Well the truck did outstandingly well on this last trip. The new lighting upgrades were awesome and the trip as a whole was great...right up to the last day.
I have some pics of the wheeling and some pose shots etc that I will post once I pull them off of my nice camera but I thought I'd start with the less than good news.
I've joined the ball-joint to spindle bolt failure club and dropped my front end into the pavement. My rig did manage to limp me all the way into town and onto a nice stretch of level blacktop before it gave out but it was like an elephant sat on my driver side bumper! I much prefer the spot the truck chose to where it could have failed over the previous week, particularly Black Bear pass gazing a few thousand feet down to Telluride. Judging by the pieces I found I think I had one bolt vibrate out, then another vibrate loose and shear, then the last two (inner pair) must have also loosened and failed together.
The tow truck driver that the sheriff roused out of bed set me up in front of his shop on a jackstand with a floor jack and a handful of bolts, saying I could keep it there and wrench until Monday morning. I worked two of the bolt remnants out and got it so she could sit on all four tires but the coilover was the most concerning hit (it took a fair bend) and I didn't want to try to drive on it. I managed to find a friend with a rig he trailered out who was willing to trailer me back home on his way east. We made it back Sunday afternoon and yesterday I got everything torn down. So far the damage report is:
Driver Fender is toast as well as the fender flare
Inner fender skirting is crunched and torn
CV shredded both boots
Inner axle seal is toast
Coilover is quite tweaked (shaft to body bend, bent shaft or valve failure or ...?)
Pride is notably dented
I've already gotten the spindle cleaned up broken off bolts removed and the threads are chased and fine. My plan is to replace the bolts on both sides with new Toyota with blue loctite and tourque seal to keep a visual indication of any loosening up. I can swap in my NIB spare CV and re-boot the damaged unit to keep as a new trail-spare. I'm going to ditch the flares all around and get creative with some bedliner. I also may take the downtime to get into tubbing the front. I will be down for a week or two waiting on the coilovers to come back and a new fender so it may prove a good time to get some cutting done!
). 3 of my 4 bolts failed after my truck was in an accident and my insurance company had a Toyota dealer rebuild it. The "tech" at Toyota installed a new LCA and LBJ, and clearly didn't properly torque the bolts or use Loctite. I got off the highway in Kansas after doing 90 mph and heard a snap when I bumped the curb pulling into a Denny's. I crawled under and found that two rattled out and one sheared, leaving one bolt holding the LBJ to the LCA. I was lucky there was a hardware store across the street with metric bolts and I didn't have that failure 10 minutes earlier. The only time anyone besides myself has done a lick of maintenance on my truck.