For the last few weeks, Franco (friend, coworker, Peruvian-Ecuadorian-Trinidadian-Awesomedude) and I have been spending our days off doing various mountainy-colorado-ey things up the Poudre Canyon. A couple of weeks ago it was fishing and panning for gold, last week it was off-roading. We headed up U.S. 287 and then Hwy 14 at about 2:00 PM, and stopped once on the way up for a quick fishing break.
Our destination was WCR69 near Rustic, Colorado, about 25 miles up the canyon. Off of 69, there is a fairly vast network of Forest Service Roads riddled with huge puddles, steep hills, and rocky terrain. Also, it was snowing. Our initial plan was to drive the Sevenmile Creek trail which I had found in the Northern Colorado Off-Road guide book, but that turned out to be closed due to flooding. I looked at my Colorado Atlas and found some alternative roads to do some 4 wheeling on, and found a bunch of FS roads a little further up from Sevenmile Creek. Before going further up WCR69, I decided to stop back by rustic to get motor oil and a lighter, just in case.
We started onto FR 171 jus past an old ghost town site which had been bulldozed in the 1930's at around 4:00, plenty of time to do some good off-roading and get back to Fort Collins by 8 o'clock for small group. After a couple of hours of exploring including a coyote sighting, a dead moose, and a flock of sage grouse, we started back towards the main road to head back down. We got out of roughest parts by about 6:40 and I was hearing some strange sounds coming from the front passenger side of the car (Franco wasn't making the sounds). I stopped the car and immediately knew what to check: the CV joint on the front passenger tire which had broken not an hour earlier, or a minute earlier, but a whole YEAR earlier. I examined it and everything was, for the most part, ok minus the fact that I had been driving on a broken CV joint for a little over a year after Seth (Meyer) had told me to get it fixed ASAP. More about Seth later. So really the only thing that was wrong with the joint was that one of the bearings had fallen out, no big deal, I just picked it up, polished it off, and put it in the center console.
We were on our way again.
We got off of FR 171 and back onto WCR69, all that stood between us and HWY14 back to Fort Collins was a hill about a half-mile long. Normally, a gradual hill that's half a mile long is no big deal at all for my Fozzie however, when I made the turn onto WCR69, CV join apparently spat out all 5 of the other bearings that locked the joint into the tire. We coasted to a halt probably 50 vertical feet from the top of the hill, and that's about where I realized that my car was really broken.
The way Subaru AWD works, is that power is diverted to the wheel with the least amount of resistance, in theory, this helps keep the car going in the direction the driver wants it to, even when it's slipping. In my case, the front passenger CV joint (read: axle) was spinning inside the connection on the front passenger wheel, and therefore had NO resistance, so OBVIOUSLY it got all of the power. Which meant that the three wheels that were NOT broken had 0% power, and the ONE wheel that WAS broken had 100% of the power. In the more user friendly words of Franco my car went from being all-wheel-drive to being "Zero-Wheel-Drive." (At this point in the story, we weren't fully aware that there was ZERO power to the three good wheels)
As you can imagine, if a 2WD vehicle sometimes struggles to make it up a hill, a ZWD vehicle struggles a lot more. We decided that maybe it would help if Franco got out and pushed- it didn't. Or maybe if he opened the trunk and sat on the tail gate to put more pressure on the back tires- also didn't help. Then maybe if he pushed down above the front passenger side wheel. Any guesses? You got it! Didn't help. The last version of this weight re-distribution attempt was sitting on the hood above the driver's side tire, which, unfortunately also didn't help.
At this point, I decided I should try and fix it, which brings us to:
Repair Attempt #1: Spare Bearing
The problem that I was having, was that the CV joint no longer had any of the bearings that connected it to the wheel and enabled it to drive the tire forward. I was very well aware that I had saved one of the bearings earlier so I figured I could just plop it back in where it was supposed to go, and voilà! everything would be fine!
