I have an Ultimate Adventure or two under my belt, so you'd think that by now I would have figured out how to prep a vehicle for the most grueling off-road trip in the country (that doesn't involve a stopwatch, anyway).
While my experiences have taught me a thing or two, life has a way of throwing you a few curveballs. In my case, it involves facilities, or more accurately, a lack of them. I relocated across the country not too long ago and would have fully expected to be settled into my new garage (with living quarters attached, otherwise known as a "house") by now. Unfortunately, that is not the case. So instead of having my tools at hand to whip my buggy into shape, the majority of them are buried 15 feet deep in a 20 foot storage unit that's packed floor to ceiling with the rest of my worldy posessions. In my current situation I have the equivalent of a 1-car garage to work in and a slightly overgrown bag of tools that I would consider more trail-worthy than shop-worthy. To make matters worse, I don't yet have a network of gearhead friends to impose upon to help me get done what needs to be done. Because of all this, I had to face the unthinkable: taking my Jeep somewhere else to have some work done. This doesn't happen. Not to me. I still shudder a little bit even thinking about trusting someone else working on my Jeep.
But let's back up a little bit. I broke every rule in my book last year with Ultimate Adventure and showed up with a brand new untested rig with untested parts and a 1,000-mile on / off-road trip ahead of me. Time and again I've seen guys take a rig they know and trust completely apart for Ultimate, only to have the multitude of "improvements" they made bite them in the rear halfway through the trip or sooner. This trip is all about endurance and over the years I've actually tried to talk people out of eliminating a simple known weakness on their rig. My thinking is that because the upgrade was untested, there was no telling what the upgrade would do to parts further up, or farther down, the line. After all, it's better to prepare for what you know will go wrong than what might, right? But even more common is the brand-new-rig syndrome, where you show up with 5 miles on a vehicle you expect to live out of for the next week and get you where you need to go every day over the next 1200 miles. This past year I joined the magazine boys in the latter group. Predictably, breaking my own rules netted the expected results: a lot of late nights and nearly constant paranoia trying to anticipate the unknown habits of a new rig. Actually it did pretty well, but the on-trip upgrade of a PSC steering ram to cure a tendency to death-wobble on the street had unintended consequences: mounting it to a home-made track bar bracket on the axle caused the bracket to fail not once, not twice, but three times during the trip. The very last patch by Caleb and the awesome guys at Hobart with their top-secret trail welder held well enough to get the buggy through several more off-road trips and most of the way through Moab this year. But it was in Moab, after a year and lots of trail miles, that the 20-minute trail patch finally failed (breaking the steel around the welds and not the welds themselves, by the way.) It was clear I had an issue that needed to be addressed or major headaches would follow.
So back to my initial problem: No tools and something that's gotta get fixed. While chanting "I'm not that guy!" I loaded up the buggy and took it to one of one of the very few shops I could trust to not only work on my rig but get the job done right the first time. Randy Ellis Designs has developed a hard-earned reputation as a shop that will take care of things the right way. Randy listened to what I needed, told me what he suggested, and gave me an estimate of what it would take to fix my ailing track bar bracket. He not only turned the job in a quarter of the time he estimated, he did it under his initial quote. But most important, the new bracket is as good-looking as it is strong. I could not have done a better job and there is no way my meager fab skills would have turned out a piece as nice as his work. He also pointed out a number of other things that needed attention (some of which I'd noticed, some of which I had not) with the eye of someone that understood what this trip was all about. I would not hesitate to send anyone his way, no matter how small (in my case) or big a job.
For a change, the prep list is relatively light now that the main issue is fixed. Aside from the usual PM, there are some exterior mods in the works as well as creating a few more nooks and crannies to stash tools and equipment for the trip. But before I forget, there are the small issues of a bent front axle, a damaged oil pan, adding on-board air, registering it in my new home state (which is going to be a chore), rigging up a parking brake...come to think of it, it's just another mad dash to prep for another Ultimate, and I wouldn't have it any other way!