[Pazuzu]

All of my stories are related to rock crawling events (think King of the Hammers, etc)

I lived in AZ, and these usually took palce in CA, so we had a 400-500 mile drive back and forth for long weekend events, driving trucks that were wiggly at best, downright wobbly at worst, and often couldn't go above 60mph. People came from all over for these events, and we had big bonfire camping areas in the desert.

One time, a guy drive his Toyota 4x4 out there from Connecticut. He was used to mud offroading, where you drop the clutch and modulate your speed with the gas. When rock crawling, you modulate your speed with the clutch. Well, he wasn't good at that, and burned it up the first day. We found a section of desert that had a ridge, pushed his truck over so the left tires were on the ridge, and used that as a makeshift garage pit. Sent someone into town (an hour drive), and we pulled and replaced the clutch right there, 4 wheels on the ground, in the sand. Two guys bench pressed the transmission out of and back into place. He finished the weekend, drove home and had that clutch for several more years.

Another time, someone grenaded their rear end. We opened it up, and saw that the spider gear was cracked. So...we took 3 batteries, used jumper cables to wire them in parallel (series? cant remember), and created a stick welder. Welded the spider gears together in the housing, creating a welded locker. Closed things up, and ran that for the rest of the weekend. Now...before we closed it up, we tossed a good handful or two of sand, some beer, several cigarette butts, the broken gear pieces into the third member, AND NO OIL, just for good measure. The owner knew that the whole thing was going to have to be replaced when he got back home anyways, so we wanted to see what happened. Welded Toyota third member survived for 2 more days with that crap rattling around back there.

One other time, I rolled my 4Runner on the trail out there, ended up breaking the engine mount and cracking the intake. Whenever I went above idle, the engine would lurch over, which opened the plastic intake, creating a massive air leak, and it would die. We ended up welding 3 links of a spare chain between the frame and the engine mount, to keep it from lurching over (that chain was still on my engine when sold it many years later...). We also took a roll of duct tape and some random spare plastic tubing, and made a makeshift cold air intake which led through the driver's side headlight hole, which was, of course, missing a headlight after the roll. Drive back to Arizona like that, then for several more months afterwards.

You're right, doing desperate things in the field to vehicles is probably just for the clicks. Especially when you've destroyed your ride home, with 500 miles of desert driving ahead of you...

Point being, if you want to survive the apocalypse, drive a Toyota truck, because they can be fixed with anything.