Sequoia trip: What I learned (1 Viewer)

[NLXTACY]

About a month ago @jtwopark called up and was asking about doing a camping trip with a few 80 Series owners. As the date came closer there were a few more that came including @Dr Gil @Qball @socallove and @ontopofm and Erik but I can't for the life of me remember his MUD name. Hopefully they will chime in.

At the last minute I had to change out my fan clutch and water pump because I just didn't want to risk any overheating issues. So literally the day before I embarked on that project. Dumb to do when you are about to leave on a trip but I was confident. Too confident. I was trying to take notes and document what I was doing for my over-heating thread. Then I got a call from another local mudder that needed help so I dropped everything and made a three hour detour to give him a hand on his issue and we finished up in three hours. Now I had an issue. I found out I didn't have the correct fan to use with @landtank 's new Orange Hub mod and its 20 mins til 6 when SOR closes. Oh crap! @Dr Gil to the rescue. He went right from work and drove up right as they were closing and got my fan!! Finished up the install with zero time to test. I only had time to pack. One problem...I had to cut the SuperCharger belt to get it off because I lost my SC Wrench.

The drive out from the San Fernando Valley to the 5, to the 99, to the 180 and into Sequoia was completely uneventful and a piece of cake considering I was sans Super Charger. Now the interesting part...

It was 105º when I left my house at around 3pm in West Hills. The drive was about 350 miles and had to climb the Grapevine and of course climb the 180 up into King's Canyon. Well with @landtank 's Orange Hub mod my temps never ever reached above 193º the entire drive. No overheating when idling, or climbing to driving or anything. My temps NEVER went up the entire drive. Amazing mod and can not be any more impressed with this hub selection. Worth every single penny. If you want more info of the Orange Hub clutch or my install of the Orange Hub clutch.

So what is it like to drive a SuperCharged truck without the SuperCharger actually working? Surprisingly well BUT I think that has a lot to do with my completely new coolant system and my completely new and upgraded engine rebuild and new CATs. These three combined give me far more power than a stock 1FZ and it just scoots just fine. I forgot to ziptie the bypass but this seems to cause zero issues so I'm not so sure that is even needed to be honest.

Once we got there @jtwopark and @socallove and @Qball already had dinner going so all we needed to do was use one of John's squatter tents while my kid set up his own tent. This is where we figured out how much food we forgot but how much food we didn't need because these guys brought SO MUCH FOOD! On top of that Erik (still need to find his MUD name) brought a rice cooker!!!! Camping with fresh cooked rice?!?!?! Whaaaaaaaat?! Note to self, get a rice cooker, its worth it.

 

[NLXTACY]

So on to more of the tech part of this discussion...

The first issue that came up was hoses. One hose in particular. The #1 bypass (I think) that comes off the Heater Control Valve. @jtwopark was running his truck so that his batteries would charge up since he was using his truck for most of the lighting at camp. All of a sudden there was coolant on the ground. Once the hood was open he could see the coolant spitting from a crack in the hose. So very lucky that this happened actually AT the campsite and not on the trail somewhere. He got a container under the truck to capture the dripping coolant and we starting looking for a spare hose. Its a hard 90º so a straight piece of 5/8" wouldn't exactly cut it. I had a spare in my WagonGear tailgate ready to go. But @socallove had one in shiny red silicone, and of course no young Asian man can say no to shiny red silicone hoses A 30º extended needle nose set of pliers and some lube for the hose later and John was good to go again. A quick inspection showed the Heater Control Valve to be in good shape but typically I would recommend to just go ahead and change it. In fact, if you use the aftermarket (Dorman I think) heater control valve it will actually close 100% whereas the OEM one does not fully close. This is good for those of use in the miserably hot South Western states.

You can see the condition of the hose itself in the pic. The outside of all the hoses look ok. But the inside of the one cracked was totally junk. All of his hoses need to be changed out asap especially the PHH.

 

[NLXTACY]

Next up, lets talk gas. Qty and containers.

