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Alright we're trying this YT thing. I recommend watching Joe's video, he's got a pretty good overview of the day in his: Heres the highlights from running the trails at AOAA with Ox, Darre & Joe. It was a rough day for me with issues with the water/meth injection on the drive up, then sinking the bronco in a mud pit and stalling it, and wrecking the alternator as well. Everybody else did fine! Got some cool pics though. I shot some video as did Darrel, so there should be some good videos to watch soon at least! So here we go! For those that don't know, this event is currently on-going; it started Thursday and will continue through til Sunday. First off, let me say that the FSB presence at the Round Up this year was incredible! Tons of FSBs everywhere! Sorry I didn't get to say Hi to everyone, we weren't doing the whole pic thing, so we kinda just unloaded, aired down and went off into the park. Me & Ox decided to go on Friday, to get some wheelin in with Darrel, because he's usually one of the only FSB'ers dumb enough to keep goin wheelin with us! But seriously, we limited ourselves to one day because weve got another trip coming up, and usually one of us breaks something big Anyways, enough babbling, on to the pics! From left to right: me, Darrel, Ox  We went over to the NE side, and went straight to Outer Limits, which is wayyyy far away from everything. ...and unfortunately this is where Darrel the d.side motor mount, which lead to a torn trans mount, & the front d.shaft & trans linkage came apart. We had to pull him down off the climb. Getting the winch cable re-set, his truck deicded to roll away! Fortunately, I was parked behind him. Unfortunately, with the angle, his bumper went right under mine and we smashed his tailgate up pretty good. We also bent his front right leaf during the extraction process, but he has another at home so its not the end of the world. From here we were able to get the trans linkage and the d.shaft back together, and he was able to limp it out of the park under its own power.  We dropped Darrel's rig off in the parking lot, and he rode with me/ox the rest of the day. We went over to the south side to run Cemetary. I shot a vid of Ox coming up the hill climb/exit, he makes it look easy (it kinda was). From there we went over to the West side to run Trail 20 (awesome new-ish black trail), then 13a, then we cut thru Rock Creek and headed into Death Trap This runs out to 23, which loops around to the Power lines. But by then it was already 5pm, so we headed back to the parking lot and loaded up to go home. Not a lot of pics, but it was still a good day of wheelin; lots of good trails run, and we did ~15-18 miles so we definitely covered some ground. Darrel shot some pics/vids, so hopefully he gets them online soon!  There is a thread running over on FSB with pics from some of the other people that attended, you can check it out here. Some misc pics from Saturday: This was a pretty sweet EB with a 6bt under the hood!    Taking a break (literally) while the same EB replaced a hub. This was on DeathTrap, which is a pretty awesome trail.  Another cool EB on the trail with us today. Those 39.5s sure look small next to these rocks!  Deathtrap leads into the far end of Rock Creek. So since we had time while waiting for a locking hub, he decided to run the creek. I decided to follow.  Somebody was not having a good day, found a damn-near new ujoint in the middle of the Creek, missing a few caps. I bet someone dropped it.  Got to the other end, and stumbled upon some other FSBs, iuncluding Jim and his too-pretty-to-wheel bronco. So shiny!   From there we went over to Crawl Daddy:      That's more or less all I got form the day. You can view my full photogallery of pics from friday, here, and from saturday, here. Theres a thread on the whole event over on FSB, located here. The annual Bronco Roundup, at Rausch Creek! Hers the obligatory group-photo pic from Friday morning:  Me Ox & Darrel lining up for the trailride  Such a nice, clean, unbroken windshield:  Heading into the park:  This is where it got ugly. From here we moved on to Crawler's Ridge, and Ox broke his rig. Seems the bolts that hold the passenger side steering arm onto the knuckle sheared off, and he lost all of his steering:  What youre looking at here, is what happens when two massive Grade 8.8 bolts break, and the Mog steering arm comes off the passenger knuckle. Because both the tierod & draglink attach to it, it left Ox with basically no steering at all. I left to go get a trailer while several others from FSB stayed behind to help ox get up, turned around, and then back down off the obstacle, so we could extract him. They built this crazy contraption out of a come-along, several short chains & some straps to sort-of get it steering again, atleast enough to get it maneuvered down the bypass, after it got winched up & off the obstacle. During that time I unhooked my