I got the jack out, lifted the front passenger tire off the ground and got to work poking the axle with my knife, and shoving the bearing into place. It seemed pretty solid, except that the axle was pretty loosely in there. Once I felt confident in my quick repair, I pulled out the jack, chocked the back tires, and hopped into the drivers seat.
Car on, e-brake disengaged clutch in, shift to first, gas.
What followed was a quick marbles-in-a-blender sound followed by more of the spinning clicking axle contacting nothing sound we'd grown to love (hate). I got out to look and sure enough the bearing I had just put back in had been chewed up and spat back out in the form of bits of shrapnel littering the gravel road.
Repair Attempt #1 was a no-go.
By this time, the sun had gone down and the light was quickly fading as flurries of snow started to descend on the mountains. At this point, we were mildly concerned, but still confident we could figure it out and make it back to town for small group, we might be a couple minutes late, but we would be there.
** For those of you who haven't spent much time in the mountains, generally speaking, there is NO cell service, and there are NO pay phones, which is why we hadn't called anyone yet**
Franco suggested that we try turning the car around and backing up the mountain. The idea sounded pretty good to me; at this point we thought the other wheels had some power, just not enough. I coasted backwards, into a driveway, and then forwards onto the road facing downhill. Shift into reverse, gas, nothing but the clicking metal on metal of the CV joint bouncing around with nothing to grab on to.
The snow was steadily increasing, and Franco and I almost simultaneously had the idea to try and coast down the hill all the way across the valley, and out the other side. Our original route would have been WCR69 to Rustic, about a mile away, and then HWY 14 back to Fort Collins. This new route would take us down a bunch of hills, and then back up one big one to Red Feather Lakes Road, about 10 miles from where we were. Admittedly, it doesn't necessarily make much sense to go for the 10 mile option over the 1 mile option, but after having attempted and failed to push my 2,300 pound vehicle, even the possibility of being able to coast all the way up the other side was better than being stranded 200 feet from the top of this one.
So, with the initial flurries of snow turning into a driving shower, borderline blizzard and the daylight quickly fading to darkness, we decided to go for it.
I used the gas the whole way, thinking that I was actually getting power to the wheels on the downhills, and did my best to keep my foot off the brake to give us a chance of making it up the other side. The result of course (Mom, skip to the next paragraph) was that Franco and I were blasting through a winding, gravel, mountain road in increasingly blizzard like conditions (visibility about 20 yards) with no power to any of the wheels, in the dark, at speeds between 40 and 60mph.
We made it pretty far, I was pretty impressed with how close we came to making it all the way to the top of the hill on the other side. Still, we hadn't made it all the way, and were basically in the same predicament as before, only the hill that we were now stopped on was much less steep, albeit slightly longer.
We chocked the wheels and systematically pushed, then held while one of us moved the chocks, over and over until we had made it about 25 yards and were cramping up from the exertion. We realized that pushing it up this hill was also not an option, so we decided to coast back the other way; we had passed a cabin or two with lights on and figured if we didn't make it all the way back to the other side, we could at least borrow a phone or get a ride from someone.
Unfortunately, physics doesn't allow a vehicle to coast from one hill through a valley to another and back up the other side, so we didn't make it very far at all this time.
We coasted to a halt once again, on yet another hill, which brings us to:
Repair Attempt #2: Gravel and Silt
Admittedly, my repair attempts throughout the night gradually became more and more desperate and less and less realistic. But I really thought this one was going to work.
I mentioned before that the problem was that the CV joint had chewed up and spat out all of the bearings, and so there was nothing to hold it in place and give power to the wheel. So obviously, all I would need to do to fix the problem, would be to replace the bearings. As you probably know, ball bearings are very similar to gravel in almost every area, except that they are made of steel, uniformly sized, smoothly shaped, and are very strong. Other than these minor differences, ball bearings and gravel are essentially the same. The problem with Repair Attempt #1 was obviously that I only had one bearing where I needed 6, using a bunch of gravel would surely be better than one ball bearing. So I decided that a legitimate course of action to facilitate the emergency repair of my vehicle would be to jam a bunch of gravel into the CV joint to act as temporary bearings.
