[87TPIYJ]

Did you use a bottoming tap or cut your tap to get the threads you needed? Definitely 3/8 lines

 

[daddyjeep87]

Did you use a bottoming tap or cut your tap to get the threads you needed? Definitely 3/8 lines

I modified the tap several times to get the thread engagement I needed.

 

[daddyjeep87]

I finally installed my flush mount tail lights. I've had these in a drawer for I think 8 years... lol. I did also install some 2" back up LEDs too, but don't have a pic yet. One more step to road worthy.

 

[daddyjeep87]

We did a little wheeling over the weekend. It was nothing hard core, but fun to get out anyway. It was nice to finally be able to drive it to a buddies place instead of having to put it on the trailer. It went down the road fairly well. I need a track bar bushing badly so there was a fair amount of wander, but very little body roll or vibrations so I was real happy about that.

I decided to give up on the camper for now and focus on a couple more things on the Jeep list. First off was pulling that broken axle shaft out of the left front. Of course it broke at that tapered spot just before the splines. I have no idea why Dana put that there in the first place. It is obviously the weak point of the shaft... Oh well. New Yukon shaft is going in now.

I also got my back up lights kind of working. I would like them to come on when in reverse, but need to either buy the switch kit from Winters or fabri-cobble something. For now they are just on one of the toggle switches tied to my repurposed TJ PDC.

I also decided to see what it would take to get my Subaru WRX seats into the Jeep. Well, I broke off a couple bolts in the stock YJ seat so I guess I'm all in now. I started modifying the passenger side seat mount. First I cut about 1.5" out of the front to level everything since the WRX seats are much higher in the front. Now I need to lower the whole mount another 2". There is no going back now.

 

[daddyjeep87]

WRX seat install is officially done. It wasn't too bad of a project. The only thing I used from the YJ seats was the bottom of the inner bracket. I cut it off to have the contoured piece to match the floor. I used a piece of 2x4 tubing for both outer brackets and cut up some 1/8" plate to build the rest of the inner mounts.

Inner mount before adding a 10" long plate on the outside edge. These pieces were tacked in place while in the Jeep to set the height and positioning of the bracket. They also provide triangulation for strength.

Outer brackets... They were cut out of 2x4 .120" wall tubing and welded to the seat frame. It is a real simple design, but worked perfectly.

I also got all my new Scosche mounts in place on the dash to hold all my communication stuff... phone, Baofeng, and mic.

Finally, I built a new track bar bushing. Yep... I said I built a bushing, I found a polyurethane leaf spring bushing and turned it down to fit in my lathe (drill clamped into my vice with a zip tie around the trigger). I used the grinder with a flap disk to turn down the diameter. There should be much less wander now.

 

[daddyjeep87]

It's time.... I'm leaving for Bantam in an hour. Everything is done, Everything is packed. I hope I see some of you there.

 

[AZdEvilYJ]

Excited to see the wheelin pics!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[daddyjeep87]

Excited to see the wheelin pics!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Well I hate to disappoint you, but there were not many pictures taken. We were low on volunteers so I didn't get a whole lot of down time. We had to set up the trails which involved pre running everything and looking for trouble spots. We had a fair amount of trees down that required cutting and moving them. We have a pretty substantial network of trails so that give us some options so we spent a fair amount of time just laying out the trails and hanging ribbons and signs. Once the festival started I was in the drivers seat from open to close Friday and Sunday and most of the day Saturday. I was planning on playing a bit in our playground, but found out while on the big rocks that I was low on fuel. I suppose I should have looked inside the fuel cell. So I lost an hour running out to get gas with all of the traffic. I walked the festival and talked to a bunch of people thta I knew and made some new acquaintances which will help me grow the Youtube channel. I had a nice talk with the Jeep Doc and met the guys from Ohio Offroad. Of course spent some time with my buddies from Torq Masters (Torq and Aussie lockers), The BFG guys (I worked them all weekend to get me some free stickies.... while I drank their moonshine), and Simpson Off Road. I spent quite a bit of time in camp with Holly and Walter Fowler from Mischief Maker TV and met a few people with large instagram followings.... mostly because they have boobs.

