Stu’s UTE

Stu,
Regarding your. Redarc wiring, did you hook up the blue wire which is the ignition trigger?

 

No I didn’t , but it seems to work fine without.

 

Great. Thanks Stu! Hope you’re doing well

 

We are well. Dreaming of better times to come. Stay safe Andy and if we are lucky we may get to go camping this year

 

We’re going car camping with the truck and our family to the Rogue river this weekend. This will be the first time for my wife to sleep in it.

 

I was thinking the pressure gauge and switch for the onboard air was kind of half arsed, so I fixed it.

 

The 1Up bike rack arrived this week and I got to it, making an extension so we can use it with the camper.





















Ready for some powder coat.

 

I finally finished the apartment remodel and found some time to put the newly powder coated rack together and load up the camper.










I think we have to go camping this weekend!

 

Looking good Stu! You even left room to use the rack mounted on the back of the camper.

 

Test run with the bikes went well. Though fairly confident of my design , I am not an engineer and my welds are not great. We talked about adding a safety leash so that if the rack fails it would be dragged behind the rig and hopefully not into the car behind!



Also, I’m super happy with the 3M tape.

 

With that long of a lever arm, I'd be more worried about the aluminum hitch snapping off at the receiver.

Might think about triangulating the 1Up into that rack you built for the back of the camper. Wouldn't need to be super strong, just enough to keep in from shock loading the hitch. A clevis for quick release on one end and a pivot on the other?

 

I have thought about that. The 1up heavy duty rack is designed to take four mountain bikes and almost sticks out as far as my rack with the extra two bikes on. That is a lot of extra weight. Though aluminum, it is really solid. So I’m not too worried, but I might seek out an engineer for a second opinion. Having said that I did add a safety chain.

 

Added some more running light. Why not? Better to be seen.

 

I like it! Didn't notice the bright "don't panic" sign

 

The skid plate needs to be bronze to match the wheels and Inferno TRD

 

Also took the finger sander to some small rust spots forming on the front side of the lower control arms and primed them.

 

Campers back on the truck with the hope of getting out this weekend.

I’ve been working on a rack to hold the traction boards, and got the preliminary test fit done.

 

I think there's Sherptek too

 

Took three days exploring the Olympic NF in a big meandering loop. I found some great adventure up tiny overgrown trails that traverse river drainage and run ridges.








I put the racks though there paces and am happy how they worked.



But I did have issues with vegetation catching and bending the antenna and getting wedged between the awning and the camper.



The awning got pretty tweaked!

 

So I have new projects. I used the car port to hoist the awning from the camper.



Cleaned it up and found that once I fixed the bracket everything sprung back to straight.




A couple of coats of fresh paint and it looks great.



I’m planning to make some mounting points for cables that the Jeep guys use. Limb risers is what they call them. The first step was to make some brackets that squeeze in the gap between the hood and the fenders.

I ended up trying two times to make them from aluminum, but in the end pounded them out of steel with the help of two Mapp gas torches to get the steel hot enough to bend.










Happy with how they came out. They could be a hair thinner.








Now to figure out how to attach the cables to the camper and the awning. One thing I’m concerned about is how to deal with the camper flexing and stretching the cables too much.