D-Day fall off road 4x4 event Oct 7-9

[Stagg]

Terry? My evil-genius plan is to go work with him this weekend... and get twice and much done, so we can take the next week off and play.

 

[RealCavDog]

So . . . any idea on the projected turnout ? I have it made, being local, and I guess this was a bit of a short notice event for some folks.

Looking forward to putting some faces to the names !

 

[Flyingvan911]

The first one in August probably had 15 people and 6 or 7 MV's. This is a new rally so it will take a while to grow. It was very fun yet peaceful at the same time and had a SS family feeling. Half or more of us hang out frequently so we were already among friends. Half the guys are familiar with the park from the Eastwind airsoft game held there annually.

 

[MWMULES]

Not sure what I will be driving down but it looks like I will be able to make it.

 

[jasonjc]

Hey realcavdog you are about the closest SS member to me.

D co 277AVN REGT 1st CAV '91-'92 FRIST TEAM!

 

[RealCavDog]

I see that !

Hoping to meet a few of the folks next Friday, the only day I'm free, BUT . . . wouldn't you know it, a fly in the ointment !

Went in the A3 with a friend of mine, and his son, up to the 4 States truck show yesterday, ( We both worked there several times over the years ! ), and noticed an oil leak from my right front rear outer wheel seal when we got back to the house !

The only issue I have had since I picked it up, and it being fairly minor, I may have to wait for the fix and may drive it to Wyandotte as is, being as close as it is ! Appears to be only on the outside, none on the inside, so appears that the brakes are dry, so . . .

Safety first, so will be looking at it closer a bit later today, but time is at a premium , so will have to see !

Hope to meet a bunch of you guys, as it is only a 30 minute A3 drive from me, but I realize most folks won't get there till Saturday !

 

[Aswayze]

I say we start us up a tradition of bringing random swap meet stuff along!

I'll have:

A selection of boarding ladders, some from M109 shop vans, some similar ones made of Aluminium (MUCH lighter)

I can bring tail lights, black out lights, trailer air hoses, Deuce Bench seat, CUCV antenna mounts, Humvee antenna mounts... I'll have to look around and see what else I've got around and add to this as we go.

What have you guys got?

 

[jasonjc]

I say we start us up a tradition of bringing random swap meet stuff along!

I'll have:

A selection of boarding ladders, some from M109 shop vans, some similar ones made of Aluminium (MUCH lighter)

I can bring tail lights, black out lights, trailer air hoses, Deuce Bench seat, CUCV antenna mounts, Humvee antenna mounts... I'll have to look around and see what else I've got around and add to this as we go.

What have you guys got?

Well..... any one need some 11.00R20 XL's I have 9 like new I need to sell bad. $1500 with or with out 5 ton rims.

 

[Flyingvan911]

I could use a 9.00-20 with good tread if anyone has one. One of mine is cupped really bad but I'm not going to swap it until after the trip. It would suck to change it then get a flat from a sharp rock.

 

[Aswayze]

Ok here’s the plan for those of us who are convoying down from Kansas City (and points west if you count Stagg). I figured I’d post it up here in case anyone wants to catch up with us and join in.

Flying Van and I are leaving from my place at around 15:00 today.

We’ll meet up with Stagg at 15:30 during a fuel stop at the 199th street exit off of US 69. Perhaps meet up with MWMules there too and likely Furnas.

Proceed south down US 69 to US 400 east just before Baxter Springs taking it over to I-44.

I-44 to the Mo 43 exit heading South to Seneca. We’ll probably stop and eat there since there’s a few big truck stops where we can fit into without causing a major disturbance.

From there on into Seneca where we jump on 60 west briefly before turning south onto Cayuga road which we follow down to 175 road and on into the park.

Probably be rolling in around 20:00

Most of us are running VRC-12 radios and our convoy freq is 51.00 MHz with the squelch set to old since Flying Van’s 150 tone decoder isn’t running right.

If you want to meet up, we should be easy to spot!

