Tyre Shredder!

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

I saw some great right-hand-drive machinery on the streets of St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica, during my visit last week, but sometimes it’s the little details that really let you know you’re rolling in a strange foreign land.


I’m reminded of the SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE signs we had at the Island Auto Movie drive-in theater, where I worked as a ticket-taker during my senior year of high school; dudes would just throw a sheet of plywood over the spikes and drive right in the exit.

Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • M 1 M 1 on Jan 12, 2011

    The plywood must have been better in the cave-man days.

  • N Number N Number on Jan 12, 2011
    "...dudes would just throw a sheet of plywood over the spikes and drive right in the exit." That was always the solution I had in my mind for that and I always wondered if it would work.
  • Mulry Mulry on Jan 12, 2011

    A thick piece of rubber-backed carpet (like a large doorway mat) would accomplish the same goal and would be easier to transport for such nefarious purposes. Not that I'd ever do anything delinquent like that...

  • Obbop Obbop on Jan 12, 2011

    Amateurs. Install the hydraulics properly then bounce the front tyres over the deflating device, advance a bit then bounce the rear tyres over. If unable to visualize this try YouTube using various search terms such as "car bounce" or "bouncing lowrider." Perseverance should lead to ultimate victory. For no real reason the hydraulic-loving cohort was a royal pain for the San Joaquin Valley farmers... and a constant expense, as the vato crowd regularly raided the parked farm equipment that possessed the needed equipment to alter vehicles into hippity hoppity expressions of a, to me, culture that has barely departed the neolithic period in many ways but that is just another grimy Old Coot Opinion (tm) © and not meant to "diss" any of a group that seems to have a proclivity to be rather fast and loose as to where to unleash streams of gunfire.

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