Back in the good ol' days, the engineers over at Jeep used to take a week off of work during the month of May and spend it out in the promised land - Moab! It was a NO work, NO stress week of wheeling with friends and family and only vacationers need apply. Unfortunately, it'd been almost 10 years since they were able to do something like this and that was something our good friend Jim Repp, the Vehicle Development Manager for Wrangler, was determined to change. Needless to say, in 2017, the guys and gals responsible for making what we love to drive, revived their long tradition of wheeling out in Moab, on their own time, with their own rigs and as luck would have it, Cindy and I were invited to join in on the fun.
I hope you can be forgiving for the lack of photos we took as we spent most of our time filming this trip and will be making a video of it. That being said, here are a handful of pics that we were able to take as well as a few that our good friend Tony Carvallo took and was kind enough to share. We hope you enjoy.
MOAB BOUND
Being that we just took Rubicat out to Moab a few weeks before, we decided to take Moby out this time around. Here's a shot of him all packed up and ready to go.
Couldn't ask for a nicer day to be driving across Nevada.
Being that we were heading out early, Cindy and I decided to step off the pavement and take a few back roads along the way and just for fun.
Mission control - we have a problem.
Climbing up a long steep grade, Moby's engine simply cut out and we were dead in the water. While we were able to get the engine started, we had no transmission and our Aeroforce Interceptor was fried so we weren't able to pull a code. After verifying that we had sufficient transmission fluid, the shifter linkage was all good and that none of the fuses were blown, I pulled the negative battery cable to try and clear any codes there might be and with the hopes that it would help things out. Unfortunately, it didn't and we were still stuck up on this desert mountain.
As luck would have it, if I walked down the trail a bit, I just had enough signal on my phone to get a text out to Robbie at Motech and fortunately, he was up and around on a Saturday morning to help me out. With his help, I checked and wiggled the wires around on the fuse block and that got our transmission working again. Unfortunately, that only got us going for about 2 miles and we lost our transmission again after stopping to check out a deep rut we needed to traverse.
This time around, I decided to unbolt the fuse block and give things a closer look. After pulling away some of the liquid insulator, I found this.
Lacking a soldering iron to make a solid field repair, I did what I could with the electrical repair supplies I had and slowly but surely, we hobbled our way off the mountain, back on to pavement and all the way back to the nearest town, 5 to 10 miles at a time or for however long our engine and transmission would keep on running.
Once in town I was able to pick up a soldering iron at an Autozone and make a better but far from perfect field repair.
While the repair did help some, we still seemed to be running in a limp mode and could only go about 20 miles at a stretch before we started having issues again. Once we were closer to home, we called our son to lend us a hand and used our Duramax to help bring Moby in.
Although it was now about 2 AM on Sunday morning, we transferred everything we had packed in Moby into Rubicat before having a stiff drink and calling it a night.
