2024 Activities

June 5, 2024

I spent some time today working on the pre-runner following our Baja vacation. It was time for our first oil and filter change as well as a thorough air filter cleaning. It all looked good but with a new engine build, we wanted to change the oil and filter after a few outings initially. We'll resume a "normal" oil change interval from this point on. I can see that the suspension system has settled a bit but it's now right where we want it so no adjustments were required. I adjusted the steering "toe" again - it was almost, but not quite perfect so with this final change it should be good to go. We had attempted to adjust the roof light bar aiming while in Baja but found it wouldn't allow any change... I took the light bar off the car today and discovered why: the spacing between the mount "pivot" and "adjustment" bolt holes/slots were slightly off, causing an interference issue. I adjusted the spacing and now the light bar aim can be easily adjusted. We'll fine tune the aim next time we're out at night.

Light Bar "aim" adjustment details
The aim was a little lower than we wanted; I adjusted it up a very small amount and we'll fine tune it next time out.

Limit Strap mount detail
In an attempt to reduce all the "clatter" noise we get from the suspension in rough terrain, I added small springs to the limit strap mounting hardware. The springs will keep the hardware from sliding freely in the boss bushings as the suspension cycles, hopefully reducing a little bit of the noise (most of the noise is normal shock "bypass valve" action that we can't do anything about).

May 10, 2024

We had a very nice family vacation at our house south of San Felipe this month; the pre-runner was great fun and ran perfectly the entire time we were there. We spent a fair bit of time capturing video of it out in the desert; here's what Trevor put together from all the clips he sorted through:

Pre-Runner in Baja
We did a little suspension tuning while in Baja and are very pleased with the results. We also adjusted the steering system a bit; we made a small change to the front end "toe" to eliminate a very minor "directional instability" that we had noted during our last outing. It's a much smoother ride and tracks better now. We believe that we've nearly optimized the handling but we'll probably make another minor "toe" adjustment - the previous adjustment eliminated almost all of the instability and we expect that we can do even better. We'll continue experimenting with small changes to the suspension/steering set-up to see if further improvement is possible.
We're determining our average fuel "miles per gallon" in various Baja off-road terrain types - we're keeping track of the GPS mileage and fuel used to get an approximate number for planning purposes. Our fuel gage works great but we want to be able to plan ahead for our fuel stops - without waiting for our fuel gage to tell us we're out of gas... So far, it seems like 7 mpg is a good starting value for the varied terrain we generally find in Baja. Our fuel cell holds 34 "useable" gallons - 238 miles from "Full" to "Empty". We'll plan our fuel stops so that we always have a comfortable "contingency reserve"... We built and tuned the engine to use premium pump gas (more performance would be available if we had tuned it for race fuel but it's expensive and not readily available in Baja). When we can't get premium fuel in Baja, we'll use an "octane booster" additive (we always carry some in the car).