Here is Halle from Mud For Makeup posing with DaddyJeep while I was on a parts run.

https://www.instagram.com/mud_for_makeup/?hl=en

All in all it was a pretty great year at Bantam. It was exhausting, but a great time as always. I spend pretty much all of my time guiding on the black trails and we did get a bit of rain right before the event and overnight on Saturday. This made the rocky climb section really tough. It was a great example of east coast wheeling... muddy slippery rocks with deep holes in between. We did have a bypass for that section and did shut down the good part for most of the event. I did have the opportunity to guide the guys from Dana Spicer on Sunday, advantages of being a long time volunteer I suppose, and we opened up the good stuff again. I got lots of great video of them and a few other people that got to go out with us, but not much of me. I actually posted a video every day we were there so I spent my evenings editing.

To further consume the little down time that I had I killed my fuel pump on Saturday. It was a 4 or 5 year old E2000 pump, so I should have expected it and had a spare pump. I ended up finding a pump at a vendor , but after installing it I found out that it only flowed 2.3 PSI. This was enough to limp it back to camp, but nothing more. I ended up picking up an in tank pump for a 90's Chevy truck with the 350 and dropping it into the fuel cell through the fill hole. It is certainly not a good fix, but it got me through the weekend. I also bent three of the four new fenders. I sue the rear tires to pivot off of trees a fair amount on tight turns and I guess I didn't design them as good as I thought. Oh well. While cleaning up the Jeep I noticed about a quarter turn of twist in my rear drive shaft. Time to either retube that one or just build another JY one. Anyway, here are a couple pics. Go check out my DaddyJeep Garage youtube for lots of good video.

Last... one of the "selfie spots" we have available for people to pose their junk on. This was after hours while we were taking down the inflatable welcome sign.

 

[daddyjeep87]

I promised a wheeling report from my last outing so here it goes... I blew off work on Friday so we could drag DaddyJeep down to Anthracite Outdoor Adventure Area (AOAA) to meet up with Hollie Fowler of MischiefMaker. Along with Hollie, there were quite a few other notable figures in the Youtube world. There were the guys from the Jeep Life Podcast as well as Josh and Ashley from Ohio Offroad.

I was scheduled to ride with the group on Saturday so we were on our own Friday, well at least most of it. We did end up finding the group and tagging along. We stuch with some easy stuff on Friday because I didn't want to risk breaking anything. We found some really tight blue trails and bent up my fender flares some more squeezing between trees. My oldest son got some seat time on some of these blues. Trail 34 was a good time and had this cool culvert at the end to flex in.

We ended up catching up with Hollies group and almost immediately broke the rear drive shaft that I just built. It turns out that I did a really crappy job welding in the tube. That's why we carry spares. I just ended my day there and got my obligatory pic in the coal bucket.

We had a pretty serious group of Jeeps on Saturday and headed over to the Eastern Reserve. We ran trail 102 out to a new section that was just cut. It was pretty gnarly and off camber. It took us quite a while to get the group through, do I get a bunch of good video of everyone there.

A pic that I pulled from my dash cam video showing just how off camber it was.

After we all got through there we worked our way to Fern Ridge where there are a bunch of black offshoots to play in. At the exit of the first one I ended up twisting my spare drive shaft completely in half. At least by this point it was already 2:00 so I did get to enjoy wheeling most of the day.

Luckily the way this section of trails was set up I was able to stay with the group and just shoot video. There was some crazy stuff on these black off shoots and I was really bummed I couldn't play. There was one climb in particular that none of the short wheel base guys would even try. I would have loved to give it a shot. Holly actually ripped off a brake line on that climb by slipping off a rock and dropping into a hole. My video is going to cover a bunch of really good stuff so keep an eye out for that. I am still editing another video that I need to get up before that one so I suppose I need to get to work. One last pic of our group from Saturday.

