Deekyn’s build of Kevin the 2015 TRD Off Road Tacoma

Well it’s not the most awesome thing I’ve done to my truck, but considering I’ve already got noticeable gravel pings on my month old King 12” shock shafts… seems worth the $20 to me. We will see how they hold up.

 

Jeni and I went up to Crested Butte Colorado for the weekend. Did Pearl Pass from Crested Butte to Aspen, drove around to Marble and then Crystal River rd and Schofield pass. Proper off-roading on Pearl Pass, maybe 4 hours, really rocky and 2 proper obstacles. Crystal river road was rocky but fine. Schofield pass (with the devils punch bowls) was pretty technical, so damn narrow and rocky. And ran into a Toyota group. Split a side wall and had to do a trail tire swap. Good times.

 

Took a friend who had never been off roading on a weekend road trip to the San Juan mountains in Colorado for a quick trip down Black Bear Pass to Telluride, then Imogene Pass back to Ouray.


Watched these two come within a hair of tipping over on “the steps” obstacle on Black Bear.
View of the switchbacks of Black Bear from Imogene


And managed to bend a valve stem against a rock somewhere along the way.

And then found that my core support has a new 6” crack that went around the plate that was welded over the last crack.

For off road trucks, these sure seem to fall apart.

 

Sweet build! Theres no stopping that crack. Mine has been ripping for a while now about the same size as yours. Your gonna either need to replace the whole core support or tube the front,

 

To continue my Colorado off-road adventures…. Yesterday, in an illogically long day I did 75 miles of off-roading, then 250 a mile drive home.

I started in Silverton at 8 am, took 110 from Silverton to the Alpine Loop. The an easy 4x4 little spur up Hurricane Peak (possibly one of the most scenic overlooks I’ve been to), then down the Corkscrew Gulch trail to 550. 550 up to the Engineer Pass trail. Took that Poughkeepsie Gulch. Poughkeepsie (with the bypass) to the Hurricane Pass. The Alpine loop clockwise to Stony Pass. Ran Stony Pass to Creede. Then drove home.

And all of it was easy off-roading except Poughkeepsie. Even with the bypass around “the wall” that trail is pretty tough.

 

Took advantage of the holiday weekend and did a little solo off-roading for two days in the Leadville-Breckenridge area of CO and saw this guy!


Having run a number of “moderate” trails this year, I wanted to get my feet wet and run a few “hard” trails. And I got my money’s worth that’s for damn sure! Hit skids, sliders, bumpers, rear diff got banged up a few times. Got hung up a few times. After this trip I’m definitely gonna make the jump to 35’s.

Birdseye Gulch, Mosquito Pass, Red Cone, Radical Hill, Middle Fork of the Swan River, North Fork Swan, Saints John.

All the trails were super scenic and many offered more of a challenge than I was expecting. Add to that the running and standing water on the trails both days.

Birdseye Gulch big ass rocks uphill in the water. No biggie


Red Cone had some healthy obstacles on the way up and amazing scenery from the top. And a steep steep decent (pics never do the hills justice)


Radical hill was pretty fuckin hard on 33s. Videos and such all go on about the narrow death defying off-camber switchbacks. And it was all of those things. They gloss over the super rocky obstacle filled mile before that.

View of the switchbacks from the top.
This was the easiest obstacle.

Views across to Red Cone from half way up. Mountain goats in the road near the summit



North and middle fork of the swan River were beautiful and rocky. With optional lines to bump the rating. I somehow found them all. I’m taking the harder rating for both of those trails.

The V-Notch section of the the North Fork got to be a steep, muddy, off-camber washed out mess that was so narrow it closed both my mirrors on the way up.
Moderate (and fairly steep) way on the right. Hard line I accidentally came down on the left.

And on the way up to the summit on Saints John trail. My truck looking muddy as usual.

 

I did a couple of quick local off-roading adventures couple days ago.

Did all the marked Cedro trails outside of Albuquerque for the first time, including every offshoot obstacle I could find. Cedro was actually a little more fun than I thought it would be.


Funny, but you go up some rough obstacle, rock as big as your tire and the picture looks like you could drive a damn Prius up it. This was the little offshoot just by the Cedro radio towers.


Also cruised down to Socorro to run the Quebradas Backcountry Byway from S to N, then ran a few trails in Gordy’s Hills OHV area.


Arroyo de la Parida - pretty chill, rocky but fine, looked at the waterfall obstacle rated 6/10, but didnt do it. Could be done in my truck with really good spotting. I chickened out solo.


ATV Pass - that was a fun trail with a ton of whoops and micro arroyos that probably aren’t friendly to stock bumpers, and found one optional 24+” step down, little slider tap and a ton of flexin


Arroyo de Coyote - turns out this trail is permanently closed. But the brilliant BLM folks didn’t mark the top of the trail closed. So I drove all the way down it to find a barbed wire fence at the bottom .

