Notes from the Workshop
This may get heavy.
Weight is the only honest number in the category — and every kilo is paid for somewhere else.
Notes from the Workshop · 5 min read
Weight is the only honest number in this whole category. You can argue about specs and features all day. You can’t argue with a weighbridge.
Every kilogram you bolt into the back of a touring vehicle gets paid for somewhere else — in fuel, in tyres, in brakes, in the GVM headroom you no longer have for water, recovery gear, or the people you’re travelling with.
A traditional steel drawer system weighs 55, 60, 75 kilograms before you’ve loaded a single thing into it. That’s a passenger you carry everywhere and never get to talk to.
The people who built their lives around it
Colin Chapman, who founded Lotus reduced the whole argument to four words: simplify, then add lightness.
He won races not by chasing horsepower but by deleting mass, and he explained exactly why it works in a line every off-roader should have on the wall: adding grunt makes you faster; subtracting weight makes you more capable. Lighter doesn’t improve one thing. It improves everything at once — acceleration, braking, handling, range. Just look at a Jimmy, or a Series One or the original Willys and where they can go and what they can do without very much power at all.
Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you more capable everywhere.
The mountaineers learned the same lesson where the stakes were absolute. Reinhold Messner — first up Everest without oxygen, first to climb all fourteen eight-thousand-metre peaks — built his career on what he called the alpine style: very light equipment, a minimum of outside help, fast and clean. He dismissed the old heavy expeditions, with their armies of porters and tonnes of fixed rope, as siege tactics — and considered them faintly disrespectful to the mountain. He would climb Everest by fair means, he said, or not at all. Strip the burden, and you don’t just go lighter. You go where the heavy parties turn back.
A BootKamp Unit 1 System is 25 kg. The full system with the IGT kitchen slide is 39. That’s not a marketing figure — it’s the difference between sitting comfortably under your GVM and quietly driving an illegal, under-braked rig you’ve talked yourself into believing is fine.
And lightness compounds, exactly as Chapman promised. Less mass means less fuel, which means more range, which means you reach the places the heavy rigs turn back from. It means you can lift the platform out on a Friday for the weekly shop and drop it back in July for the Simpson. It means the vehicle still drives like a vehicle.
Heavy is easy. Strong and light is the whole discipline.
Anyone can make a strong thing heavy. Making it strong and light is the actual engineering. The weighbridge doesn’t lie, and neither does the fuel gauge at the end of a long day.
— Vaughan