Ill bring this thread back to life with another MOAB trail fix. This was in 2013 on behind the rocks out in moab and my first time to the promised land. I was following my buddies XJ down a couple of ledges when he stopped and got out and was like dude i cant turn... we took a look and it didnt take long to find the problem... he must have drug his tie rod across a rock going down a ledge and bent it all out of shape.
So we pulled his tie rod off and tried to come up with some ways to bend it back straight as we didnt have a spare with us. Literally nothing worked we couldnt bend it by hand or with any of the tools we had with us. even wedged between some huge rocks and using both our body weights as leverage. after about an hour of trying to figure this out we found a little crack in the rocks wedged it in there and used my Fat ass JKU to run it over and wouldnt you know it worked!!! haha. We werent able to get it completely straight but we were able to adjust it enough to get the tires aligned the best we could in the dirt.
after we got it buttoned back up we tried to continue on the trail and every time he would try to turn the left front tire would just bury itself turning to the inside while the other side stayed straight. as soon as he would stop the tires would go back aligned. Turns out where it had bent previously was still weak and every time he would try to turn it would bow out again bringing one of the tires in.
We put our engineering student minds together once again and came up with this as a solution.
The strap kept the tie rod from bowing out and kept his tires tracking they way they should. We were only about 1/3 of the way through the trail at this point and thought about just calling it quits to get back to town and fix it but decided NAWWW F it lets keep going and he was able to finish the trail no problems. We stopped right before getting on the freeway to double check the alignment and we were amazed when he was able to drive it all the way back to town at 60 mph on the freeway without any problems.
While it sucks to break stuff on the trail i love this story and all of the creative solutions people come up with on the trail to get home
So keep this thread going lets see some more MOAB MENDS :rock: