Tuesday morning, we head out for one final tuning run. Scott and I had agreed the car was as good as it was going to get with the suspension limitations. We headed over and made a run up Chocolate Thunder with no issues, just to see how the shocks handled in the rocks. Thinking the worst was behind us, we head out to do some desert pre-running. We had decided to run the first 13 miles to remote pit 1 and then decide where to go from there. We made it through the first rock section around mile 5 then hit some open desert. The rear end started bottoming out on every bump. We pushed on to pit 1 where we met up with some of the other guys who had driven in from the road. Disaster, the driver rear shock had split near the top losing all of the oil and basically all of the dampening. With no spare shock, we begin the long drive out to the road to wait for a trailer. This was it, our trip was over, 13 miles into practice, 2 days before the race. During the 2 hour wait for a trailer, we entertained ourselves by playing “corn hole” with an old tire and some rocks.
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At some point I remembered Phil mentioning that he had a set of Radflo shocks new in the box. We get in touch with Ken and send him over to check it out. We bought the new shocks and with them, a new purpose to get this thing going again. Never easy, the Radflo shocks had a different size mounting bolt and different lengths than the Profenders. Back at camp, we head over to the ESAB booth in Hammertown and have them plasma cut some new shock tabs for us. Back at home base, we go to work cutting all of the rear shock tabs off, upper and lower. We also send a couple guys into town to buy the correct size bolts for the new shocks. After some grinding and drilling, we have new shock tabs but again no way to weld them on. With all of the tabs and gussets mocked up, we call it a night at 12:30 Tuesday.
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We are up early Wednesday morning and head over to the Ruff Stuff booth to get the tabs welded on. With the front shocks on and the rear sitting on the bump stops, I’m sure we got some weird looks driving in. We arrive before the Ruff Stuff crew is out but only have to wait about 10 minutes. Shock tabs welded on, we go back, install the new Radflo’s and take about 3 runs through the desert near our camp. With my confidence at an extreme low, we park the rig at camp and start prepping it for the race in less than 24 hours.
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