Posted by John Eickhof on Tuesday, February 03, 2004 at 7:41PM :
Saturday, our temperature here finally rose above 20 degrees...so I decided to fire up the 1970 W300 and shake the dust out of her...She lit right off, (has not been fired up since last April!)I removed the 20 foot boom, went and put some fresh gas in ...found a slight vacuum problem..the vacuum line to the power assist unit on the firewall had lsot it's little cover! So, the brake pedal was hard and the response from the motor was very poor!! Anyway, Sunday, Digger and Tommy called me to go on an afternnon ride so I took the W300...We had a GREAT time! (forgot the danmed camera though) The snow as deep and had a 8-10" hard crust from all the freeze-thaws lately... anyway, the LU-2 winch was used a lot! First to pull myself out of a 4ft drift then several times to pull either Tommy (in a Blazer) or Digger (in his Ford 1/2 ton) out of drifts! Well, we were less than a quarter mile from the road when Tommy really got buried...So, I hooked up a strap onto my winch line so I could stay back about 60 feet (or get buried myself) Tried winching only to slide towards him, so I pulled forward and gave hime a few tugs to get him out...well...so far so good untill I was backing up on a pull and felt a clunk like I hit something...but I kept going and pulled him free...about that time Digger was yelling for me to stop...I had a broken tie rod!!
At least Tommy was out and we were able to get him and Digger to the road..Sure enough the tie rod had evered next to the adjustable section...1" diameter torn right in two!!
So I left the truck there (now getting dark) and rode back with Digger to my yard where we removed a tie rod from one of my spare axles..took it back, installed it (in less than 20 minutes!) And I was on the road home...Moral to the story is: Never drive over a winch line! They have a habit of grabbing the worst things!! It was my own winch line that got caught on one of the lock collar bolts on the tie rod and when I was backing up at speed, the line got caught under the tire and ripped the tie rod in two!! All I can say is that it sure is nice to have spare parts!!!Hopefully someone else won't be a stupid as I was!!
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