Vic high country - Easter 2014

Dedman

Dedman

Forum Member
Joined
Dec 3, 2012
Messages
766
Location
Perth Western Australia
Car Year
1999
Car Model
Forester
Transmission
5MT
Just returned from a long weekend away on the Wonnangatta River on the edge of the alpine national park. I will post some pics and videos when I get more time but here is the story in short.

Attempted to drive billy goat bluff track and ended up bending a rear strut part way up as a result bottoming out hard from going to fast to compensate for lack of low range and low rpm engine torque. It was so bent that the wheel was rubbing on the strut :eek: fortunately I have camber bolts in the rear so could compensate for the bend so at least the wheel would not rub anymore... Amazingly it still seemed to work and the car was perfectly drivable.

I decided to ignore the damaged strut with the logic that it was stuffed anyway and keep driving, although I decided to give the rest of billy goat bluff a miss.

Did have some great fun on some of the creek crossing on the Wonnangatta and Crooked River though with this being my favourite.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URpP68EZzs"]www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URpP68EZzs[/ame]

I may have been a little outside the if you cant safely walk it dont drive it rule though...
 
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You're like NachaLuva, you have a boat on wheels, sorry, on propellers !
 
By the sounds of it you had a great time :)
Sorry to hear about the rear strut :( but, it's great to hear that you still made the most of the trip enjoyable though :cool:

Well done on the water crossing too :ebiggrin:

Regards
Mr Turbo
 
sorry to hear about the rear strut. Was it OEM or KYB? I reckon the OEM are less prone to bending because they seem a heavier construction.

good tip re the camber bolts, I have em too. Another trick is to flip your wheel inside out if you need to clear the spring seat.

Top vid!
 
Full Trip Report

I have finally found time to write up a bit of a trip report for my Easter long weekend away.

The plan was to meet up with the parents around Dargo on Friday morning but I decided to go up on the Thursday arvo to get a bit more wheeling in.

After spending the night in a lovely campsite on the Wonnangatta River near Colins Hut I hit the tracks for my first river crossing

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuxiiiLpqo"]www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuxiiiLpqo[/ame]

After all the rain we had had the week before I was hoping for a bit more water in the river but unfortunately the rivers seemed to have dropped again.

Further upstream I discovered a crossing where the river was a bit narrower than before resulting in a deep fast flowing albeit short crossing.
This is the trip across

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo-HLoXdfHg[/ame]

I love this still from the video, can almost see the bonnet through the water on the windscreen.

14169392253_39e993a2b4_c.jpg


As you can imagine this sight combined with the car drifting downstream a small amount mid crossing had me hoping against hope that I would be able to drive the exit to the crossing which did look pretty sketchy....
But no such luck...

13925935000_6f0869ca2f_c.jpg


Soft wet sand on the exit combined with a bit of a ****ting myself lead foot on the accelerator saw me bottomed out on the sand. Fortunately I made it up far enough to avoid water coming in to the car.
There was no way I was going to try reverse the crossing so winch out it was

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=9msuKOUHrCY[/ame]

I discovered winching on sand is a bit different to other terrain as you have to winch with the car as a dead weight. If you try to assist at all by driving you end up digging the in wheels almost straight away making it even harder to winch... The winch had plenty of capacity so this was not an issue.
 
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Unfortunately the track kind of ended after this so I had to return the way I had come (not really a complaint..) After being almost washed off my feet several times trying to wade across the river to set up the camera on the other side (the deepest section was 0.9 meters deep and flowing fast enough that I had walk down stream as I crossed to avoid being swept off my feet) I made the return crossing.

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URpP68EZzs[/ame]

and the view from the cab

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0tH2CM09Mc[/ame]

After this I decided I had had enough of rivers for a while and decided to climb some of the hills. Taking Maguire track up from the river at 200m above sea level to the highest point of 930m a short distance later this is the view I received.

13934690328_b7b67e57bb_k.jpg

and a few pics of the car
13925886357_b578b82877_z.jpg

14089404376_76639d54cc_z.jpg


After this it was time to head back down and meet up with the parents, not a bad amount of driving completed before 11am.

After setting up camp in the same location which I had stayed in the previous location (which turned out to be one of the few campsites not already filled with the Easter masses) we decided to have a go at driving up Billy Goat bluff track.
For those who don’t know Billy Goat bluff track is one of the iconic 4wd tracks in the Vic high country increasing in altitude by over a kilometre in well under 10kms of driving. Needless to say it is very steep and due to the large amount of traffic was rather cut up.

This is the first time I had been offroading involving serious hill climbing in my vehicle with 3 people and gear in the car and to my horror I discovered that a track I could have easily driven in the car on my own could not be driven with the extra weight. I just did not have low enough gearing or enough power. I was amazed how much difference an extra 2 people made but it was phenomenal.

To compensate for this lack of power I had to hit climbs faster and harder and as you already know this did not end well for me. Only a few hundred meters into the track I was on a steep section and had to climb a small ledge. As I went over it with far to much speed there was an almighty bang followed by what sounded like a flat tyre.
I stopped straight away and expecting to see a shredded tyre but the tyre was fine. The incline was to steep at this point to go sticking my head under the car to inspect so I tried to drive further up the track hoping that I had imagined the noise. Unfortunately I had not.... After a one million point turn on the narrow track with some very sketchy angles I headed back to the flat ground at the start to inspect the damage.

Before I even inspected the car I had decided that it was most likely a bent a strut and sure enough when I removed the wheel there was a very clear bend. Unfortunately my camera was flat at this point so I did not get any pics or videos but here is the strut removed from the vehicle.

