Offroading for beginers

Wooohoo on Friday we took the bumblebee off road. It was awesome fantastic fun! Though as you may well have picked up from reading the other post nothing ever goes according to plan, mind you this time the issue wasn't really all that devastating, it was more just a mild annoyance kind of like a rock in your shoe (but not as easy to fix). Anyways the issue i had was when we arrived at the reserve all excited about going 4wding, i got out to try and engage the hubs so that i could put it into 4wd, but one of the hubs wouldn't lock in AAAAArgh mild annoyance aaaraargh. After regaining my not very lost compose we decided just to go fangin' around in 2wd (which as it turns out can take you pretty much anywhere anyway). It was great fun there was so much mud around as it has been raining pretty consistently around these parts.

Not much else to report other than fanging around in the mud is awesome fun. Have a look at the pictures below showing the tremendous suspension on ol'bumbles!

New Shoes

Well it seems as with the rest of my life, everything i do seems to go wrong in one way or another. I ordered the tyres on Tuesday and the local tyre place said "they'll probably be in tomorow",with my luck in mind i replied that i'll drop the car in on thursday just to make sure the tyres are in.

Thursday morning i dropped the car at the tyre joint and the bloke behind the counter informs me that the tyres havn't arrived yet, so me, unsuprised by the unfortunate turn of events got back in the bumblebitch, and drove back to work. It wouldn't have been 10mins later i recieved a call from the tyre place letting me know the tyres had arrived. Still unsuprised i get back in the bumblebee and drive it back to the tyre shop, hand the guy the keys and got a lift back to work with the manager of the tyre shop, he asked me if i had left the keys with the bloke at the desk and i told him i had. It was at this point i had that nervous feeling in the back of my mind that something was going to happen to my keys, i dismissed it as paranoia.

The work day drew to a close and i got a lift back to the tyre shop, I noticed the bumblebee in the driveway with the new tyres on and they looked great.

I continued inside to get my keys and leave at which point the bloke behind the counter handed me a different set of keys.

"These aren't my keys" i said. And then the search was on. They asked me what my keys looked like, i let them know they are the hardest set of keys to lose due to them having a large black and yellow lanyard and a flashing keyring on them. (see below)

Anyway after about an hour of looking for the keys i call nelso to get him to drop off the spare set so i can get home and unlock the unit and not to mention drive my car. Nelso arrived about 15mins later and just as he was entering the driveway they tyre guys had found my keys in an order book. HAHAHAH what a stupid debacle, at least the tyres are cool!

Bumblebitch in unmodified glory!!

The plight of the bumblebee

The decision has been made to travel the country. With two beautiful new friends (Heff and Mikki) and my best mate (Nelso). The girls had already bought and half decked out their vehicle by the time we (Nelso and i) actually decided we were going to travel with them. So i started scouting around on eBay and found a 1988 Toyota landcruiser troop carrier that looked outlandish enough to capture my attention.

So we all went for a road trip up to Sydney to purchase this ridiculous beast. When we finally go to Maitland where the car was located, we started to inspect the vehicle, Mikgater noticed there was a leak coming from under the front, turns out the leak was the power steering box seal. After some tinkering to no avail, we made the decision to wrestle the beast without power steering until we got back to Wagga Wagga. (at the moment its still not fixed.) After a large night out in the city it was time to drive home again. As soon as we get out onto the open highway the bumblebee swerved violently to the right, almost wiping out the girls driving my other car.
Through tenacity and sheer determination of will and might i managed to wrestle the angry beast to a rest area. We looked over the wheel we though may have been causing the trouble, we couldn't see anything glaringly wrong with it (oh we were very wrong). I had by this time dismissed the swerving as some sort of gremlin living in the brake system.
We limped the heavy creature home and discovered the wheel was leaning at a very concerning angle. As we soon found out the wheel bearing had completely disintegrated and had left nothing but powdered metal flakes behind.

Anyways lucky it was a landcruiser or the wheel may have very easily came off and sent us into an early grave. We have since fixed the two front wheel bearings and this weekend will be attacking the rear bearings hopefully.

I'll do another post of some images of the bumblebee in her current condition.