Struggle Bus
This week’s blog I am going to tell you about the struggle I went through to get the Race Jeep power steering rebuilt.
I have a full set of spare power steering parts, so back when I was preparing for King of the Hammers 2020 I was going through everything and had found some damaged bits on the steering box. I put my spare parts on with the intention to run those for King of the Hammers and then send my main steering parts to the manufacturer to have them rebuilt.
I had borrowed my spare steering gearbox to a competitor and when it was returned to me I don’t think it had been rebuilt, I didn’t find about this until I went to put it on my race Jeep (completely my fault for not inspecting it when it was returned to me). I didn’t find out anything was wrong with the gearbox until I got to KOH and started prerunning, When I found that it was leaking oil from every orifice.
By some miracle the gearbox survived KOH and went on to do a couple for fun trail rides before getting so bad that it wouldn’t hold a quart of oil for more then a hour. I broke down and finally sent the main parts in to get serviced. Well, that didn’t go as planned either. I sent them in and a little over a week later I got them back, almost all of my parts were correct. The pump that was sent back to was the wrong one, after about a week of going back Band forth with the customer service I was finally able to get them to agree that a mistake had been made and they got the correct pump sent to me.
After about a month of not being able to drive my race Jeep again, putting it back together was a NIGHTMARE! I accidentally got two hose backwards and of course they are the two hardest hoses to get to for a normal functioning body. With my impaired left arm and my weakened condition it was astronomically worse to try and make right, but I managed to get them in the right location so that the steering would work properly. I also was doing all of this in the race trailer (which is a decent size trailer) but once you get the race Jeep in there it gets very small. Now the race Jeep is back running again with fresh power steering parts and fresh shocks thanks to Desert Speed Shock Tuning! Race tracks and trails here I come!