Alright folks... well.. not that I had a chance to get my head straight after the eventful day yesterday, and get some water and rest after a VERY long hot and long day I wanted to provide a quick update as to what transpired on the wonderful Sunday afternoon.
I've been itching to get off -road with all my new upgrades for a shake down pass and Saturday night ended up opening up with a few plans that fell through and the wife said "well why don't you go camping?" And I said, heck yea i'll go! My brother also joined with his jeep and we did a quick late night easy trail ride down to a camp stop in Uwharrie. Woke up Sunday , packed up and hit the trails.
The rig performed amazing with all the new upgrades. The only thing I discovered VERY fast was that my TK1 sway bar was hitting the upper link against the inside sidewall of the tire when I started flexing hard... I imagine this is due to running 15psi vs 38 when I checked it out on the ramp... a bit of a bummer but I think it should be an easy fix by just flipping the link to the other side of the arm possibly, i'll have to check and see .. otherwise i'm not sure what I would do with it since the bar can't be shortened and i'm not looking to take it apart anyhow. A bit more track width in the rear would probably clear as well. The rubbing is TERRIBLE but I don't want to rip the side wall while flexed and crawling. More to follow on this.
After a few mild trails we did some intermediate-hard stuff (for Uwharrie anyway) and again the rig performed amazing. The rack gave me 0 issues, didn't feel any weird steering , came down decent on a few rocks and not a single nut or bolt moved according to my wax paint on each fastener. After making a couple of pretty decent climbs I felt super pumped. This was now around 11 a.m. and we were at the top of the hardest trail in the part (Daniel) and I decided that before we head out that I wanted to drive down the rock garden and crawl it back up on our way out.
This is where my day took a turn.. Due to shear lack of experience and being completely stupid, I attempted a hard line that I thought I was lined up pretty good for. after a few attempts I kept getting hung up and all 4 tires were spinning. I backed up and repositioned a bit to the passenger side thinking I just needed to bump over whatever was holding me up.. at this time I heard my brother give a quick honk behind me which I thought probably meant "hey hold up i'll come spot you" but I felt like I had it right finally... as he jumped out of his rig behind me to come tell me to stop.. I tried to give it a little bit of sauce and after feeling the rig bounce just a bit and come to a stop I heard him say "oh shit you just busted something bad".
I jumped out and ran around to the passenger side where all I saw gear oil spilling out pretty healthy. First thought was broken axle... but no, it was intact.. the leak was coming down onto the skid plate and was further down line. Diff?? Could I have actually cracked my damn diff?? There was no time to find out, I was at the bottom of the most difficult rock crawl section of the trail with what I thought was only 2wd left and a 6000+lb rig..
We sent my brother up first in case I needed him as an anchor point to winch/tow up, surpringly I was able to slowly crawl up in 3wd. Locking the front diff still gave me the drivers side wheel and I didn't hear the diff making any noises so I proceeded. At the top of the trail we dropped the skid plate and found the issue..... I completely blew apart the axle shaft tube on the passenger side (or whatever the hell you call this intermediate shaft/housing portion??) There was literally a hole a the top and I had no drive to that wheel.
After a quick judgement call about how much fluid I lost and should have left I decided it was worth trying to get the rig off the trails. We made it off and out of the woods, aired up and went to the outpost gas station just at the entrance. My thought was I can get some gear oil, dump in as much as I could, and limp the rig home slowly.
I then discovered that the couple of short miles off the trail literally separated the housing and at this point it was just hanging there on the other end of the RCV axle. . clearly there was no driving it home like that..
This is where my Stupid #2 came into play... "let's pull the axle, poor in gear oil and patch the housing closed so I don't overheat the diff".
2 hours later we had the axle pulled, where I discovered that I snapped the factory intermediate shaft not in 1, but in 2 place and it blew itself out of the housing. Imagine the force it took to do that??? I think what happened was a combination of being locked with rcv axles, going from spinning wheels to passenger side abruptly stopping against a large boulder, and possibly the skid pushing up on the diff when I bounced down onto the rock that caused the carnage. I don't know..
Needless to say at this point I was pretty happy and tired and read to get home. I gave it a quick drive onto the road and back to the parking lot and everything felt great. My brother went one way and I went the other.
This is where things got REALLY fun.
