ODO: 315,043
Still doing the long days, but allergy season has kicked in with a vengeance!
Part III of our spotlight on pre-running continues now:
After getting stuck in the Helltrain several times, we developed a bit of a technique to getting out. You see, while prerunning in a work truck, we’re super cautious about getting buried in the silt. Hit the hole too slow, you’re guaranteed to get stuck, hit the hole too fast and you’re just asking for trouble. Find that Goldilocks speed, and you get through most of them in a semi-controlled fashion, and only sometimes you get stuck.
The beauty (and pitfall) of a solid front axle truck in deep ruts, is the front axle plows into the center of the rut, sometimes just grading the road, sometimes getting the front axle high centered and stopped up against a wall. An independent front suspension truck or buggy on the other hand, has a nice smooth ramp on the front, which allows it to easily slide up and over the center of the rut. Sometimes, this allows them to slide up/over/through the ruts, but when it doesn’t work, it allows you to get WAY more stuck, and allow the entire belly of the car/truck to beach itself, leaving all 4 tires “flying”, and you, severely stuck.
But I digress, when the Helltrain gets stuck in the ruts while using the Goldilocks speed…don’t panic! We tend to run around in the silt in four wheel drive, with all the lockers turned off. I have a tendency to always hold something back for later, always try to have something in your back pocket. Every time we got stuck in the truck, we were able to turn on all the lockers, turn sharp one way or the other, and very very gently crawl out backwards. It worked like a charm! 60% of the time, it works EVERY time! So, this one time we’re stuck, drop into low range, hit all the lockers, and start creeping back. The engine loads up a little bit…ITS WORKING!!! and BANG!!! Ruh-roh, we broke the front end and blew up the axle disconnect in the front axle. Lucky us, we had a spare on board! We carry a random sampling of spare parts because, you never know!
First, we need to get out of this hole…cue the winch. But its on the front and we only having 3 wheel drive, and we’re stuck up against a wall in front of us. Our only real choice is to go up/over/through it. There wasn’t a huge assortment of appropriate anchors to hook a huge truck and a 12,000 lb winch to, but after attempting to excavate a couple trees and bushes, we finally got unstuck.
We bypassed the remaining silt and worked our way back to the highway. We met up with KoKo in the Tacoma, set up some tarps, broke out the tools and went to work. Nothing like setting up shop in a dirt lot on the side of the highway in Baja to tear apart the front axle of a truck! The repair only took us a couple hours and we were back in party mode! That seemed like a good place to end out our day and head for camp for the night.
