Carnage Report
What a great weekend of running trails. If I leave anything out, feel free to add it in.
After arriving at camp at about 10:30pm on Thursday, we started unloading, setting up camp and moving trailers arround. Painter Ken had is truck idling for a while and when he got back to it it was overheating. We noticed the fan wasn't spinning and after shutting it down, we tried to turn it by hand and it wouldn't move. Figured it was the fan clutch, luckily we had one, so we started the replacement procedure and about 5 minutes in to it, we found a screw driver wedged in the blades, keeping it from spinning. After that was removed, it worked fine and solved the problem.
After that, Spdrcer34(Ryan) rolled into camp in his Ex with a bike rack on the back. Apparently, there is a design flaw in the rack as one of the bikes came in contact with his back hatch glass and blew it out on the freeway.
Friday we ran the Nachese Pass trail. Within the first mile of the trail, Codey, my son, learned that he had to watch both sides of the truck as he put a tree limb right into the passenger side headlight bucket. Luckily, we found another one on the trail that we used as a dummy light to look street legal by covering the gaping hole.
On the return trip, Codey got the left rear shock mount hung up on a log and high centered the rear and the front was up against some slick roots. whitetrashfab(Ben) was backing down to give him a tug and caught a tree root to a valve stem, flattening his tire. I pulled codey backwards off the log and we threw the spare on Ben's.
After that, I clipped a stump with the left front doing about 5mph. The steering wheel spun violently and then there was no steering resistance at the wheel. The sector shaft in the steering box snapped. Upon further inspection, it looks like there was already a crack in it as there was rust about 1/16th inch deep on one side. Probably happened in Moab when I lost my track bar bracket and twisted my pitman arm. We pushed my Ex off the trail and everyone went back to camp. The steering box was pulled off the BII, brought back to me on the trail and put on the Ex to get her back to camp. Ben was able to call in a part request to Chris to bring out another steering gear.
Saturday started by installing the steering gear into the BII. Good to go and we hit the road, ran into town, gassed up, and then headed off for Funny Rocks and Moon Rocks. We all played on the rocks where for a while with no carnage to report, but deffinately a couple of scary moments. Andy in his jeep took a line that required a little more wheel base and ended up hooking up to Painter Ken's Explorer with the winch to make it the last two feet up the obsticle. Codey did a nice one wheel stand on the right front coming off a ledge.
We started the trail back to camp running Shoestring to Tip Over to Kainer trail. My power steering pump had been giving me problems all day starting out with excess air, but mainly, due to a bushing wearing out in my track bar, causing my front axle to float about an inch side to side, which meant the drag link was constantly moving the pitman arm a little. This caused the fluid to heat up quick, boil, and spit out the vent hole. It got so hot once it blew the cap right off once. A hose clamp was added to help hold the cap on, but I think after 10 years of wheeling, that power stering pump has lived it's life. Even cold it howells like a banshee and there just isn't as much turning power as there used to be.
Chris dropped his right front tire into a hole and slipped the bead off. He winched himself backwards, jacked it up, and reset the bead ether style. Aired it back up and we were back on the road. Ben had a starting issue that turned out to be the vacuum line falling off the fuel pressure regulator.
We got back to camp still during daylight, but it was a long day on the trails, roughly about 10 hours or so. When we got there, Ryan was there and asked us to listen to his dry lifter and no oil pressure. See the link in this thread for more on that.
Sunday we headed back out to the rocks to play around one last time before we packed up and went home. We played there for a while and the group split, half went from Funny Rocks back over to Moon Rock, and Painter Ken, Codey, and myself headed back to camp to pack up and get on the road. Just as we were leaving, we saw Forest coming back solo in his BII. He informed us that he was back to get Chris's Truck and trailer. I didn't get the full updae on that but heard that he snaped a rea axle and when Forest left to get the trailer, they were winching him straight up something.
Overall it was an hell of a weekend. Lots of fun and good times with friends, new and old.