Elevated photography

 
And here's something different today. Here is a picture of my setup for taking elevated photos. The mast attaches to the hitch receiver and extends over 15 meters into the air. As you can see there is a 3D head allowing for 360deg. left-right movement and 90 deg. up-down movement.

Pacer fender flares

 
 
Remember the earlier post reg. fender flares - as you can see I finally installed them...or almost installed them - for now I only had time for the front. Or to tell you the truth I didn't have much idea how to go about installing these on the back, considering the decorative plastic trimming and bumper which extends on the sides and will be difficult to attach to. Nevertheless I already did some mud testing and these work great. i.e. many people install the flares to keep the car road legal - well if your tires do not extend beyond the standard wheel wells, install something like this anyways - do it for your own comfort. Earlier, whenever I would hit a larger puddle of water even on the stock tires, it would amazingly make it across the hood and then flow inside through any of the open windows. Another problem was that if such a wave of water hit the windshield and flowed down onto the hood, some of it made it into the air intake of the interior blower fan - making the windows inside fog instantly. Now with the flares installed the problem seamed to dissapear - I did some testing on a flooded parking lot after the recent rainfall and the water beautifully splashes at 45deg. angles to the sides - next time I'll have to take someone with me to take pictures - it must have been a very nice view from outside.

Optima

 
Can you see it?
Yes...that little red thingy in the left hand corner...my battery was starting to fail...so I bought myself an Optima.
Since my Jeep is a Diesel, I used to have a 74Ah unit installed whilst this Optima is only 50Ah...but to tell you the truth it works great. With the capability of 1100 Amps at 0 deg. the glow plugs heat up in no time - almost twice as fas as with the previous battery. Now I'm thinking of getting a second battery like this, but the yellow top version, for the foreseen winch. It will go in the place of the air filter box, when this is replaced by a tubular unit, to facilitate installation of a snorkel. ;)

replacement spicer CV joint part

 
Today another package arrived from the US (the earlier mentioned CV driveshaft replacement part I managed to buy on yet another auction) therefore it looks I'll have a bussy weekend trying to rebuild and install the front driveshaft. I already managed to get the old ball off the driveshaft, although it was not an easy task. It would come off half way and then would get stuck - you can't see it, but it has a needle bearing inside, where these needles run on a shaft protruding at the end of the driveshaft and when I tried to pull the ball off, the needles inside would reorient at such an angle that they wedged between the inner runway and shaft making removal impossible. So what to do in such a situation? ... HEAT - as you might remember from physics when you heat something up, it expands. Unfortunatelly I didn't have a blowtorch or anything similar handy...but a grinder worked just as well. Pressing hard against the running grinder the ball heated up from the friction, turning all those 'nice colors' and simply fell off.

unexpected surprise

 
so what can you stumble uppon in the tall grass when offroading? Yes ...these are wild boars...fortunatelly they were more scarred than we were...and therefore ran away...otherwise it could have been 'interesting' ;

vacation ...

 
and some more mud and water ;)

My vacation

 
Some of you might be wondering what did I do on my vacation ...well it rained for a few days, therefore instead of going to the beach we found ourselves a better pastime ... M U D ! ! ! ;)

x-mas time!

 
 
 
 
Look at all the 'gifts' I have received.
I just returned from my 10 day holiday at the sea just to see two of the few packages arrive, which I have won on Ebay. One of them is a set of Pacer fender flare extensions I managed to buy for 1/4 of the price for which they sell here...and that's including shipping ... and what's even better, these are the heavy duty 3 inch type with wire reinforcements ;) although I have a dillema now as how to install them...or to be more exact - should I have them come all the way down in the front onto the plastic bumper, or should I end them where the metal fender ends and meets the bumper? I guess I'll have to dig through my 4x4 / offroad magazines and see how other's do it.
The other one is a hood bra - this little gadget simply is nowhere to be found in Poland, whilst with our roads and all the gravel etc. shooting at you from the cars in front, this should come on the car as standard - I asked once at the dealership about it and it was only available on 'special order' i.e. as you can imagine the price was also very 'special'.
I got it on ebay from Eric here: http://myworld.ebay.com/erockjeep, he unfortunatelly does not take paypal whilst bidpay for some reason refused both my credit cards, fortunatelly we were able to complete the transaction via Western Union. Of course Western Union clerk asked three times if I'm sure that I want to transfer money to some unknown individual, that it might be unsafe etc. I took the risk and it was definatelly worth it - as a matter of fact Eric shipped the package so quickly and the paperwork was done so perfectly, that the package made it here quicker than I get most packages from other cities in Poland!