After jamming the joint full of gravel, I remembered that I was missing one VERY IMPORTANT thing: grease. Obviously I didn't have any grease with me, so the next closest thing I could find within 5 feet was silt in the drainage ditches to the side of the road.
To summarize:
Gravel = Ball Bearings
Silt = Grease
Pretty ingenious, huh?
The whole time I had been executing this second repair I left the headlights and the hazards on in case somebody came around the corner or something. However, I had shut the engine off so that there was no chance of the engine engaging the axle and grinding my hand to bits. Safety first!
Unfortunately, when you take 15 minutes to jam gravel and silt into your CV joint, while using the car battery to power the lights in below freezing temperatures, chances are, there won't be enough power left to turn over the engine. If you can't turn over the engine, you can't test your ingenious gravel-based repair attempt.
No worries though! We were parked on a hill, remember? All I had to do was point the car back downhill and push start it. I cranked the wheel and started backing up to get pointed downhill, but the road here was much narrower than other parts, so I ended up with both back wheels in a ditch, car perpendicular across the road, and I couldn't start the engine.
About 2 seconds after I got the car stuck in the ditch, a car was coming around the corner, we told the guy the situation, and asked for a quick jump (so that we could try the ingenious gravel based repair attempt). He gave us a jump and went on his way.
I put the car in 1st, gave it gas, let out the clutch............. and..... marbles-in-a-blender sound followed by more of the spinning clicking axle contacting nothing sound.
Repair Attempt #2 was a no-go.
At this point, we were already coasting back down the hill, so we decided to just go for it, who knows, maybe by coasting the axle would magically heal itself....
We came to a halt not far from there a quarter of the way up another hill, our attempts to coast out of there were getting less and less effective. So without any further ado;
Repair Attempt #3: Nylon Rope
While initially, nylon rope might seem like a much more legitimate repair option than packing the axle with gravel, I can assure you, it's not. At least not in the way that we used it.
Here's the concept: The CV joint isn't catching, maybe if we have a constant force pushing it into the wheel, it will catch. Who cares that the force of the engine was enough to grind up a bunch of gravel and a ball bearing, nylon rope is MUCH stronger.
I started lashing the rope around the steel wheel and then looping around the axle, tightening, and repeating. I spent probably about 40 minutes doing this process over and over while kneeling on the muddy, partially snow covered road.
Franco ran up a hill next to us to try and find a high point with cell service, he did not find any service.
Just as I was almost ready to try out the nylon rope fix, a guy pulled up and asked if we needed help. We arranged for him to wait until I tried the rope fix and then take us to use a phone.
I probably don't have to say this, but;
Repair Attempt #3 was a no-go.
The passerby turned out to be a staff member at the local Buddhist commune, which made me feel foolish for bringing a knife in case things went south. He drove us to the Shambhala Mountain Center (Buddhist commune/retreat center) to use the phone.
After about an hour and a half of phone calls, including a call to my parents and one to the insurance company (who initially promised a truck and then told us we'd have to wait until morning), I called my mom back and found out my Dad and brother were already on the way up with a tow strap.
The Buddhist guy drove us back to our car, and just after he pulled away, my Dad and brother pulled up in the 4Runner. They brought us apples, beanies, and cheese.
We hooked up the strap and started to tow, and made it off the dirt road to the main road. The brakes were heating up a lot on the downhills, so we decided to park it on the shoulder and have it towed the next day. The odor from the overheated brakes mixed with the burning vinyl rope was quite intense.
The next day, I had the car towed into town and to the shop where my good friend Seth works. Before I even knew it had arrived, he sent me a text which read "it is finished" and said I could come pick it up whenever I wanted to. Only cost me a little over $200, HUGE thanks to Seth for saving my butt over and over again where car repairs are concerned...