Here in Sequoia there are only two place to get gas and both are relatively close to each other. You can go and get gas on the 180 close to Cedar Grove Camp and visit the countries last gravity fed gas pumps, which luckily has premium, or you can drive up another 15 miles to the Hume Lake Cult...I mean Christian Camp

The first thing is to get a better lay of the land and where the gas pumps are. I had a general idea of what my gas mileage was and relatively how far everything was from each other. What I didn't keep in mind was how much fuel basic, slow moving off-roading actually sucked up. This made me nervous because not only was I low on fuel but because of the angles of some of the climbs and decents there was a good possibility of running out of fuel while on a hill and that would just suck.

After making my way to the bottom of the first trail I decided to go ahead and fill up. Now I brought two 5-gal NATO and NATO-knockoff tanks with me. What I did not bring was a NATO nozzle only the knock-off nozzle. For whatever reason these don't seem to be interchangeable because the stupid nozzle leaking like a sieve. No problem, I'll use the Super Siphon...oh wait...I forgot mine in the drawer because I was packing last minute. Ugh. Luckily @ontopofm had one that I used. So after a couple of movements that made my wife and kid giggle, we were back in business.

The other issue is the container that is used for fuel. Someone in the group, who shall remain nameless, used fuel inside of water containers. Booo! If you are going to do that at least spray paint the canister red or green. Mistakes can easily be made ya know?

 

[NLXTACY]

Next up lets talk brakes and Hi-lift...

My brakes just started squealing. I was going to stop off at the dealer and just pick up a set of pads and just change them at the campsite but we got out of town so late that I decided to skip it. Well lucky for me my brakes held up just fine but the wear indicator was a touch annoying.

The issue though wasn't with my brakes but with @ontopofm 's brakes. He had to jet out early after running the Buck Rock Jeep Trail because his "brakes failed". He had to ride his emergency brake just to get his 4" lifted and 37s with Hummer H1 wheels to finally slow down enough to actually stop. Then he saw smoke coming from his right front caliper. It was already dark and it was Saturday night. Nothing was going to be open and we were discussing just heading out to the Napa in Fresno and getting a room so that we could pick up a set of pads in the morning.

But then it dawned on me that what if the caliper was just sticking bad on one side and it wasn't a pad issue? What if I could just swap sides on the pad to give him some grab to make it down the hill safely with his family? The wheel had to come off.

37s and a steel H1 wheel comes in at right around 150# per tire. Couple that with the requirement of what looks like a 6" wheel spacer and this setup to me just looks nuts. Like crazy nuts. Now I could see why he made a crane system for his spare tire. That tire was incredibly heavy. And @ontopofm is a lot smaller than me.

The Hi-lift, although new looking, was a pain to use because it needed to be lubed. Due to the lack of properly lubed parts the hi-lift would not easily switch back and forth from lifting to lowering. It took a lot of strikes against the mechanism to finally let the Hi-llift lower.

With the tire off I could finally get a better look at the pad/caliper situation. They were fine. Plenty of material. In fact they looked almost new sitting in their blue, rebuilt calipers. I did see plenty of bluing along the outside edge of both sides of the rotor. This thing heating up really bad. At first I assumed the brakes were over taxed with the weight of the truck and the tires. Then I started asking some pointed questions...

It turns out he ONLY used the brakes when going down hill on the trails. Never once downshifting into either 2nd or even low for that matter. Second issue was because of his 1.5' body lift he didn't have the correct extension bar on the 4WD hi-lo shifter so he could never get the truck into 4WD LOW. So his entire off road excursion was done using DRIVE and 4WD HI and lead footed the brakes. Yes, of course the brakes are going to fail. They will fail every time. So we had a quick talk about it and he feels a lot better about things now. I used the opportunity to talk to each guy there individually and discussed what I found out about his truck. I'm not trying to out the poor guy but I think its ALWAYS worth discussing because there will always be someone that just doesn't know and its better to look foolish repeating something to someone who already knows this info than it is to not say something and then have that one newbie that gets into a gnarly accident...or worse. I do think we tend to treat everyone on the MUD board with kitt gloves sometimes. We take for granted that people know what they are doing with their chosen vehicles. But that isn't always the case and we should ALL be using the opportunity to teach others.