 

Before I drive 7 hours to help my mom move…. I did a quick rear diff oil change, swap air filter, grease zirks, oil change this am. Man, changing the oil with a fumoto oil drain valve behind a steel skid plate is so easy…


Which makes up for the fact that my passenger CV is leaking like a son of a bitch.



So I swapped that out for a Napa spare that I carry on my wheeling trips. Next week I will reboot both oem CVs and get the Napa back in a case as a spare.


Possibly I will also clean off my skid

 

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

 

Sleeping in the garage doesn't count.

 

Well the tent was shipped freight, took less than 48 hours to get to my house. The mounting hardware from prinsu, on the other hand… will take a week

 

Finally I’m a cool kid!

Installed my Warn EVO 10s winch. With two Mob trips coming this month, it feels rather timely.

Wouldn’t say it was my favorite installation on the truck. Figuring out a mounting location for the controller box and fabbing up some brackets and splash guards took all damn day.



And yes the truck is dirty, dinged up, and scratched to hell. But it’s always dirty. Long ago gave up on a pretty paint job.

 

Wife (Jenn) and I took advantage of the long weekend to do a Utah off roading adventure with the new roof top tent. Plan was to run a 4x4 version of the Kokopelli Bike trail from Fruita CO to Moab Utah. This trail includes portions of Dome Plateau, passes by Top of the World, and heads down the Rose Garden Hill. The full trail is 140 miles with sections of up to 6/10 or difficult.



We ran into a bit of a snag after the first day, so our trip got cut short. But it was still a great time. One thing to note is that the night before we were to start the trail, the Fruita area was expected to get strong thunderstorms. And it did. So we skipped camping that first night. It rained hard and the trail was a muddy sloppy mess for many many miles.


The off roading version starts at the official trailhead, but immediately veers off. And follows random uninspired ranch roads along I-70 for miles. Until it reaches Rabbit Valley, it’s not worth doing. So if you stumble into a gpx just skip the start.

After that, the trail is reasonably scenic, and the terrain varies between super easy smooth dirt road to moderate/hard obstacles, including extremely narrow shelf road sections to large-ish steps. If I were to guess, I’d say the trail is a solid 4/10 or moderate until it crosses 128.

An example of the one of the obstacles is a super narrow section of shelf road that you have to get over a 15” rock on the passenger side. While not sliding into the large boulder on driver.




Note that the Cisco Wash crossing is no longer maintained and completely impassible.




But as the trail heads down to Dewey bridge it follows the Dome Plateau trail, including some easy slick rock driving


and descending the hardest rated obstacles which are 5/10 on that part


It was at this point we ran into trouble.

What the hell is that squeak? Must be mud or gravel in the rotors. See? It goes away with some braking. I popped under the truck several times and couldn’t find anything.

The plan was to check it the next morning after camping just south of Dewey bridge.

Note the trail was so muddy, that even the top of the brand new RTT was muddy.

The next morning after breaking camp, I spent probably 1 1/2 hours on the trail trying to figure out the squeak and rattle that you could feel. Turns out it was a caliper mounting bolt on the drivers side had loosened itself along the trail and fallen out. And the other bolt was loose!

Fuck! Must not have loctite-ed those bolts. So we tightened up the other bolts and tested out the braking. Everything worked fine. So we drove into Moab, 40 miles away, and bought a new bolt at the Carquest store.

With the new bolt installed and loctite applied, we rushed back to see if we could pick up the trail where we left off. Instead of starting at 10am, we decided to start the trail at 2:45. Oh well, it will be fine.

And it was. We decided to run the full lollipop loop. Up the west side, down on the harder east side, with a waypoint named “nasty” we new it would be good fun.



The way up was pretty easy for a 6/10. Too easy. Once you hit the lollipop loop though, it became more difficult. But not too bad, no rear locker use. No spotting needed.

Until the posing ledge at the top that is. Don’t want to drive too far on that one.

The way down on the left side was much more challenging. Big steps. BIG steps. Sliders scraping. Skids and bumpers hitting rock. Jenn spent a fair bit of time out of the truck spotting me.



Total time on TOTW was about 3 hours. So we rushed down Shura Rd towards Dewey bridge to reach same spot we camped at the night before.

Tired from the stupidity of the morning, the drive in and back out of Moab, the challenge of TOTW, we decided to not push our luck and drive the last 1/3 to 1/2 of the Kokopelli trail and just make the 7 hour drive home.


The blue track is what we drove (plus TOTW), the pink is the full route. Looks like I will have to finish the Kokopelli trail another visit to Moab.

 

Today was a huge pain in the ass.

Took on several front end projects at once, including things I hadn’t done before, so learning curve and swearing and so many blue shop towels covered in grease.