 

[daddyjeep87]

More Jeep things over the weekend. I went to the inaugural Great Lakes Jeep Jam with my oldest son. We visited a college for him in Erie first and then did Jeep stuff in the rain. It was a very wet weekend with flooding all over. The event was Thursday through Saturday. We missed Thursday because of the college visit. Friday I focused on video to help get the event some visibility for future events. I have about 200 individual video clips to put together into a handful of videos... ugh. They had a playground set up and a vendor area on site and had a bunch of off site activities. They did a hill climb at Peak and Peak ski resort, which was actually a little challenging due to the rain. They did a beach crawl down at Lake Erie every morning. The most exciting part was the offsite trails at a piece of private property that had some fun stuff. I walked the whole thing while filming the intermediate trail... in a monsoon. I did wheel the extreme trail, but my son and I still got a ton of footage. There was a fair amount of carnage on that trail, which eludes to the difficulty of the trail. I can't wait to share all the video. They had evening parties as well.

Here is a pic from the top of the ski hill.

 

[daddyjeep87]

I got the Jeep all cleaned up and took it to a car show over the weekend. I did not get any trophies, but the people enjoyed seeing it flexing a little on my display stand... ie. 4 wheels welded together.

I started building my RTI ramp yesterday out of some reclaimed oil field pipe. This pipe is way heavier than I expected. It is 2 3/8" .250 wall tubing. It will certainly be a strong ramp.

 

[NashvilleTJ]

I don’t care how strong that pipe is - it will still collapse under the weight of the awesomeness of you rig….

That’s cool. Can’t wait to see it completed.

 

[daddyjeep87]

I don't care how strong that pipe is - it will still collapse under the weight of the awesomeness of you rig….

That's cool. Can't wait to see it completed.

Thanks Jeff. I should wrap up the ramp this week. We will be using it for a Jeep Challenge at our county fair in a couple weeks. If anyone wants to make the trip to Mckean County Pa it would be great to have you

 

[daddyjeep87]

So much editing..... I don't know who's idea this YouTube thing was, but it is a lot of work. My latest video from the Great Lakes Jeep Jam...

 

[The_Goob]

Right it’s a lot of work haha. My last smorr video took forever to make. Turned out great yet it’s not getting watched hardly at all. Oh well.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[daddyjeep87]

Right it's a lot of work haha. My last smorr video took forever to make. Turned out great yet it's not getting watched hardly at all. Oh well.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yeah.... It sometimes makes no sense. The videos that I am real happy with don't get much traction, but others take right off. Then I see some other channels that hardly put any videos out growing like crazy. I don't know all the answers yet. I'm going to just keep at it. I still have four videos to edit now and will be shooting for another tonight.

 

[daddyjeep87]

I don't care how strong that pipe is - it will still collapse under the weight of the awesomeness of you rig….

That's cool. Can't wait to see it completed.

The ramp is done...sans paint and we put it to use last night at the County Fair. It worked great. It was very muddy and we had a guy slide off and get his front reciever stuck on one of the tread bar things, rungs maybe, whatever you want to call them. He tipped the ramp about half way over to get off and didn't bend a thing. It pulled just fine behind the Jeep too.

DaddyJeep testing out the obstacle course

 

[daddyjeep87]

I put out a real short Quick Tip video. This is something that I have done for years and felt it was worth sharing...

Now that I have my spare drive shafts handled it is time to get on the trail . We will be heading to Rausch Creek this weekend so watch for some videos soon. I hope to run the gnarly stuff this time.

 

[bgredjeep]

Nice tip on the bottle. I went and designed/made these to do the same job.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4907789

 

[daddyjeep87]

I got my YJOTM winnings installed on the Jeep. I will have a full install video coming soon.

Thanks again for the votes gents.