Got back from my long weekend riding the Hatfield & McCoy trails. I’m only 3.5 hours away so not a huge trip but certainly a good time with a few of my buddies. Overall, a great trip. I didn’t sleep enough, drank way too much beer and had a few mishaps. I don’t wanna type out a full report but I’ll talk about the hang ups. Friday, 30min into the trails I catch a rock the size of a gallon jug on a downhill with the right rear tire hard enough that I radioed back to the guy behind me and asked him to pull up and give it a look. Sure enough, I pinched it against the wheel and cut a hole in the sidewall. We pulled off to a flat spot and used a winch snatch blocked to a tree to get the weight off of it so I could get to work.
I carry a ton of tire repair stuff and I went for the Glue Tread bag. I was able to get a patch on the outside good enough that got it holding air and we hit the trail again. Another 30min and we pull off again to add some air to it but it was a pretty slow leak. As the day went on it kept getting worse as the patch job wasn’t perfect. We stopped again and I decided to try another patch job. This time I cleaned more and used more glue and activator to try and get a better seal but that didn’t last very long before we where stopping every couple miles to add air. We made the decision to head to the county road and back to the house so I could do a proper repair with a patch from the inside so I could get back out Saturday. We pulled in and washed the thing up and got to work while the other guys cooked dinner. We only ended up doing 35 miles for the day.
Used the trailer jack to break the inner bead and got everything apart pretty quick.
Here’s the cut from the inside after some clean up
Here’s where things went sideways, I was putting the wheel back together and while torquing up the beadlock ring bolts
NEVERLIFT noticed some imperfections in the paint in the recessed holes for the bolts. After a closer look we decided to pull the ring back off. 4 of the holes in the beadlock ring had cracked around the bolt heads. Instantly I’m pissed. After some thoughts about it, I had put some oil on the bolts so they wouldn’t get seized up. Well, that was certainly a mistake and I definitely over torqued them because of that. Another hang up was my 1/2” drive split beam torque wrench I keep in my truck is 40 ft/lb to 200 ft/lbs. the KRX wheels call for 41 ft/lbs for the bead lock bolts. At 40 you can hardly feel it click and its at the absolute end of its range so who knows what I was actually at when it failed. Unfortunately in my scramble I didn’t get pics of the damage but I will get some when I get a new ring and tire. We took off to town to get a few supplies to try and make something happen. Keep in mind at this point it’s 7pm on a Friday night not a proper shop around that’s open at that hour. We got to a tractor supply and snagged the last 4 M10 bolts they had and a dewalt 3/8 torque wrench but we never found anything to use as a washer to pull the ring in on the thickest part. We stopped in to Auto Zone and found a generic polyurethane swaybar bushing kit that had some nice thick pressed washers… perfect. Rushed back to the house and put it all back together with clean dry bolts all around and a proper torque wrench.
Got air in it and everything was good. Saturday we put in 80 miles with plans for more but the two guys on bikes where starting to get really worn out so we headed back. Over all a great trip but I’m still pissed I trashed that $100 ring and a tire but that’s all part of it.
On a different note, the KRX was incredible and the seats are icing on the cake. The other guys in the group where in a General XP, a Maverick 1000 and a RZR 800s. Everyone was sore and beat up at the end of the day, I felt great and I’m very happy with my decisions. I did get a nice stretch of rough service road beside the county road to really open it up, never lift took a cool video of it doing work at 60+mph. I was just messing around and when I saw him filming I just hammered on it. It’s so impressive coming from that General XP I had before.