 

[MWMULES]

Change 2 to revision 4, it doesn't look like I will be making it down. I took the M890 to the parade of heroes last night, about 20 miles away at the Kansas speedway. Truck ran fine on the way up, but when it was time to come home the 34 year old wiring went wacky, amp gauge would swing to discharge, lights would dim or go out then back to charge no real pattern to it. If I would let off on gas sometimes it would stop running all together, I would drop into neutral, hit the key and it would fire right up! Good thing was I had a strong battery and was following GBOOTH back home so when the lights would go out I was covered. I am trying to figure out where the gremlins are, but don't know if I will have it up to speed by move out time. If I was still young and dumb a 3 1/2 hour trip down would not have stopped me.

 

[Aswayze]

I left out of KC around 3:00 heading south to rendezvous with Stagg and Master Chef just slightly south of town. David was going to meet up with me at my place but was running a tidge late so decided to meet us there as well. Furnas was going to meet us somewhere along the way using the much higher ground speed of his Pontiac to insure an easy meet up.

Stagg beat me to the rendezvous at 199th street by about 10 min and flipped on his VRC-12 to see where I was. I was just coming up on 135th street when I got his call and filled him in on the situation. Once I arrived, I fueled up and went shopping for scooby snacks and bottled water while we waited for David to show up. David rolled in a few minutes later and we decided to stick his rear cover on prior to moving out since it would be dark when we got to Oklahoma and it's a lot easier to put those on when it's not pitch black.

All that done, we hit the road! It never ceases to amaze me how pleasant it is to drive deuces on the road in convoy when you've got inter vehicular comms. It's easier to stay awake, stay entertained, stay aware of hazards, wave at the people who need waved at, give people the finger who need to be given the finger etc.

Master Chef managed to keep Furnas up to date as to our location and route so before long he had caught up with us. We had noted on previous trips a few locations that seemed suitable for meal stops along the route that we could fit several large trucks into and decided to try stopping off at the Chinese buffet in Northern Pittsburg for dinner. It was ok but being very American style Chinese; Stagg and I quickly dubbed it the Happy Clapping Monkey French Fry Buffet. To sum it up, it was better than being poked in the eye with a stick, but not as good as eating somewhere else. Next time, we're going to try Pichlers Chicken Annies since they also seemed to have ample parking spaces and at least are supposed to have fried chicken and french fries...

From there, we rolled on south towards our destination. Not being sure of the status of the Oklahoma State Route 137 super short cut, we opted to cut over at Baxter Springs to I-44 then from there dropping in through Seneca to get to D-Day arriving on site at perhaps 9:00 or so.

We rolled around a bit and finally settled into a nice spot and parking the deuces in a line konked out just after calling Brett and Warnick to let them know where we were camped. Warnick showed up first at around 11:30 (I think). We were all asleep and he sort of crept in there with his Explorer and got out to take a look around. With many of the trucks 1/2 way through being painted and most of the bumper numbers off, you could tell he wasn't really sure if this particular line of deuces was the line of deuces he was looking for. Naturally I screwed with him for a while before finally letting him know he was in the right spot. Brett and Trucker showed up a while later but since Trucker had been doing much of the painting, there was no fooling those guys, they settled right in.

 

[Aswayze]

Saturday dawned as a lovely day. We had noted that Seneca now rated two Donut shops now so we determined that we should have a donut shop show down between the previous stand by, daylight donuts, and the new pretenders to the Seneca donut shop throne.

Once we got back and all votes tallied in favor of Daylight Donuts we immediately set about having "fun".

Trucker, Warnick and I headed over to the new NATO camp location and offloaded a bunch of fire wood then headed over to the Motor Pool area to hitch up our M105 trailer where we caught up with Brett who had dropped off his trailer and was working on getting the BTR-40 fired up. The BTR seemed to have ample power but was not cranking over due to a bum battery terminal so I left Trucker with him to tug him with the F-350 and Warnick to gesture wildly at Trucker from the top of the BTR so that they could just tug start it.

Not long after I showed up back at camp, Brett and Warnick buzzed by with the BTR so it obviously fired up just fine.

With that out of the way, we again set to having fun!