Keep your eyes out for a post about my symbolic analysis of all of this in the next week or so....
Our destination was WCR69 near Rustic, Colorado, about 25 miles up the canyon. Off of 69, there is a fairly vast network of Forest Service Roads riddled with huge puddles, steep hills, and rocky terrain. Also, it was snowing. Our initial plan was to drive the Sevenmile Creek trail which I had found in the Northern Colorado Off-Road guide book, but that turned out to be closed due to flooding. I looked at my Colorado Atlas and found some alternative roads to do some 4 wheeling on, and found a bunch of FS roads a little further up from Sevenmile Creek. Before going further up WCR69, I decided to stop back by rustic to get motor oil and a lighter, just in case.
We started onto FR 171 jus past an old ghost town site which had been bulldozed in the 1930's at around 4:00, plenty of time to do some good off-roading and get back to Fort Collins by 8 o'clock for small group. After a couple of hours of exploring including a coyote sighting, a dead moose, and a flock of sage grouse, we started back towards the main road to head back down. We got out of roughest parts by about 6:40 and I was hearing some strange sounds coming from the front passenger side of the car (Franco wasn't making the sounds). I stopped the car and immediately knew what to check: the CV joint on the front passenger tire which had broken not an hour earlier, or a minute earlier, but a whole YEAR earlier. I examined it and everything was, for the most part, ok minus the fact that I had been driving on a broken CV joint for a little over a year after Seth (Meyer) had told me to get it fixed ASAP. More about Seth later. So really the only thing that was wrong with the joint was that one of the bearings had fallen out, no big deal, I just picked it up, polished it off, and put it in the center console.
We were on our way again.
We got off of FR 171 and back onto WCR69, all that stood between us and HWY14 back to Fort Collins was a hill about a half-mile long. Normally, a gradual hill that's half a mile long is no big deal at all for my Fozzie however, when I made the turn onto WCR69, CV join apparently spat out all 5 of the other bearings that locked the joint into the tire. We coasted to a halt probably 50 vertical feet from the top of the hill, and that's about where I realized that my car was really broken.
The way Subaru AWD works, is that power is diverted to the wheel with the least amount of resistance, in theory, this helps keep the car going in the direction the driver wants it to, even when it's slipping. In my case, the front passenger CV joint (read: axle) was spinning inside the connection on the front passenger wheel, and therefore had NO resistance, so OBVIOUSLY it got all of the power. Which meant that the three wheels that were NOT broken had 0% power, and the ONE wheel that WAS broken had 100% of the power. In the more user friendly words of Franco my car went from being all-wheel-drive to being "Zero-Wheel-Drive." (At this point in the story, we weren't fully aware that there was ZERO power to the three good wheels)
As you can imagine, if a 2WD vehicle sometimes struggles to make it up a hill, a ZWD vehicle struggles a lot more. We decided that maybe it would help if Franco got out and pushed- it didn't. Or maybe if he opened the trunk and sat on the tail gate to put more pressure on the back tires- also didn't help. Then maybe if he pushed down above the front passenger side wheel. Any guesses? You got it! Didn't help. The last version of this weight re-distribution attempt was sitting on the hood above the driver's side tire, which, unfortunately also didn't help.
At this point, I decided I should try and fix it, which brings us to:
Repair Attempt #1: Spare Bearing
The problem that I was having, was that the CV joint no longer had any of the bearings that connected it to the wheel and enabled it to drive the tire forward. I was very well aware that I had saved one of the bearings earlier so I figured I could just plop it back in where it was supposed to go, and voilà! everything would be fine!
I got the jack out, lifted the front passenger tire off the ground and got to work poking the axle with my knife, and shoving the bearing into place. It seemed pretty solid, except that the axle was pretty loosely in there. Once I felt confident in my quick repair, I pulled out the jack, chocked the back tires, and hopped into the drivers seat.