trailer from the tow-rig, hitched it to the back of my bronco via a home-brew hitch I built for moving the trailer around the yard, and then drug it all the way back to the scene of the incident:  During my trip out & back the rest of them were hard at work getting him turned around, so I could back up into the trail and we could load him up at the bottom of the bypass/exit:   From there we towed him all the way out of the park, over to the emergency exit near Route 209  Here we unloaded his truck, and drove back to the parking lot in mine, where we jumped in Ox's tow rig and came back for his bronco. I left my bronco hitched to the trailer in Rausch's lot overnight as me & ox were planning on coming back Saturday to go wheelin again anyway with my rig. 460 for the win, it honestly did not care at all that ox's rig was on the trailer behind me. It was pretty awesome to see. It took us 5 hours to extract his bronco and get back to camp which was half-decent I thought considering the situation, but it meant we missed dinner Friday night since we didn't get back until after 8. Ok so here we go, MEB's annual Winter Ride @ Rausch Creek. There was a pretty good turnout, it looked like a dozen rigs were there yesterday, and half of em were FSBs. Unfortunately, with the crazy deep slushy snow, we ended up breaking into smaller groups, because there were many places where a rig on 35s was struggling to go. It was pretty nasty out there. The worst of it was the parking lot though, it was a sheet of ice in the morning!  Pretty much right off the bat I seized a caliper and it was dragging HARD. Had to pull the rear left off and remove it because it was killing me in the snow. Im sure theres a pic of it somewhere. Ground clearance for the win! The group I rolled with was on a minimum of 36s, and people were dragging their diffs everywhere.  Considering that we were cutting paths through fresh snow all day long, this made for some interesting challenges at times.    This was a pretty nice EB, but the Fun Countrys were not the best choice for the snow. He had lots of traction issues, despite being locked front/rear  digging in pretty hard. snow was almost knee deep in this area of the park  You wont see a rock, unless you get stuck and start digging; the snow was so deep that no one hit bottom unless they got stuck  This was a pretty wicked hill climb; Chris tried to get to the top and was almost successful before getting stuck. The dude in the blue EB (sorry I forgot his name) was going for it but back down, I assume due to lack of traction; the FCs were not the best tire for this heavy snow  Ryan givin 'er hell on the left path   You can see in these next two, he starts digging in pretty good, but eventually got stuck and had to back down   We went for it and made it all the way up the right path, so im hoping some pics or vids of that show up! ...and finally a panoramic my bud shot on his phone:  All said, I had an awesome time. The seized caliper really sucked the power down, we did way better after it was off the truck. Darrel did pretty good but being behind me most of the day I didn't really get many pics of him. I ran into several other FSB members, but we all got split up early on due to smaller rigs getting stuck, and atleast one broken axleshaft, so I never got to wheel with anyone else. There's more pics from the trip over on FSB. This year's RoundUp was held on June 27-29 at Big Dogs Offroad down in Virginia. We decided to make the trip, so we packed heavy for 4 days of camping and wheeling! Camping was at The Cove Family Campground in Gore, and was a pretty nice place to camp. We didnt get a ton of pics; we ended Friday early due to throwing a caliper clean off the front of the truck, but fortunately we were able to get parts locally and fix it for Saturday. After our trail guide's rollover me & dawn switched seats and she drove for the remainder of the day which was a nice change of pace. Theres more pics from the event in a thread over on FSB. This was a rough day of wheelin for me & ox. Pretty early on, Ox broke an upper link mount on a hill climb. Later in the day, i broke my D60 completely in half! So here's what happened. I had just gone thru Smoothie & Milkshake, RC's nastiest mud holes, when i spotted the housing was cracked. There arent any rocks in those pits, so it must have been coincidence that i decided to look at the front, and see the tube sticking out about an inch. Well, i had a ratchet strap around both radius arms, but it didnt last long....about 1000' later the front-end just fell apart. Probably a good thing i was only idling along in 1st when it happened. A bunch of Toyota guys from Right Coast 4x4 (whom me & ox wheeled with the previous day) helped to get it back together so i could drive it out and get it on the trailer. As you can see, the passenger inner axleshaft is bent. So is the ring-side trunion on the ARB as well, so we're going to have to replace some parts on that too. |
