off road

Quote:

Originally posted by Gracilis

who knows of any good trails in eastern michigan?

well there aint really dick shit for trails within a hundred miles of detroit but my uncle has a place at houghtan lake and has a jeep he takes on the trails in roscommon county and around that area up there.

It's dirty and hot, you get stuck and things break.

I love it!

The CJ7 is the King, the first Sport Ute ever.

I've been offroading for two years now. Done some competing too, both offroad trial and offroad endurance&orienteering (24 hour competitions, where you are given a list of waypoints that give you varying amounts of points according to their difficulty).

There's a national cup for off road endurance&orienteering here in Finland and our team finished 4th after the last season with an old Toyota Landcruiser HJ60.

i do off road but with no awd...
with my second car, an opel kadett, i drove 65.000km on 1year, most of it not on paved roads... it wasn't real offroadin' but just small forestroads and dirttracks through the fields...
and now with my XM i just follow my GPS, when it says: "caution dirt road" well i just wanna check out what my gps calls a road... in france i noticed it is very optimistic in what she calls a road ever went down a hill of 15% that was obviously only meant as a test for awd-cars? try that with a front wheel driven overloaded XM and you feel alive!

jta...does that landcruiser have a tube frame, or is it a c frame? I think that a lancrusier, atleast older models, not real familiar with the newer models, have a far supieor frame, for endurance, i've wrecked a many c channel frames on cj's. I retired from the army awhile back, and i would say i rode around alot in humvee's and drove quite a few, but mostly had a driver, and they are fairley impressive in what they will endure, would like to get my hands on a frame from a military humvee, biggest drawback being the pure wieght of the vehicle, but it was not designed for the type of off road we are exactly talking about. Landcruiser Frames are getting harder and harder to get ahold of in these parts, so we go through alot of cj frames, had a 69 lancruiser with 3 on the tree, but unfornutaley i sold it, it didnot have alot of high end torque, but hand an impressive low range torque, so to end my ramblings keep rockin' with the Toy's they do kick ass, by the way have you modified the motor, does it have a sr22 or what in it?

also when you talk about orienteering, do you have a spot person, or is it single driver?

The toyota has a standard frame, with some armor bolted on below the more sensitive stuff. The engine is a standard 4.2 litre inline 6 cylinder diesel with a relatively small Garret turbo bolted on a reversed intake manifold, that gives full boost at around 1600 rpm. Don't know how much power we get from it, but it has been quite sufficient so far. Other mods on the car : chassis has been lifted 4" off the frame, a 6 point rollcage, dual winches (electrical Kewi 9000 in front and original Tyota mechanical one in back), suspension mods that allow greater flex (currently we can drive any of the wheels on a 85 cm rock with all three others still on the ground). It's a pretty impressive all-round offroader at the moment. The tires we currently use are 35/13.5" Maxxis Mudzillas on 15" rims, which seem to perform well on most terrains.

Orienteering is a team event, since the competitions last for 24 hours from start to finish. You're not allowed to compete alone for safety reasons, the minimum is 2 persons / car. Our team consists of 2 drivers, who take turns at the wheel, a winch monkey and a navigator. At the start of the competition we get a list of 150-200 GPS coordinates. Our job is to get close enough to them so that we can take a picture where one of the crew is able to touch both the vehicle and the spot marker with his hands (like in the pic of yours truly in my earlier message). We get different amounts of points from each marker according to their difficulty. The one in the pic was a 3 pointer. There are some that give you 100 points too, but then you have to do something pretty close to impossible in order to reach them. Then it's just a matter of trying to get as many points during the 24 hours as you can... We compete in the second hardest class (Modified) with our Toyota.

There are 4 vehicle classes : Original, Standard, Modified and Prototype. Original is for unmodified vehicles with wheels up to 29". Standard allows some suspension mods and wheels up to 31". In modified you can have wheels up to 35" and do some rather heavy mods if you are so inclined. Prototype has very few limitations on what you can do to the vehicle. Maximum wheel size there is 42".