Breaking Parts Not Hearts

How often do you go wheeling? Off-roading? Trail Riding? Two-tracking? 4-Wheeling? Whatever you may call it, when you take a vehicle off the pavement and onto some dirt roads that may lead to rocks and dense wooded areas or high cliffs, you are always at risk to break something. That’s what this blog post will be about, breaking parts instead of hearts.

For many people out there in the wild, driving a Jeep is an incredibly fun time. You wake up in the morning, there is a little bit of morning dew on the hood, you hear all 4 or 6 of those cylinders fire up and Goosebumps creep across the skin. For those higher privileged folk, they may hear the rumble of their V8 swapped ride as they press the remote start button on the key fob and sip their morning coffee as they look into their garage to see the pristine beauty that stays tucked inside every night! Ok…. enough with the jokes…for now.

You have now hopped in the Jeep and it is time to go wheeling. Now, a day on the trails can be a couple hours or 12….it is whatever your little heart makes it out to be and is solely dependent on how happy your skinny pedal gets! Let’s use a recent trip for example. I am deep in the woods. These are not your typical woods though, there are giant boulders, holes bigger than 42 inch tires, and hill climbs that would flip a Jeep backwards if traversed up the wrong way. Anyway, the day started at about 9:30am, Dinner occurred around 7pm…that is 10 full hours of Jeepin’. Throughout the day our group experienced the following carnage, a dented corner on an LJ, another dented corner on an LJ, a broken motor mount on an LJ, a broken sway bar link on a JK, a popped bead on a non-beadlock wheel, a broken locking hub on a superduty axle, a roll-over (don’t worry we flipped him back over and he kept wheeling), a bent roof rack, a broken rear locker on a dad 44, a hole through the transmission because the driveshaft rubbed it, and a Suzuki Samurai (He didn’t break or nothing, just wanted to mention it because it was an experience in of itself just watching the thing wheel.)

HOW DO WE FIX ALL THESE ISSUES THROUGHOUT THE DAY?! We call people names like idiot, stupid, and dummy for not knowing how to build their rig! NO, Definitely not that one. We take time, stop, insure everyone is safe, and we all work as a group to figure out the solution to the break. YES! So that’s exactly what happened. Each time someone broke something, nobody got angry, nobody called anyone any names and nobody made the other person feel dumb for what they just did to their Jeep. This is how a day of wheeling is supposed to be, educational, fun and pushing your rig to exploit the limitations and continually improve. That is the whole hobby in a nutshell. Many parts were broken throughout the day but at the end of the day what matters most is every single rig that showed up, drove out of the woods under their own power, smiles were being worn by everyone there and at dinner memories were shared and everyone is able to look back on the day as a good day of wheeling.