Canyonlands shock mount problems, tech help needed!

For those of you interested, here's what the bolt & shock mount looked like when we first discovered it:



The bolt is wedged in place by the downward force of the shock.

Totally chance that my brother even glanced over and saw it - we had just relaxed at Dollhouse 1 and fortunately, we dropped our chairs right behind the trucks. Who knows how long it had been hanging out like this. The threaded end of the bolt was not damaged at all, so we know this wasn't caused by a rock hit - it's likely that it either never had a nut on it at all, or the nut was simply hand tightened and never torqued down.

Though it would have worked fine to simply remove the shock, we did still have a perfectly good bolt that threaded back into place with a few taps. Seemed a waste to just take it all off, and we didn't want to end the trip early, since we did still have some challenging terrain to cover to get to the rest of the campsites. We wanted to at least try something before we resorted to removing the shock.

So the issue then became how to keep that bolt in place without it wiggling out on the trail. We had hoped to find another nut that fit somewhere on the truck that could be removed, but Tacomas don't actually have a lot of nuts on them - mostly bolts, used with threaded holes or nuts welded on. My brother did have a set of hardware that came with his new shocks, but naturally, they were in the garage at home. Trail lesson learned: along with a set of tools, bring a set of replacement (mostly metric) hardware.

So here's what we did:

Closest nut we could find was 1/2" - interior diameter is pretty close, but the threads don't come close to matching the Toyota M17. My brother just happened to have brought along his power drill, so we drilled out the threads on a 1/2" wingnut...



whacked it onto the end of the bolt via deadblow hammer. It stuck pretty good and we got it all the way on.



The wingnut gave us a good shape to wrap zipties around, so we chained about 12 in several wraps:



Theoretically, that bolt and nut shouldn't experience much lateral force - just vertical from the shock expanding and contracting.

And it worked great! Stayed on for another two days. With frequent visual inspection, the wingnut never twirled, the zipties never slipped. I'm sure hammering the wingnut on there ruined the bolt, but the shop that installed the shock owes him at minimum another bolt.

So we got to have our last day at Golden Stairs and got all the way back to Grand Junction with zipties in place. I'm pretty sure it'll survive at least until my brother gets it back to the shop where the shock was installed and asks them if they notice anything non-standard.

 

You know what I just noticed two things looking at that picture. Your bottom leaf is out of place and whats up with your uptravel? Looks like you got maybe a few inches.

 

Yeah, we noticed the leaf out of place when we were down there, too. We gave it a couple of whacks with the deadblow while we were down there, but with weight on the wheel it wasn't going anywhere. Something else to look at when we get the truck back on the lift.

 

That shock travel is super short, could they be extended body shocks on a truck that's not lifted? Maybe the truck is overloaded?