Today was the day to tackle the squeaking lower spherical bearings in my King coilovers. Just did this a little over a year ago I think. I also pulled both CVs, so I could reboot them, and swap out my front diff needle bearing for an ECGS bushing.


Pulling the needle bearing was a pain, as the tool, didn’t quite fit. Spent nearly an hour trying to get it to fit and it just wouldn’t. So I ended up grinding it down a hair on both sides and finally got it to be able to pull out the needle bearing. Also the ECGS bushing is a pretty tight fit for the CV and it took a damn lot of work to for that bitch back in after I rebooted it.


And Imma tell you right now, rebooting CVs is a goddamn messy hassle. Musta went through 50 blue shop towels. Also getting those boot clamps to crimp without the crimping tool was a pain. I damn sure will be buying one if I ever reboot these CVs again. Here’s hoping there’s no leaks or spraying grease!

 

Went from this ⬇️

To this

When we decided to get a roof top tent, I new I wanted it to be fast deploy and able to hold the bedding and as light-ish and low as possible, but able to carry the kayaks if needed too, since we love kayaking. So we settled on the two channel CVT Mt Hood medium.

But when I ordered it, I knew I was gonna pull my Front Runner roof racks and just use two 48” 1020 8020 extruded aluminum slats and low profile (1/2”) feet from prinsu. Apparently I had it in my head that they came in sets of 4 or something so the week of our Moab adventure


the shit arrived and I didn’t have enough feet. I needed 2 pairs of feet from the load bars to the tent and 2 pairs of feet from the tracks on my camper shell to the load bars. Since I didn’t order enough, I had to use feet from my front runner roof rack.

As such the tent was about 4 1/2” above the cab. Which was ridiculous. Those feet were 2 7/8”. The new ones are 1/2” so the tent is now a bit lower which I love. The tent is 1 1/2” over the shortened shark fin antenna and 2 1/2” over the cab.


But from personal experience hard wheeling I know that bed only flexes about an inch independently from the cab.



So I may ending up fabbing an even lower profile solution. Although now I can fit my arm under there to check bolts and I may not be able to do that logically with a lower profile set up.

 

That's funny, went back & forth trying to figure why the brackets were different, never noticed the height different until I read farther.
Looks real good Dustin.

 

Thanks. While I was the one pushing a RTT. I also knew I wanted to keep low profile and light weight to be able to balance my wanting to wheel harder and harder. This tent is a pretty good balance actually. Not super heavy and thinish. So I don’t have to worry a ton about hurting the tent or about flipping over with a lot of weight up top. It’s super comfy, so easy to set up. The wife loves it. And I can still off road hard. Goals met. For now.

 

Little camping trip in southern Utah. Last trip with the RTT on the camper shell. The Leer doesn’t like the weight.

 

Not today but two weeks ago. Removed my camper shell and installed a Leitner ACS Forged bed rack to better help support my RTT. Camper shell wasn’t cutting it.




not today but last week…
Installed decked drawer system in the bed to go with the new bed rack


Not today but 3 days ago…

Installed my ARB single in the “ammo can” of the decked drawer system

Today
Installed hardwired ARB plug for the fridge when it lives behind my seat.

 

Had a cool three day weekend up in Colorado. Drove up from Albuquerque to spend a few days off-roading and camping. Drove ~150 miles of dirt over two days.



Most of it was easy. A lot of it was scenic. Some of it was sloppy muddy mess.

Hayden Pass in the Sangre de Cristos, mild and pretty.


A little loop south of Salida Sand creek and Badger creek. Bland. Do no recommend.

Aspen Ridge loop from Salida to Buena Vista. Camped just above Salida. Cool view and I could just make out the live music from whatever festival was playing.Went up dead horse gulch. Challenging enough to be fun. Plus I accidentally started down one of the million bike trails and my back tire slid off the trail and I had to use my winch for the first time.
Dumbass.




Tin Cup pass was super scenic, rocky, and sloppy muddy in places. Followed a stock 4Runner up. Buy a damn compressor! Watching their heads bounce around, I felt sorry for them. Water crossing at Mirror Lake was about 18” deep.



Napoleon Pass. That was a doozy. Saw no other people. The trail is rated hard as is. It was so sloppy muddy, big slippery rocks, muddy messy dug out spots, big tree roots. I had to keep using the rear diff locker. Even the top, a slightly steep two track… I almost slid off. Sketchy solo. Multiple 15-20” deep creek crossings. But pretty fun. Plus I sliced a side wall and waited out a brief rain storm to swap tires.



Then essentially followed the CO backcountry discovery route from Pitkin to Lake City. All of it was easy. But quite scenic. Elks, deer, antelopes, marmots. It was fun. This fall I may try to take a few days and run the full COBDR