El Jeepe!

[AgentOrange76]

More:






Bed Tent anyone? :********:


Okay, I'm about to share a top secret recipe.
WARNING! You will get diabetes and die.
But its totally worth it.
Are you ready?






BAM! Cosmic brownie s'mores. Yep, they're kinda a big deal.[/SIZE]

 

[AgentOrange76]

My biggest regret with the Jeep. I got talked into scouting the trail ahead of these big mud pits. There was a bypass and I had done it before with zero trouble, so I proceeded ahead and with all the recent rain we had had it was very sloppy and otherwise solid bottoms were very ambiguous. I called it and headed back. The mud was so bad I couldn't get up the bypass and was sliding all over the place, the tires locked in ruts. I was getting pretty scared at this point and was out of options but to come back through the mud. We dug a channel to drain some of the water but it was a losing battle. I had to hit the deeper of the two because I was locked in the ruts. That was the only time those tires ever let me down. It was really friggin deep and I shut it off for fear of hydrolocking it. We pulled it partway trough and then I fired the Jeep back up to assist with extraction. The Ram that pulled me out is pushing 320 hp and was in 4th gear high range at indicated 95 mph trying to get me out, and the Jeep was helping. It got out but it was ugly. What I wouldn't learn until later was that pushing in the clutch while submerged compromised the otherwise sealed integrity of the transmission. 3 transmission fluid changes (at 10 bucks a quart of syncromesh) the mud is gone but the damage is done. My synchros aren't near what they used to be, and I thought the clutch was destroyed but it ended up just being crap. That's what prompted the clutch change mentioned earlier. So I learned a couple things. First and formost is to listen to your gut and not let your buddies talk ya into stupid stuff. Second is to not touch the clutch in deep water/mud. And third is that if I had a winch (or good sense) I wouldn't be there in the first place.

 

[AgentOrange76]

Finally got is on the rocks! After that sketchy crap in the mud with no traction, it was great to have control and just creep over the trail. I love this trail not only because its the only real rocky one around here but dad used to take us up here all the time to go pick blueberries.

 

[AgentOrange76]

Another trip





Field repair, exhaust fell off but that's nothing a couple zip ties wont fix!

 

[AgentOrange76]

Got new tires!!! Same size (31x10.5) BFG KO2s!!!! They're sooooo legit.....honestly rides like I have my factory shocks back, its so smooth.... The Jeep no longer porpoises down the highway and it rides so much better. I don't know how much of that is that they aren't 7 years old and how much is the difference between the KO and the KO2 but I'm loving them. And they look sweet.....I've been drooling over them ever since they came out and now I've got some! The old KOs held up great, 7 years (only about 30k miles) and only 2 flats, and only one was getting low on tread (from riding around with a broken swaybar for a while I think) One flat technically shouldn't have been repaired as it was right on the edge of the sideway and tread, and the other was getting close to the wearbars. I would've run em for another year but my grandmother was worried about me driving 4 hours to school on em, so happy birthday/Christmas to me! I went ahead and got a fifth, so for the first time in 10 years the Jeep has a full size spare, and I'm gonna start 5 tire rotations. And of course I had to get them dirty :sombrero:

 

[SilicaRich]

I'm jealous. Great tires, only thing I wish they had carried over from the older design was the rim protector

 

[AgentOrange76]

I'm jealous of myself, these babies are sweet......Yeah, I wish they carried that over but at least I just have plain old steelies I can touch up if they get scratched. Something I'll keep in mind if I buy new rims though, since I RUB EVERYTHING OFF ROAD.....

 

[AgentOrange76]

Last camping trip with my buddy before he mover to St. Louis. You may recognize the red yoder from the earlier pictures, and if you look closely you might wonder if it's the same truck as the old rusty green one in the early posts. You wonder correctly! The old rustbucket was my friends truck in high school, and he bought a tundra to bomb out to school in Raleigh (he's my roomie) He sold it to another friend (the white Tacoma in earlier posts) who was in automotive class at early college and he put a new bed and fender and frame cross members and all sorts of stuff to fight the rust, but you know Toyotas. They just love to rust. It looks pretty good though, if it would only stop breaking on him.....

If ya haven't figured out yet, even though this is about the blue Jeep, this thread won't solely be dedicated to it but will also include stuffs. Its part build tread, part trip report thingies, part everything related. So feel free to ask anything, be it about my Jeep or anything else that piques your interest.

Anyway, this is again at Harmon Den and it was a blast, except for my heater still being broken (fixed it since, turned out to be the resistor. That was interesting because it dropped 30 degrees from the time we woke up to the time we got in our vehicles! It was freezing and the wind was savage but we were treated to a layer of rime ice as we popped out of the trail!

