I thought Mark might be working on this, but he wasn\'t, so I\'ll throw one I already wrote up.
With 571 still down from the crash, there was no racing for us this weekend. Smike, Paul, and I met Keith, Erin and Pete in Honeoye to pick up Keith\'s TJ with fresh airshocks on my trailer, and split up passengers. We were aiming to make it down for a screening of the RCQ movie but were already at least half an hour behind when a quick fuel and Wendy\'s stop turned in to a 40 minute saga of slow, manager-less teens probably spitting in our burgers.....
We met Mark already there, and Ryan showed up slightly behind us.
I broke a hub at the Other Climb on 5, and bought a set of Yukon flanges from Doug after reading his phone number off the Extreme trailer in the parking lot about 15 minutes after diagnosis. Awesome.
Most of us made Jotters, and did a loop up the hill and back down on trail 6. I\'m not sure I\'d ever run that before. We went down the red section (poor call with two TJs on 33s, but Mark actually did great with some careful spotting; Keith & Pete bypassed). I broke a shock mount off, drooped too much, and lost brakes right at the bottom (thank god for small favors!). I had a spare line with; installed it; welded up the shock mount at the office. I\'d broken that mount off at Big Dogs Icebreaker this year, and welded it up with a Ready Welder trailside; welds looked good on the outside but were VERY porous and shitty, I was shocked (no pun). There was almost nothing to them. The beads looked good on the outside and felt great going down at the time. Very spooky. Bridged the gap to the axle tube on both mounts, shouldn\'t have any further issues... I also discovered a bad power steering leak from the cap on the end of my box. At least that\'s a lifetime warrantied part.... and it worked for the rest of the day.
We tooled around on some other crap, did some 2, did some J, did some 14 which I hadn\'t run in years; did Otters from the creek back up the hill and it was awesome. Ryan\'s buggy, me, Keith. Had to throw two rocks in the middle for the TJ, and I took a second try at the two big rocks at the end but made it. felt great, that\'s a SICK trail.
I ran out of gas going back up H to camp. Got towed to camp by a Little Black TJ That Could, nobody had a gas can so we rolled me all the way down the hill to the truck stop. Thanks Smike and Mark! Rolled from the park entrance all the way to the maintenance shed and then towed to the truck stop. 5psi is a lot of rolling resistance.... Good times.
Aside from some unloading on steep climbs Keith\'s new airshocks seem fantastic. There was some comp course playing while I was welding my shock mount and I guess Ryan made Double Bump just crawling it. I think we should have a new Class IV comp buggy if she can do that!
We woke up to a [unforecast] soaking wet Sunday and decided to pack up and leave instead of betting on weather improvement. Topless Jeeps, windowless Dakotas and a buggy can be fair weather wheelers I guess. Another saga of waiting for Paul\'s tires that were 20 minutes out for about 2 hours total, and a loss of 5th gear in my Cummins were all that made the trip home long. I think it was close to 7 hours end to end for me, I got home around 5:30....
