5th ORT Washita MX 11-19-11

My neighbor and I ran down to Washita this past Saturday and met up the SJIA group. Since the neighbor was along for the ride, I got a plethora of photos out of the deal. I won’t post them all in this thread, but this link has the rest (there’s about 300 photos or so):

Link to all the photos here (click)

Somehow I got elected to lead this group around the park again, so we wandered through A-4, up spotters alley, back around to B10, then down trail 4. All said and done we covered about 5 ¾ miles total:

Photos form throughout the day (I’m sure they’re going to get out of order, but whatever):

Wound up having to replace a starter early in the day:

Modified my driveshaft’s here (spotters alley):

Videos (no particular order, click on the photo to watch the vid):

Lots of photos in that link up top.

Nearly a trouble free trip for me (yea!), but I did have some minor damage:
-Finally managed to kill my drivers side mirror (that one should have been dead awhile ago)
– Goobered up my drive shafts some, the rear shaft had a vibe an needed to have the slip yoke swapped (bent the ears, but managed not to kill the joint somehow).
– All of my skids are very thoroughly bent. The belly skid will need to be reworked at some point as it sacrificed itself to save the tranny (did a good job too! That sucker is bent up a good 1.5″ easy!).

That’s all! Other than the drive line vibe, it drove back home just fine.

Though I will be changing up a few things here soon:

-I’ve had it with the LSD, so a 14 bolt is in the works (soon!).

– The steering could be better. There were very few times that I couldn’t steer off-road. My biggest complaint was that the steering wheel can be ripped out of my hand pretty easily (even at a slow speed). So Hydro assist is definitely in the future (probably early next year).

-The .mil tires worked really well at 6psi, but I lost quite a bit of ground clearance going down that low, so I still need to play with the pressure some more.

-I’m digging the Spartan locker in the front over the Detroit. The Spartan seems to lock up sooner which is how I like it. The down side is that It likes to stay locked all the time which makes it a little harder to turn. Not impossible to manage though.

– I may have fixed my trail overheating problem. I noticed when I was putting on my power steering cooler that a large portion of the foam that surrounds the radiator was missing. This was allowing air to bypass the radiator. It seemed to run cooler, but it was hard to tell since it never got above 50°f on Saturday.