 

[NLXTACY]

Finally the PO302.

Driving up to the campsite I had no Super Charger belt installed and thus no Super Charger benefit. Two days later we used a crow bar, some 550, a ratchet strap and a roof rack in order to get the tensioner compressed enough to get my spare Super Charger belt install. Special thanks to @socallove to coming up with the idea. Worked like a charm. So now I had the Super Charger all ready to go and I was happy. Because of the added power I had to scoot up the mountain they all decided to make me the group leader since I was the fastest on four wheels

Well, my fun and enjoyment lasted only 20 mins because once we got on the road I went full PO302. Not just a little hiccup here and there with some bad gas mileage. Nope, I was driving with a dead cylinder. I had to keep the truck at either 30-34mph or 69-74 mph because any other speed and the truck would buck like crazy. I was really worried the motor mounts were going to tear out of the truck. s***!

Sure enough as I started playing around with the harness I found that the idle was getting affected. s***! So screw it. I drove it. I drove it off-roading and I drove it 350 miles back home. It drove like crap of course unless I hit those two speed sweet spots. Even with only 5 cylinders my truck walked over everything and I was still quicker then everyone else. Every now and then a PO171 would rear it's ugly head but not too often. I've got a harness to fix again. I'll do a betterer job this time around. I purchased some heat shield for the EGR tube while I was at it.

So I'll go ahead and throw in a couple of pics and a link to my Google+ account if you want to actually see the pics and video I took:
https://plus.google.com/+JoeyRomero/posts/cuouR8nmBL4

 

[socallove]

Fu = Phuc @ontopofm
I do not know Erics' mud name.

 

[socallove]

I agree, fresh cooked rice at camp with all that food we had was an awesome addition to our feast, in fact it would have been very incomplete if Eric didn't have fresh rice for us

 

[The Jayhawker]

Great read! Thanks for sharing.

 

[alleycat]

Great post - enjoyed that.

 

[LINUS]

Cool writeup - good balance of tech with applied real world cause / effects woven in through the story.


A personal takeaway for me is to go lube the Hi-Lift I leave hanging on my bumper - it lives there & here in WA that means rust/corrode. Hate to admit it's only seen use well under 10 times in 4-5 yrs living out there, twice was lent to others who prob cuss me & my lazy ways.

Good stuff J!

 

[1973Guppie]

nice, I wanna come next time!

 

[NLXTACY]

nice, I wanna come next time!

We are already talking about the next trip.

 

[landtank]

it's time you put that engine harness in, don't ya think.

 

[ewillis]

We are already talking about the next trip.

Looks like good times! Count me in for the next trip and increase the caucasian to Asian ratio!

 

[NLXTACY]

Looks like good times! Count me in for the next trip and increase the caucasian to Asian ratio!

I know right. My Asian persuasion was totally apperant this trip

 

[jtwopark]

hahahaha! just for the record majority of the rice was me! the RICE COOKER was ERIC! JUSY FOR CLARIFICATION.......SOCALOVE THANKS FOR THE HOse......you saved my butt!

 

[surfpig]

Cool writeup - good balance of tech with applied real world cause / effects woven in through the story.


A personal takeaway for me is to go lube the Hi-Lift I leave hanging on my bumper - it lives there & here in WA that means rust/corrode. Hate to admit it's only seen use well under 10 times in 4-5 yrs living out there, twice was lent to others who prob cuss me & my lazy ways.

Good stuff J!

Olive oil works fine in a pinch.

 

[Cruiserdrew]

So what did you guys do other than camp out, pose, and make rice?

Sounds fun, but we want to see some trail carnage and more pics of the giirrrllll.

 

[LINUS]

it's time you put that engine harness in, don't ya think.

Perfect project to do the evening before the next trip.​

 

[NLXTACY]

it's time you put that engine harness in, don't ya think.

If only I didn't think I was smarter than I actually am. I thought I nipped that issue in the bud so I sold off the harness.

I am the prime example of "live and learn"