Finally got to trail test this thing today. Wow. What a friggin' beast. All of these photo's fall under the heading of 'steeper than it looks'.
Some of you may remember I joined the 'North Iowa off-road club" to gain access to some land to wheel on locally. Iowa is fugged when it comes to land rights, and there is nearly no publicly accesable land to wheel on. It's nearly all farm land, and you can own it right up to the rivers if you care to.
So, I joined a mostly jeep club to gain access to some private trails.
There were 8 jeeps, one bronco, and a pre-runner on the trails with me. Every single one of them commented on how impressed they were with what the 80 could do. The pres of the club (the guy in red above, with the red jeep) said I should change the name from Land Cruiser to "Land Crusher"..
I took the mud flaps off and the spare out to make more ground clearance room. Turns out I did very well. There was only one part of existing trail that worried me, and I had about 2" under the benches at that point.
Cutting some new trail was a different story. I dropped into a 'previously unseen' hole and tore the rear porch mounting position loose.:whoops: Oh well. I wanted sliders anyway. The nice thing about that part of the trail is that it was a 30 degree up slope over un-even terrain. Everyone was at the top watching me climb. The driver of the blue toyota pickup told me that he was impressed how the 80 was stuffing the tires on one side, full drop on the other, and still kept going without spinning the tires. It was good to hear after popping that running board off. It's salvageable, but like I said, I want sliders on it anyway.
I'm sorry I didn't get some pics of the nastier bits of the trail, it was tough to take pics and drive at the same time. The best parts of the day were the hill climbs. I took the 80 (rear locker engaged) up some hills that I didn't think were possiable to climb. Good thing I still had the hitch on, or I would have lost the rear bumper on a couple of them. All of the hills were 50-100 yard long, so they were a good test.
I had planned on taking the 60, but it's in surgery getting a new radiator to address cooling concerns.
Here's one of the smaller climbs on a new section of trail I helped clear out. Bought a $40 cordless Dewalt recip saw on e-bay that worked great today.
This is the creek crossing I was worried about. Goes from flat to a 3" 60 degree drop to the creek. By the end of the day a certain grey jeep that kept getting stuck here had knocked the top off the drop and made it much easer.
I literally went everywhere the jeeps and bronco did, and did it without spinning tires and ripping up the trails. Most people just got on it harder once they got to a difficult section, I was able to lock up the rears (never did need to lock the fronts) and just drive up it. There was a nice steep hill that was broken into two parts that I made a point of going up as slowly as possiable. Every single jeep had to get a 'running start' at the hill, I just crawled up it.
Wheeling in an 80 is just plain cheating.
No longer a
,
so that I can play with the 80 in the snow!