Car on, e-brake disengaged clutch in, shift to first, gas.
What followed was a quick marbles-in-a-blender sound followed by more of the spinning clicking axle contacting nothing sound we'd grown to love (hate). I got out to look and sure enough the bearing I had just put back in had been chewed up and spat back out in the form of bits of shrapnel littering the gravel road.
Repair Attempt #1 was a no-go.
By this time, the sun had gone down and the light was quickly fading as flurries of snow started to descend on the mountains. At this point, we were mildly concerned, but still confident we could figure it out and make it back to town for small group, we might be a couple minutes late, but we would be there.
** For those of you who haven't spent much time in the mountains, generally speaking, there is NO cell service, and there are NO pay phones, which is why we hadn't called anyone yet**
Franco suggested that we try turning the car around and backing up the mountain. The idea sounded pretty good to me; at this point we thought the other wheels had some power, just not enough. I coasted backwards, into a driveway, and then forwards onto the road facing downhill. Shift into reverse, gas, nothing but the clicking metal on metal of the CV joint bouncing around with nothing to grab on to.
The snow was steadily increasing, and Franco and I almost simultaneously had the idea to try and coast down the hill all the way across the valley, and out the other side. Our original route would have been WCR69 to Rustic, about a mile away, and then HWY 14 back to Fort Collins. This new route would take us down a bunch of hills, and then back up one big one to Red Feather Lakes Road, about 10 miles from where we were. Admittedly, it doesn't necessarily make much sense to go for the 10 mile option over the 1 mile option, but after having attempted and failed to push my 2,300 pound vehicle, even the possibility of being able to coast all the way up the other side was better than being stranded 200 feet from the top of this one.
So, with the initial flurries of snow turning into a driving shower, borderline blizzard and the daylight quickly fading to darkness, we decided to go for it.
I used the gas the whole way, thinking that I was actually getting power to the wheels on the downhills, and did my best to keep my foot off the brake to give us a chance of making it up the other side. The result of course (Mom, skip to the next paragraph) was that Franco and I were blasting through a winding, gravel, mountain road in increasingly blizzard like conditions (visibility about 20 yards) with no power to any of the wheels, in the dark, at speeds between 40 and 60mph.
We made it pretty far, I was pretty impressed with how close we came to making it all the way to the top of the hill on the other side. Still, we hadn't made it all the way, and were basically in the same predicament as before, only the hill that we were now stopped on was much less steep, albeit slightly longer.
We chocked the wheels and systematically pushed, then held while one of us moved the chocks, over and over until we had made it about 25 yards and were cramping up from the exertion. We realized that pushing it up this hill was also not an option, so we decided to coast back the other way; we had passed a cabin or two with lights on and figured if we didn't make it all the way back to the other side, we could at least borrow a phone or get a ride from someone.
Unfortunately, physics doesn't allow a vehicle to coast from one hill through a valley to another and back up the other side, so we didn't make it very far at all this time.
We coasted to a halt once again, on yet another hill, which brings us to:
Repair Attempt #2: Gravel and Silt
Admittedly, my repair attempts throughout the night gradually became more and more desperate and less and less realistic. But I really thought this one was going to work.
I mentioned before that the problem was that the CV joint had chewed up and spat out all of the bearings, and so there was nothing to hold it in place and give power to the wheel. So obviously, all I would need to do to fix the problem, would be to replace the bearings. As you probably know, ball bearings are very similar to gravel in almost every area, except that they are made of steel, uniformly sized, smoothly shaped, and are very strong. Other than these minor differences, ball bearings and gravel are essentially the same. The problem with Repair Attempt #1 was obviously that I only had one bearing where I needed 6, using a bunch of gravel would surely be better than one ball bearing. So I decided that a legitimate course of action to facilitate the emergency repair of my vehicle would be to jam a bunch of gravel into the CV joint to act as temporary bearings.