A mile down the road I started noticing that my wheel was cocked pretty far to the left to keep going straight.. I thought this is strange.. I just checked the rack and all the bolts and everything was still wehre it should be... what could be causing this?? In the middle of this thought, as I was going over a small bridge with guard rails on each side, the rig started pulling hard passenger. I was at about 50mph (maybe 55?) and started countersteering while getting off the gas and easing into the breaks. I coulnd't pull off immediately but saw the guard rail ending just ahead. At this point all I saw my passenger front wheel shoot up past my window bounce on the road behind me JUST in front of the car following me and then shoot off across the road about 20 feet in the air and into the woods down the embankment as I veered right hard on the break (with not much luck) .
By some grace of God, or whatever higher being you chose to believe in, I came to a very smooth stop when the spindle dug into the dirt on the shoulder. My initial thought was that my spacer has failed, I've see this before , or maybe sheared lugs or something , I've seen it.. In my disbelief I quickly called my brother and my exact words to him were "I'm ****ed dude, I just lost a wheel" .
Before I could process any of what really just happened, the car behind me stopped and the guy came around to ask if I was good and I told him everything is good and I was super lucky. The response I got went something like "Yea man definitely, but man.. I don't know how to tell you but it looks like you got you a little fire situation going".
I was confused as hell and got out of my rig to see what he was pointing at... yup... sure enough, I see 4 spots of dry grass on the shoulder smoldering with smoke starting to build up. One patch is probably 60-70 yards away and the other 3 closer. So in the 10 minutes following my wheel coming off I spent running back and forth stomping out the grass fire that I just started when my spindle sparked against the concrete as it shaved itself down. Luckily I was able to contain everything and keep it from spreading.
At this point I was able to finally come over and assess what happened. Pure confusion is the best I can describe what I saw.. No wheel, no rotor, no hub, no caliper, leaking brakeline from where it ripped out, and the bearing mounting hub still attached to the spindle. It then slowly came to me. When I realized what I just did it made literally sick to my stomach.... In my attempts to save some time and money to properly get the rig home I just about killed myself and possibly someone else around (luckily it's not a super busy road and the tire went off on its own journey with no harm).
My dumbass failed to realize that the reason the axle and axle nut are there are to keep the wheel bearing pressed into the hub... without the axle nut sandwiching the bearing, spindle and axle together it only lasted a mile before the bearing separated and shot the wheel off.. Stupid, stupid stupid me. Don't be like me. Don't be stupid.
All in all, this was the absolute best case scenario. I was lucky enough to have my brother with me to give me a hand both getting it off the trails and the ordeal that followed. And I was super fortunate to have my dad and his truck available AND him having a friend that let him borrow his skid steer trailed which we used to finally get the rig home. We spent a good 3 hours or so on the side of the road , in which time I was able to hike down and find my broken off wheel/rotor/caliper assembly about 30 yards off the road and about 70 ft down a steep embankment... talk about a word out to get that sucker back up out of the woods... I am still hurting.
Finding the wheel was blessing though... my brother had a genius idea to do what we just did but in reverse... use the axle to put the wheel on and hold together with the axle nut, which is what we did. after 30 minutes of trying we got it partially on and nut started. This allowed us to very quickly drive the rig backwards on the trailer and back down at home..
The damage:
So far, here is the best that I can tell from what I saw, thankfully the rack and everythign steering related I just did seem to be OK with no issues.
-blown up intermediate shaft and housing
-separated wheel bearing
-snapped off caliper
-torn off brake line
-2 lower spindle bolts are shaved just about all the way down
-Unsure on the balljoint bracket damage
-lower control arm is shaved pretty hard into the ball joint and for sure needs to be repalced
-torn CV boot on the good axle (DAMN IT! ) while we were offloading it .. the strap caught and tore the boot.. sucks.. but all in all I can't complain.
-my custom fender is pretty screwed down low, but nothing that can be fixed with fiberglass..
-snorkel pushed up and out of the bracket when the fender shifted up
Anyhow, sorry for the long-winded post. Don't be like me, don't be an idiot.
I am super fortunate on how everything played out since the outcome couldn't have been any better, but could have been SIGNIFICNATLY worse in many different ways.
Now to go search for parts...... and keep in mind folks... it's nice to have strong RCV axles... but don't be like me and forget that there is still a factory shaft in the mix there... I don't know how the RCLT HD Folks are going to plan on wheeling these toyota 8 and 8.5" diffs with the 37" tires reliably...
