My rig is not that modified for typical wheeling that is in my region. I do pretty well with it's current stature. Really not much of a lift, but good protection and good spotting can get you a long way.

On eclipse day headed out to perform trail maintenance for my club's adopted trail. Rolled away with no beauty marks, but did destroy the steering stabilizer, tweaked the exhaust downstream of the muffler, and really put a shakedown on the winch. Pics to come.

This was a good quality shakedown. This video is using a GoPro Hero and its mounted to my Thule rack in the bed. I'm not super videographer and don't plan to be as that would take much needed time required for building the rig.

Anyways, playin vids, features, etc. and hoping to give those who watch an idea of what a fullsize can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd1ScEvF3SM

 

Cool! What music is that?

 

That would be, Down By Law "I wanna be in AC/DC " . My favorite band, AC/DC that is.

 

I made some brownie points with zman! Really hard to do.

Here are pics of my boo boos

Steering Stabilizer - Getting replaced for free as its a Napa part.



Exhaust Tweak

Looks good for clearance here! But how and where did I gain that? I believe it was from a water crossing, which still had snow built up on both sides of the bank. This is how you learn what kind of departure angle you have...or don't have.



Oh that's how it moved! lol





I'm hoping its just rotated as the muffler didn't move. So I'll try to rotate it back. Later modify to tuck it up better.


Bumper Tweak -- I used this thing 4 times. It was the last pull that did this tweak and was completely expected with how the front end was situated. Dropped down into a creek butted up against a wall of ice. This on the last mile or so of trail (6pm) and everyone was just done for the day, therefore a bit of haste was not good.

The top bolt takes most of the load and the sliver of frame rail horns are really slivers. This setup I had was never meant to be done in this manner. It was a compromise this summer. Had I paid more attention to what was going on, this would not have happened. I'm providing this as an example to anyone. I'm aware that bumpers like road armor/rhino, alien patrol, buckstop etc are quite similar in mounting. They all use the stock bolt locations. I think they also pull out the same top hole location. I have to confirm on my buds truck as his does rock back and forth.

In any event, I'll be making a proper bracket or biting the bullet and boxing the whole thing in and compromising on NOT having a bolt on winch bumper. Main point, it was safe and it was uniform deformation (both sides). The height was perfect though with my tire/lift as I would not have cleared many things on this trail. Something to note with minimal lift.

Note, what you don't see is 0.25" plate on the inside of the bumper bracket. it's not all by itself. I really loaded this thing up. I had no problems on the previous pull. The last picture is pull #1, which was the toughest obstacle on this trail.

 

Fixed the video to show "annotations". Forgot to hit Publish button to make them live. They help describe a little bit. In the video's "Description" section is link to video showing POV from the front with a Jeep going through.

 

Looks like a good time man!

Might I suggest either a 2nd video camera on the driver side or perhaps running it in the dash at an angle or something in the front to allow a better view of the track?

 

Sure. Send me $200 for that 2nd camera!!

Originally was wanting to mount on the front, but not enough time to properly secure it.

 

Round 2 on the bumper. Ready to rock. Will be doing some tube bends later.

 

Looks really solid. Had you smacked the first one off any rocks yet? Nice work!

 

The first one (as shown in sigpic) + rocks? No, it was high enough that it cleared them. This second one will b/c it's down lower. So it'll get smacked until the lift gets put on.