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Wheeling in the Slop
Weekend of Damage and Recovery
  

Watch the Sparks Fly

Back on the hill Lewis was making progress.  Nearly up the hill he had a few hundred feet to go on a fairly mild incline.  Ascending on his own power, for some reason he was having problems with minor bumps.  Every time he'd hit a bump in the train the Jeep would die.  We were blaming the problem on what we thought was a newly installed but poorly tuned Holley Truck Avenger carburetor, which turned out not to be the case.  We later discovered that his winch was wired backwards and the positive side of the winch power cable was connected to the negative side of the battery!  With the Winch main power switch turned on, every time he'd hit a bump the winch would touch the grill of the Jeep, sending sparks flying and killing the engine!  Later when we discovered this, we stood puzzled for a while trying to understand how it didn't fry the battery.  A continuity check showed that the winch wasn't fully grounded to the frame.  We're guessing rust and paint kept it open enough to allow the Jeep to run at all.  When the winch cable was wired correctly, the Jeep fired right up and ran better than it ever did.  Imagine that.
  

Meanwhile Stephen was crawling around the open hillside, over old logs and around trees.  Little did he know a stick had jammed into and pierced his radiator.  He was quickly loosing coolant.
Back up to the Tree stand.  Again we paused here to inspect the Jeep and take a break.
 
Closer inspection of Lewis' front axle and we saw that the ears of the u-jointless front axle were making contact with each other and  was breaking off piece by piece.  They're going to have to be cut before the trip home.

At this point Stephen realized he was loosing coolant.  We saw the stick poking out of the bottom of the radiator.  He put a little water in then drove up the hill as far as he could before the temperature got high.  From there John hooked up his Toyota Pickup to the over-heated Four Runner and towed him back to camp.

 
 
       

  


 

 

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