After jamming the joint full of gravel, I remembered that I was missing one VERY IMPORTANT thing: grease. Obviously I didn't have any grease with me, so the next closest thing I could find within 5 feet was silt in the drainage ditches to the side of the road.
To summarize:
Gravel = Ball Bearings
Silt = Grease
Pretty ingenious, huh?
The whole time I had been executing this second repair I left the headlights and the hazards on in case somebody came around the corner or something. However, I had shut the engine off so that there was no chance of the engine engaging the axle and grinding my hand to bits. Safety first!
Unfortunately, when you take 15 minutes to jam gravel and silt into your CV joint, while using the car battery to power the lights in below freezing temperatures, chances are, there won't be enough power left to turn over the engine. If you can't turn over the engine, you can't test your ingenious gravel-based repair attempt.
No worries though! We were parked on a hill, remember? All I had to do was point the car back downhill and push start it. I cranked the wheel and started backing up to get pointed downhill, but the road here was much narrower than other parts, so I ended up with both back wheels in a ditch, car perpendicular across the road, and I couldn't start the engine.
About 2 seconds after I got the car stuck in the ditch, a car was coming around the corner, we told the guy the situation, and asked for a quick jump (so that we could try the ingenious gravel based repair attempt). He gave us a jump and went on his way.
I put the car in 1st, gave it gas, let out the clutch............. and..... marbles-in-a-blender sound followed by more of the spinning clicking axle contacting nothing sound.
Repair Attempt #2 was a no-go.
At this point, we were already coasting back down the hill, so we decided to just go for it, who knows, maybe by coasting the axle would magically heal itself....
We came to a halt not far from there a quarter of the way up another hill, our attempts to coast out of there were getting less and less effective. So without any further ado;
Repair Attempt #3: Nylon Rope
While initially, nylon rope might seem like a much more legitimate repair option than packing the axle with gravel, I can assure you, it's not. At least not in the way that we used it.
Here's the concept: The CV joint isn't catching, maybe if we have a constant force pushing it into the wheel, it will catch. Who cares that the force of the engine was enough to grind up a bunch of gravel and a ball bearing, nylon rope is MUCH stronger.
I started lashing the rope around the steel wheel and then looping around the axle, tightening, and repeating. I spent probably about 40 minutes doing this process over and over while kneeling on the muddy, partially snow covered road.
Franco ran up a hill next to us to try and find a high point with cell service, he did not find any service.
Just as I was almost ready to try out the nylon rope fix, a guy pulled up and asked if we needed help. We arranged for him to wait until I tried the rope fix and then take us to use a phone.
I probably don't have to say this, but;
Repair Attempt #3 was a no-go.
The passerby turned out to be a staff member at the local Buddhist commune, which made me feel foolish for bringing a knife in case things went south. He drove us to the Shambhala Mountain Center (Buddhist commune/retreat center) to use the phone.
After about an hour and a half of phone calls, including a call to my parents and one to the insurance company (who initially promised a truck and then told us we'd have to wait until morning), I called my mom back and found out my Dad and brother were already on the way up with a tow strap.
The Buddhist guy drove us back to our car, and just after he pulled away, my Dad and brother pulled up in the 4Runner. They brought us apples, beanies, and cheese.
We hooked up the strap and started to tow, and made it off the dirt road to the main road. The brakes were heating up a lot on the downhills, so we decided to park it on the shoulder and have it towed the next day. The odor from the overheated brakes mixed with the burning vinyl rope was quite intense.
The next day, I had the car towed into town and to the shop where my good friend Seth works. Before I even knew it had arrived, he sent me a text which read "it is finished" and said I could come pick it up whenever I wanted to. Only cost me a little over $200, HUGE thanks to Seth for saving my butt over and over again where car repairs are concerned...
Keep your eyes out for a post about my symbolic analysis of all of this in the next week or so....
