Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, November 28, 2006 at 4:27PM :
In Reply to: Smart Monster truck builder recoops $ posted by lurker on Tuesday, November 28, 2006 at 3:14PM :
Or maybe he just sold the axles. I've heard the rock crawler guys pay 2 grand apiece for rockwell axles. Even if he bought the M35 from GL, he probably paid less than 5 grand for it. He more than got his money out by selling the axles. Anything he gets for this abortion is gravy. I'd love to see him try to drive into my place in a foot of snow and through the creeks to my shed with that rig. I'm sure the first chuck-hole he hit just outside of town would break those axles like toothpicks.
It's obviously no good off-road, but I wonder if he's ever taken it out on the highway. An empty M35 puts about 3500 lbs on EACH front tire. Wonder what the rating of those "Wide Brute" tires on the 15" chevy rims is? Even worse is the rear. It sure looks like he replaced 4 9.00-20s with a single 15" tire. If the truck is only driven empty, the rear tires aren't loaded as badly as the front ones, but any load at all would severely overload them. M35s scrub their front tires pretty hard on the pavement even with aired-up NDTs. With wide-footprint mudder tires, they'll eat the rubber off real fast. Add the heat from that to the obvious overloading, and the temptation to go 70 mph due to the difference in gearing compared to the double-reduction rockwells, and I'd like to seem him go 100 miles on the freeway on a hot summer day without a blowout. Speaking from experience, you haven't learned the true meaning of "armstrong" steering until you have a front tire blow out in a deuce in heavy city freeway traffic with no shoulders.