Thread: Lessons learned
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Old 02-09-2004, 03:25 PM
mrblaine mrblaine is offline
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Dana Point, CA USA
Posts: 7,988
Quote:
Originally posted by Jeff Weston
For those of us who were dying to go but were housebound by bathroom remodeling and was hating life for it, please post a mini-trail report. It's pretty easy to tell from Blaine's lessons learned that someone broke a D35 (imagine that) and the group was hating it. Also, Jeff rolled somehow. Who blew up the D35 and how (I didn't think anybody even had one) and how did the rollover occur?

Details, please!
Jeff started the day by rolling his rig at the top of the first fall on Jack. Slow motion flop that was righted in less than 20 minutes followed by a fairly nifty run back to camp to replace the 7 quarts of tranny fluid we had to clean up.

This event sort of placed most everyone's nerves on edge and a vote was taken to opt out of finishing Jack, take on a shorter run so that our previously arranged business could be tended to.

We decided on Claw and personally I was having a downright blast seeing just how smooth I could drive the trail.

About a hundred yards from the top, things went to hell in a handbasket. Larry snapped his draglink in two pieces at the pitman TRE. We spent about an hour and got it welded back together, braced and reinstalled.

At this point we decided to have Chris strap him while he drove under his own power to the top in order to keep the draglink alive. No sooner did we get moving then we noticed the right rear wasn't turning and heard a loud snap. We were then faced with replacing a rear c-clip axle and a right front that had also managed to blow the bottom balljoint out of the yoke.

Several hours of messing with a lockrite in the rear and having only an XJ disconnect outer complete with the wrong backspacing on the unit bearing and we had to spend another 45 minutes digging up washers to get the rotor free from the knuckle. Wrong replacement parts cost us precious daylight and we had to finish the hardest part of the trail in the dark. Cold, exhaustion, and hunger when combined with a difficult obstacle with no daylight is a near certain recipe for disaster. We are truly lucky the rest of the evening was incident free.
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