Sunday, July 31, 2022

July Photo Dump -- Food, Jeep Maintenace, Yard Cocks...

LOL...saw a link to the bears at Brooks Falls, Katmai National Park live feed on YouTube and shared it with my team at work. Pretty much all of us are addicted to watching it now.

I looked over to see this one, I say the salmon just gave up -- "Oh Great Fury Gods, take me now!"

Bought 3/16" steel skid plates from Mountain Off Road. Read the directions and watched the videos, sure I can do that in my garage! Be a pain, but I can...and then my shoulder got arthritis and I went into PT...

Brought it to Ocean State Off Road / Barrette Fabrication and had them install them because every so often I did things like this to the factory skids:


Holy schnikes...strawberry poppy salad from Panera!



Cool VW truck



Missy bought a yard cock...she sent me a pic. I neeeeeeeeeeeeded one. They went to Brimfield antique market the next day and picked one up for me. (I paid).



Only pain with Ocean State Off Road was arranging for Eric to pick me up and bring me back.



I shall call him Fred.



That cot is...big.




Pretty sure this is at Galilee.




Trying a new way to grill corn




Came out well!




Sweet Jesus...it's an Airstream small enough to tow behind a Jeep!



On a conference call with work, waiting for Cindy.



Free at last!

Tailgate latch was stuck, I had hit it with WD-40 a while back but now it was stuck stuck and closed. Took way to long for it to finally release.



Took both the locking mechanism and the latch out.

Rinsed both with brake cleaner, penetrating oil to get things moving. Rinse with brake cleaner, then sprayed with dry lube. Latch needed a bit of Scotch Pad work to remove some surface rust on striker pin (?).



This is the 2nd round of duct tape; first round had made it out west and back.



Had a good visit with Cindy for a few hours while I puttered on the Jeep.

I'll bring some Goo Gone camping this week and clean up the duct tape residue then.




Lunchtime! Had the remains of the Porterhouse from last Sunday before I did the Saturday dump run to gnaw on.



At the dump, the thought did cross my mind that an RV Awning over my garage door would be kind of cool...



Sunday morning...don't know if I'll try it again, but strapped the Recovery Boards to the spare. Difficult to think of a situation now that I know what a Rubicon can do, but I was thinking if camping in the Jeep and I need to put stuff under it like my chair to keep out of dew/rain, I could use these upside down to keep things off the ground.

Just it took way longer to rig this up than I expected.





This style ratchet strap has a fabric loop for it to hook to itself.





That dolly is nice for handling a tire -- jacked up that corner (to give me more room to fix the fender), set the dolly, removed lugs, pulled tire straight out. Was pretty much lined up just right to put it back on afterwards.



So, when fixing fenders on a Wrangler JK that are really munged up is to take the three pieces all the way off and re-assemble off the Jeep. (Tthis started flapping on the Mass Pike so I got off the next exit and pulled the fender and liner off.)





Improvised repair; this marker light has been loose for a long time but got even worse.



Probably could've gotten side cutters under the head to pull up & cut the plastic rivets, but these I tried cleaning them drilling out the center.




These are not side cutters! But they are what, if you have them, should be used to trim plastic rivets and wire ties -- they cut flush so you're not going to cut your self on the zip tie/rivet later. Side cutters don't cut as close.



All back together and ready to slide on. Push the fender in and bolt the support down and life is good.



Connecting the marker life was a pain -- I ended up grabbing some plastic scraps from the floor and making a shim to hold the button "open" so it would slide into place then removed the shim.




Robby Layton on the 'tube...



And it's Dinner Time (which may or may not be a Robby Layton pun :D )


Conquerer UEV-490

Dayum...but expensive.

Saturday, July 2, 2022

Opus OP Lite

Had YouTube playing while doing Saturday housework...it landed on a guy doing walk throughs at various RV / Offroad / Overlanding shows.

And I've become dangerously enamored by this camper:

https://www.opuscamper.us/lite/