14109462002_f7ea7e648e_z.jpg

13925871507_f10d75a729_z.jpg

The pictures do not do it justice at all. It was very bent in two directions, so much so that it jammed at full compression and had no shock absorbing ability what so ever.... Also had an alarming amount of play in it.

Fortunately I had recently installed camber bolts on the rear and with a quick adjustment to maximum positive camber the wheel did not rub any more.

At this point I decided to call it a day and head back to camp rather disappointed.

I did manage to find another crossing of the Wonnangatta river though on the way back to camp

14089397696_908059c3ae_z.jpg


[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=qubHCt2w0GQ[/ame]

Had a fair bit of wheel spin in the deepest section on the slippery rocks fighting the current but nothing to bad.

The following day I decided that despite the damage I was going to keep driving as it was to far to come to not make the most of the location.
This time we headed up Conway track which was another very steep track. Again I ran out of oomph at times and had to ask the parents to get out and walk for a bit (they insisted they needed the exercise but I still felt very bad)

Here are a few videos from the steep sections.
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cuvgb2qBSY[/ame]
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tjtI66ztYk[/ame]

At the top of the climb we explored the ruins of the old mining town of Grant. It was a very interesting place and had heaps of old mines to explore. This is a pic of an old ladder in one of the mines. Can anyone guess how I took this photo?
13925879437_b0558b4105_z.jpg


For the afternoon we decided to have a go at the Crooked river track which had over 20 river crossings in a 10is km stretch. Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea and the track was a bloody traffic jam...

Until now I haven’t really mentioned the other vehicles but over the whole weekend I saw hundreds of them. Out of those hundreds only 5 were not 4wd and of the 4wds about 70% were heavily modified with 33inch or greater tyres.
I don’t know if it was the fact that a Subaru forester was completing the tracks they were or if they just didn’t like the way I looked :poke: but a large number of them were f@%kwitts, complete with beer in hand driving like idiots. One group of them decided they wanted to stop in the middle of the road and have a chat with another car stopped in the middle of the road completely blocking the road. After waiting patiently behind them for a few minutes we went up and politely asked them if they could let up passed to which the response was pretty much f@%k off. I decided to ignore this and take another route which was turned out to be a great track and resulted in me being in front of them so later on they had to wait whilst I went as slow as I could along the track :lol:
 
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Anyway back to the crooked river track. Apart from it being a complete traffic jam it was also rather easy. I only had trouble on three of the exits to the crossings.
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=14zCQ2EGZGw[/ame]
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6vmyfttb90[/ame]
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC5O1R2m8s[/ame]


That was about it from the trip. I drove a few other tracks but nothing tricky.

Finally here are a few pics I took whist at camp.
14109274751_d71cec41ab_z.jpg

13925923658_f4b4267f5d_z.jpg


All in all it was a great trip even with the damage and now I know what my next mod is going to be... A custom gearbox with L series low, front lsd, some form of lockable centre and hopefully 4.44 diffs so the car is unstoppable.
 
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Great trip :lildevil:

Love the vids as usual. Sure looks like you had a great time despite the bent strut

Our SFs dont like extra weight do they, they sure miss decent low down torque :lol:

Dedman said:
I don’t know if it was the fact that a Subaru forester was completing the tracks they were or if they just didn’t like the way I looked :poke: but a large number of them were f@%kwitts, complete with beer in hand driving like idiots. One group of them decided they wanted to stop in the middle of the road and have a chat with another car stopped in the middle of the road completely blocking the road. After waiting patiently behind them for a few minutes we went up and politely asked them if they could let up passed to which the response was pretty much f@%k off.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately thats a very typical attitude from 4WD boofheads who are obviously doing some serious compensating!

I decided to ignore this and take another route which was turned out to be a great track and resulted in me being in front of them so later on they had to wait whilst I went as slow as I could along the track :lol:
Click to expand...

Haha cool....karma lol :lol:
 
Dulagarl said:
sorry to hear about the rear strut. Was it OEM or KYB? I reckon the OEM are less prone to bending because they seem a heavier construction.
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Was some Pedders suspension strut. They seemed to be fairly good in terms of retaining their shock absorbing ability even with constantly being coated in mud but do seem to bend fairly easily.

Dulagarl said:
good tip re the camber bolts, I have em too. Another trick is to flip your wheel inside out if you need to clear the spring seat.
Click to expand...

I am curious what exactly you mean as I dont really understand how that would work, at least with standard steelies anyway as the ring of metal in the centre of the rim would prevent the rim from sitting hard up against the disk.
 
Awesome mate! You're a braver man than I am with those river crossings - pretty gnarly stuff!!

Cheers

Bennie
 
Dedman said:
I decided to ignore this and take another route which was turned out to be a great track and resulted in me being in front of them so later on they had to wait whilst I went as slow as I could along the track :lol:
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Ahh thats karma :lol: don't you love it :rotfl:

El_Freddo said:
You're a braver man than I am with those river crossings -
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I'll 2nd that alright :biggrin:
Well done Dedman :discomonkey:

Awesome pics & vids too mate :raz:
I really love that panorama one of you when you reached the top :raz:
It's banner material for sure, if I may & if its ok by you :iconwink:

Regards
Mr Turbo
 
Dedman said:
All in all it was a great trip even with the damage and now I know what my next mod is going to be... A custom gearbox with L series low, front lsd, some form of lockable centre and hopefully 4.44 diffs so the car is unstoppable.
Click to expand...

Beautiful trip report Dedman….and your next mods will help you a lot but not sure if the 4,44 diffs fit with the 1,59:1. Maybe a 2,2 non interference motor with more grunt would do the job…(my next mod !)
 
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