck you see above, from scratch. Francois Couture, known in his posts as "H150", showed up in the Full Size Bronco forum on September 17, 2004 with a simple query: "Since I'm a Ford nut but always wanted a HUMMER but don't have lots of money, I decided to fabricate my own [based] on Ford truck frame..."

As forum users do, there were soon people offering a multitude of answers to his questions. But what the other users discovered rather quickly was that this guy was, literally true to his word, was fabricating a HUMMER H1 from nothing but plans. Using steel from his job, he built his own sheet steel bending machine, and over the last four years has been welding together a HUMMER H1 practically out of thin air. And get this: before he started his project, Francois didn't know how to weld. He learned to weld in order to build the truck. And he's good. Like, awesome. His fabrication work is as professional as anything you'd see from folks with a lot more money than a dedicated husband and father in Quebec.

The H1 is being built on a donor frame from a 1987 Ford F150, with an engine from a donated E-350 Super Duty shuttle van, and a whole bunch of other ingenious swaps, all from Fords. If you have the time to read 45 pages, it is worth it. Our favorite name for the truck so far: H4d. After four years and a bit, he's still working on it, and he's taking donations at the behest of other forum members in order to get the truck finished this summer. The effort and the passion speaks for themselves in the gallery of photos below. Hat tip to reader Kiran!

supercharged Geiger H3 in our hi-res gallery

Mention the name Geiger to a physicist and you're likely to hear about the man who discovered the atomic nucleus and the meter that bears his name. To automotive tuning fanatics, the name refers to the aftermarket firm that turns lethargic HUMMERs into tarmac-chomping beasts. But we're not so sure the two are that far removed.

Geiger's latest project is another riff on the relatively (and only by comparison) "small" H3, tinkering with the truck's reactor core to pump up its radioactivity. The stock H3 comes with a 3.7-liter inline-five producing a paltry 239 horsepower and 241 little torques, though it is available with a 5.3-liter V8 which still only manage 300hp and 320 lb-ft of twist. Along comes Geiger to fit a supercharger to said eight-cylinder, boosting output to 423 megatons horsepower and 502 lb-ft of torque. So equipped, the 5000-pound Geiger'd Hummer can reach 60 miles-per-hour in an admirable 7 seconds. 380mm discs gripped by six-pot calipers bring it all back to a halt, surrounded by 22-inch wheels bearing 305/40 Continental rubber. The interior, decked out in carbon fiber, is a matter of taste, but we love how Geiger revives classic racing livery: After their custom H2 popped up in a baby-blue and orange Gulf scheme, this H3 brings back the iconic striped white Martini livery popularized by Lancias on the rally circuit and Porsches on the track. Check it out for yourself in the gallery below.

30-inch wheels

It doesn't surprise us that someone makes a 30-inch wheel. It does, however, that someone actually makes a 30-inch tire. We are behind the times because Pirelli has been making the Scorpion Zero Asimmetrico in 315/30R30 sizes since 2006. We spotted two separate Hummer H2s sporting the tire along with two separate wheels - one with the Giovanna Caracas-8 and the other with Asanti AF 143, both, of course, in chrome. We'd really like to know how a Hummer H2 handles with 30-inch wheels in place, and we can't imagine what these do to the ride quality. The real kicker? We did a search for the Pirelli tires and found that they run for just over $2,000... each. If you include a spare like the blue H2 did, that means you're putting out well over $10,000 just in tires.

Automobile's Ezra Dyer has a knack for positing the most intriguing vehicular questions in an inimitable, screamingly hilarious style. Who else would send Hummer's junior-level H3T against Nissan's heavyweight GT-R, and why? "I want to go bash around in the boonies with a jacked-up truck before somebody decides that that sort of thing is really so much fun that it should be illegal" is the perfect answer to that question. If vehicles weren't in some way about fun, we'd all be lining up for coveted used Trabants. The challenge was thus: run one vehicle on the road from Telluride to Lake City, while another hits the trail, Duke-Boys style. Both vehicles can be painted with anti-green when one considers their respective purposes. The GT-R is for chewing up miles and passing everything short of determined Porsche drivers, while the Hummer doesn't enjoy the free pass enviros give a Wrangler, but is a capable alternative to the Jeep when things heads off road. Hit the link to see whether an as-the-crow-flies route bests turbocharged brute force. Here's one thing we'll play spoiler on: the Hummer used less fuel.

[Source: Automobile]