Took the buggy out over the weekend, no rockcrawling but put 65 miles on it with my buddy fully suited up.
I got a new driveshaft from Driveline Tech in Hurricane, I had dropped off the old shaft after the last trip down.
Beefed up the carrier bearing mount and made a new bracket for the new setup. This is the 3rd front driveshaft iteration and hopefully the last. I was hoping the Busted Knuckle carrier bearing kit I had could be reused, but the dude said their kit was really weird and recommended replacing it all for parts that are off the shelf and easy to replace, so I bit the bullet and said sure.
A quick drive the other day to test it and started getting a misfire again. Found that the same #4 cylinder spark plug wire had gotten fried. The heat protection sleeve wasn't doing as good a job as I had thought, so as a temporary (or permanent?) fix I wrapped all the plug wires in aluminum foil and then put the heat sleeve over them. Kinda ghetto, but I think will do exactly what I need. There was also a plug wire on the driver's side that was starting to get brittle and have the coating flake off. I'll probably rig up some plug wire mounts to try and further secure the plug wires from the headers, but the headers I made are pretty tight.
For the test run this weekend we also hooked the boost bypass valve back up. At this point I think the bypass valve may just be inherently fucked up, since it's extremely inconsistent revving the engine and watching it actuate. I won't fix that before the next race, so decided to hook it up and I'll get that sorted in the future. Since my intercooler is really small, I'd rather the bypass valve be hooked up and not make much boost since it'll keep the intercooler/steering cooling loop cold, where as when it's always in boost that cooling loop gets really hot.
The next Bonneville Offroad race is in 2.5 weeks, so this was a good test run doing a loop around Sand Hollow and Warner Valley. It was also the first time my buddy was able to fully suit up and properly check out the fire suit/neck restraint/helmet combo. She runs like an absolute animal! No issues whatsoever, no front driveshaft wobble anymore. I'd like to solve the boost issue, but I don't know if I'll ever put more power through this thing than what the current pulley can do. I had thought about putting a bigger blower on, but it makes so much power I don't think the chassis can take anymore. There's so many things that limit it before power---bigger shocks, front suspension travel, steering fidelity, etc.
The biggest thing it needs is a better alignment. It's not horrible, but past 50mph you can feel some oddities of how the suspension is cycling and the steering. Last time I raced I got a proper alignment and it made a huge difference in how controlled it felt and how it handled.
There's also a handful of other small things I'm going to change before this race. The pedals are pretty awful in how they're positioned, really have to crank your ankle back at rest so going to fix that. I ordered a larger master cylinder to try and stiffen the brake feel up too but we'll see how well that fits. I'd still like a 2-turn orbital, but for how expensive orbitals are I think that will wait. The steering is improved with the tighter turning radius from moving the tie rods though so that helps. I'm also going to revalve the shocks again, I got some more shims in from ADS and some more advice about setting them up.
The suspension is alright, I thought before it was pretty good but pushing faster through stuff and I'm finding the limits again. I'm going to stiffen the shocks up a bit more, and then open the ride height bypass tubes more to try and make small shit feel better. The bump zone actually seems pretty good, the whole loop and I never got into the bump stops more than 1" which is where I want. The bump zone is incredibly stiff, combine that with the bump stops and it takes an extremely hard hit to fully bottom the suspension which is what I want.
I'm debating increasing the ride height 1-2" to make it ride a bit better, though that'd compromise handling somewhat. But right now I think I'm only at 8" of up travel in the front, which is really 6" before you hit bumps. Another inch or two would help quite a bit.
The drivetrain ran extremely cool the whole time. Engine never got over 192 I think, trans was sub 150 the whole time. Diffs were nice and cool. No misfire issues finally! It still amazes me how reliable this thing is, I don't really think of something built from scratch to be reliable, but she's been an absolute champ. If I can keep the tires alive and avoid running into any fences, should be a good race in a couple weeks!