Today has a bit more exciting news. First of all I put my one good bump stop in just to see how it is, too long unsurprisingly. I'll pull it out and shorten it to a 2" stroke. Contacted FOA and they're gonna send me new schrader valves, so I'm just gonna take both bump stops apart and fix the bad one and shorten both of them. As I understand it there's just a sleeve that controls how far they can droop, and you just cut a new sleeve out of electrical conduit or something similar. After doing all that I did a quick suspension check and came across the bottom cap which screws into the seal retainer and has it's own O-rings integral to it, had somehow become unscrewed and moved down on the drivers side... No idea how that happened, maybe FOAs policy of being finger tight on that was supposed to be better than when I rebuilt it and cranked it down... Anyways, fixed that.
Now it gets exciting. Plan was to go up providence canyon and take some pictures.
The truck seemed to be doing well, and making sure I was controlling my speed and where I was placing the truck I could avoid having my one non-bump stopped tire from rubbing for the most part. Somehow I only got one video, I guess I missed the record button when I thought I hit it but this is a screenshot I did grab. I hit this little bump in the road at about 40mph, I wanted to get off the ground a little but not totally wreck the back end.
Ironically I actually ****ed the front end :cry2:
That's right, the passenger spindle--a "new" one, but the same side that failed at the beginning of the year--snapped again. Though this time it was on the top, which ultimately is a MUCH easier trail fix than the bottom since the upper arm is barely loaded nominally and is just there to keep the spindle pointing up (versus the lower arm which holds the truck essentially).
I'm honestly not sure how this happened, I checked my bump stop on that side and it still had plenty of pressure (I just depressed the valve for an instant). It looked like the passenger side bottomed out the bump stop, I'm just guessing this from the fact I couldn't see any dirt rings on the bump stop which usually you can see on the shock how far the suspension compressed based on where it's clean from the wipers/O-rings/seals going down the shaft. So if that's true, then the bump stop probably fully compressed and that created a radial load spike on the upper arm and spindle, and the spindle just couldn't take it. That explains why the outer portion disconnected as the spindle moved inwards. I knew my compression valving was soft but I didn't feel like I actually bottomed out, and in the video the drivers side doesn't look like it bottoms out. Maybe that bump stop was low on pressure, maybe the shock was, maybe it just happened to land harder, I don't know.
Not sure if the CV is okay, boot got jacked which I'm also not sure how that happened since it looks like it rotated... Really not sure how that happened especially since the slip joint is on the inner CV so I must've sheared the outer CV to get the boot to spin like that. I was in 2WD though so that's the weirdest part.
As I said, fairly easy trail fix to get it home.
I had to revise the ratchet strap job twice but by the end I was able to do 20mph through the back roads and felt safe and everything seemed solid.
And a final picture I took before driving it back, luckily where I was is essentially a dirt road. Cartzo and I come here fairly often since it has some of the deepest woops from some puddles that form every year plus some decent jumps on the road which I assume are meant to just channel water away. So unless you go further up there's nothing technical luckily. Tomorrow I'm gonna try to weld the two halves back together, tack-back gouge-weld, make it strong enough to get to school but then later this week I'm thinking I'll fully box the spindle and gusset everything I can together. Obviously this was a totally stock spindle, not gusseted with the Total Chaos gussets like my last set, but I want to go more indepth than that since the TC gussets don't reinforce the base much where you develop your peak moment and overall are pretty simplistic so I want to really beef these up since I'm gonna have to run them for a few months. Anyways, fun time, easy fix relatively speaking, truck wasn't hurt otherwise (though I lost one of my rear fenders somewhere and need to go back for it), and luckily all my homework is due towards the end of the week and not tomorrow!
. I can't say I've seen any broke at the base. I have seen multiple broke on the top and the TC gusset is the simplest solution. You could easily beef the TC gusset, then you don't have to spend the time making the rest. They're cheap insurance for sure. Good Luck.