We offloaded the "new" GP Medium from Staggs truck and rolled it out for patching, Furnas set up his GP Small and set to conducting repairs on it, Brett and Warnick rolled back over to the motor pool to offload the contents of the Unimogs bed and get it fired up and brought back over, and Trucker, Stagg and David got to work painting trucks... We continued at around this pace occasionally stopping to goof off, nap, or cheer Dewayne as he rolled past in his just fixed mechanical mule.


Towards the end of the day, we finally got everyone saddled up and did some trail riding with Dewayne and the gang. (We actually had gone riding a few times prior but not as a group.)

Everyone got around quite well and Warnick even managed to eventually master driving the Unimog around in the company of all of the Deuces. (No easy trick since the Unimog is a gas engine truck and climbs much differently than the big diesels). We stopped off and watched some rock crawler guys climbing ledges down in one of the valleys then retired to Dairy Queen for dinner.

 

[Aswayze]

After a nice nights sleep, we had a quick breakfast in town again then set ourselves back to task. The "New" medium was rolled up, another one was rolled out and repairs were made to it as well as all the ropes changed, David finished up repairing a little battle damage from an encounter with a stump the evening before and the Furnas clan struck and folded their GP Small as well as the Arctic they got from Houli. Brett changed the battery terminal on the BTR and Stagg and David took Master Chef, Shannon, and Austin off to show them how to drive the deuces and get them a little time behind the wheel. Once all of that was settled, we set about redistributing all the stuff that we brought down.

Extra GP medium to Dewayne along with periscopes for the tracks...

Sales stuff for the St. Louis guys to Brett.

M880 parts for Terry to Stagg.

Basically everyone got a nice boarding ladder from Stagg

and so on and so forth till eventually everything we had was finally loaded up.

We finally hit the road at around 4 and after making one quick stop off on Cayuga road to dislodge a rock from between the duals of Brett's F-350 we were quickly rolling back home.

Everything was going quite well till just north of Ft. Scott when Stagg reported via radio that something felt wrong with his truck. I was lead truck at the time and I selected an exit that had a decent shoulder as well as a large set of lights directly above and we all slid off to the side to have a lookie.

David was the first to notice the thin wisp of smoke coming from Stagg's drivers side brake drum. Once we jacked the truck up, it was rapidly apparent that he's suffered a wheel bearing failure. We stripped it down to have a look and the outer bearing had completely shelled itself leaving nothing but hot debris behind. Obviously, we were not going to be going anywhere at this point so we settled in for the long haul.

We gathered up all the reflector kits from the Deuces and set them up, David got out his laptop and set about doing some research on part numbers for us, the Furnas clan loaded us up with extra scooby snacks and made room for Master Chef in their Pontiac and after a few calls to Dave Thomas and Dewayne, Stagg and I settled in for the night in the back of my deuce feeling at least content that the weather was not 5 degrees with ice lighting and that we were actually in a pretty good spot to work on trucks all things considered.

 

[Aswayze]

It rained cats and dogs that night and into the morning but by the time the parts stores in Ft Scott opened up and we got back with our parts everything had dried up. We had a few issues managing to get the old bearing inner race off of the spindle but once that was done, we got everything all fixed up right as rain and were off on our merry way.

 

[dctrack44]

glad you guys made the trip to D-Day off road event it is great to have more
trucks there besides my stuff. I really felt bad you guys broke down but one
thing about you guys you figure it out and get back truckin

 

[Flyingvan911]

"It's not just a hobby. It's an adventure." I will post some pics later. No time right now.

 

[Aswayze]

It's always worth it to run down to D-Day. I'd do it again any time even with the roadside wheel bearing service thrown in.

Here's a few more pics of the weekend:

 

[Flyingvan911]

Here are some pics I took. The Unimog tried to kill us my throwing me a foot in the air and slaming me back down on the troop seats but it was all part of the experience. I got to add the black and brown to my truck which my girlfriend is standing in front of. A friend's son is driving a deuce for the first time. Nothing fancy, just putting around a field. Everyone had a blast. Thanks, Dewayne.

 

[MWMULES]

I am really sorry I did not make it down, but had to many things that needed to be done at the "Beeferosa". I could have sat there in a lawn chair drinking coffee and watched you guys change the bearing!
OK dctrack44 when is the spring 2012 event going to be. Maybe with some lead time we can get more folks to show up.