We got up in the morning and got to work. We went to the hardware store and bough some supplies. Jimmy had left us with some slide hammers and we had a small hole drilled into the end of the shaft from the night before. We picked up a tap and die set from Jimmy and the drill bits required from the hardware store, along with more hacksaw blades.
While everyone else was out wheeling on Friday, Amber and I took turns with the hacksaw blades, cutting away at the weld boogers. Sometimes we'd take a break and attempt to pull the shaft out with the slide hammer, but we weren't making much progress. It was hard to put pressure on the saw blade without it binding so we just slowly cut away at it as the day wore on. We broke the small slide hammer, so I welded up an adapter to allow us to attach the broken part of the small hammer to the big hammer. With the big hammer, we managed to break one of the bigger boogers loose, Amber worked at it with the saw for a while and managed to get it free and out of the spindle. Stephen Watson showed up just as we re-attached the slide hammer and attempted to pull the shaft, it slid all the way out, right up to the point the splines hit the remaining boogers...
This was the Friday of Blazer Bash so it was getting close to time for the BBQ, we decided we wanted to make it to that with the truck and trailer and since the shaft wouldn't come out, it would have to go with us. To prevent further damage, we cut the stub off the broken end of the shaft so we could leave the stuck end of the shaft in the axle tube without it engaging the splines on the diff. The flange was then glued and bolted back in place, we grabbed a shower and headed to the BBQ (late). At this point I was exhausted, my arms, hands and shoulders were sore from the hours and hours of sawing away (I'd estimate 8-10 hours between Amber and myself) and I just wanted to drink and talk with friends for a while. We headed back to the cabin after the BBQ and crashed fairly early so we could go back at it in the morning.
Saturday morning we got right to work, we pulled the shaft out as far as it would go, pulled the shaft from the other side, then pulled the diff cover and dropped out the carrier. At this point we were able to slide the broken piece of shaft out the opposite side and finally see what we had left to clean up. We headed to the hardware store for the umpteenth time and picked up a Dremel with an extension so we could clean it up. We cleaned until we melted the generic sanding drum spindle and decided that was good enough. We test fit a stock shaft, bolted it to the hub and spun it to make sure we weren't getting any contact and everything looked good. Just for fun, we test fit the Superior shaft and discovered that the splines are a bit deeper on it and it wouldn't clear the damaged section of the spindle...
After carefully cleaning out the axle housing, we glued a nice big magnet inside the diff cover, reassembled everything and topped off with oil. We grabbed a quick shower and hit up Milt's for a late lunch on our way to Hell's Revenge. Finally we were back on the trail after what seemed to be an eternity of working on the S-10, we had been in Moab for almost 3 days and had only done about 500 feet of trail...
We stopped up at the Colorado Overlook to snap a couple pictures:
We cruised through the trail up to the crossover point (just before Escalator) and then cut back across to the entrance so we didn't have to take the bumpy exit road. Someone had told us about the dino tracks near the entrance to Hells (right at the overlook for Moab) so we stopped to check them out:
We went ahead and cruised up Potato Salad Hill on our way back to town just because we were so happy to be back on the trail. Then we headed back to camp to find some of the other Blazer Bash attendees to make plans.
I had volunteered to lead a night run on CK5 prior to coming out, that was supposed to be Thursday night, but sh*t happened... A few people wanted to do a night run so I lead a small group up Moab Rim in the dark. It's a cool trail, and honestly it's less scary at night because you don't see that you're 2 feet from a 50' cliff... Here's a shot of the Moab lights from the top:
We had been told about the "endless cave" up at the corner of the cliff on top of Moab Rim closest to the Colorado so I went on a hike looking for it. After doing some research the next day, I think I was really close to it, but I didn't want to get that close to the edge at night. We'll have to go searching for it again next year in the daylight.