 

[AgentOrange76]

Horse Creek this summer! He came back! And of course he wasn't gonna miss out on the no door fun!






View from the top

 

[AgentOrange76]

Harmon Den again





Backroad cruising, Looking Glass, Slick Rock Falls





Frying Pan, Devil's Courthouse

 

[AgentOrange76]

Some more stuff on the Jeep I forgot to post earlier. I put in a skyjacker steering stabilizer to match the shocks I got (that I got so the shocks would match the lift) I also had to put in a new starter/solenoid after the incident in the mud.....



Wasn't too happy about that but its always fun to go to the parts store in the old CJ to get parts to rescue the new ones! We seem to go to the parts store as often as we go to Walmart....but hey, broken old stuff has way more character than new stuff, is actually fixable, and way more fun.
In our driveway-
My Jeep
76 CJ
81 El Camino
91 Power Ram
05 Dakota
10 Grand Caravan

I can throw up some pictures if y'all wanna see em. Most recent happenings-new wheels and tires on the Ram and the El Co is still a beast but being cranky and not wanting to start, the ignition is the only thing we haven't replaced....., The minivan still burns oil and the Dakota still does burnouts. Life is good.








Specking of the mud, remember when I said that my transmission filled with mud when I pushed in the clutch? Well here it is, miracle it still even works...



There's my super manly allen wrench I had to buy to do the tranny. What made me really mad was I just changed the fluid 2 months earlier...oh well.











Here's my current gear setup. It works pretty good for the space but I need to get cooking supplies and food in there as well as a full size tent and make it all waterproof.



In the bag is a full size pillow, blanket and hammock with bug netting. The diddy bag has a pair of towels for when the rains inevitably come and the hi-lift bag has all my recovery gear including gear to turn the jack into a winch, tree saver, hitch receiver, and winch controller. The ammo cans hold survival gear and navigation gear (space blanket, first aid kit, water purification, fire starting stuff, area and highway maps (I use the Nat Geo trails illustrated) compass, flashlights and headlamps, knives, multi tools, bug spray and sunscreen, zip ties, paracord, ect.....) The Frisbee is because yes, and the black thing is like a foldable knock-off max trac, and it works great, and of course a fire extinguisher because its better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I have a tow strap in one door and a mallet and entrenching tool in the other.

 

[AgentOrange76]

Update on the Long Dong, we slammed some Poison Spider rock rails under it and it has new shoes too! 31x10.5 KO2s and new pro comp wheels! The rockers were harder than mine to install because you had to undo the body mounts and cram them underneath but unlike me he doesn't have a bunch of holes in his floor. Either way she's lookin good and it was a ton of fun wrenching together.



Went for a cruise, found a little mud








These pictures are a little old, but it doesn't make folding the windshield down any less epic!

 

[SilicaRich]

Here's my current gear setup. It works pretty good for the space but I need to get cooking supplies and food in there as well as a full size tent and make it all waterproof.

View attachment 358013

In the bag is a full size pillow, blanket and hammock with bug netting. The diddy bag has a pair of towels for when the rains inevitably come and the hi-lift bag has all my recovery gear including gear to turn the jack into a winch, tree saver, hitch receiver, and winch controller. The ammo cans hold survival gear and navigation gear (space blanket, first aid kit, water purification, fire starting stuff, area and highway maps (I use the Nat Geo trails illustrated) compass, flashlights and headlamps, knives, multi tools, bug spray and sunscreen, zip ties, paracord, ect.....) The Frisbee is because yes, and the black thing is like a foldable knock-off max trac, and it works great, and of course a fire extinguisher because its better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I have a tow strap in one door and a mallet and entrenching tool in the other.

The storage space struggle is real:xxrotflma I definitely know the pain

 

[AgentOrange76]

The storage space struggle is real:xxrotflma I definitely know the pain

The struggle is real, but I also know I would adjust how much crap I carry to the amount of storage I have. So even if I had a minivan I'd still have no room for anything :********:

 

[AgentOrange76]

Today I rescued my other baby, our little 8ft Coleman popup we got at the same time as my Jeep. A bear busted out the front fascia so I have some aluminum to fab a new one. Hopefully there's no water damage but if so I have to fix that. I would've brought it home much sooner but our bridge had collapsed and it was stranded up there, so its in need of some love. We also gotta relocate the spare to the rear since it used to live up front. I'm also gonna pressure wash it and really clean the inside and wash everything up and restock it. I might also re-caulk all the trim to keep it nice and watertight, and do that tent seam repair stuff.

On the way up I explored some fire roads and side trails along Hurricane Gap.




Fire tower


I wish I knew how to rotate pictures, this was a cool one...


Found a friend under the camper. Other wildlife sightings included a deer, a turkey, a heron chasing a hawk that had scooped up a fish, and a big ole black bear sitting in the road.