We got up in the morning and made a plan, we'd have breakfast at Moab Diner, put Amber in a rental car and I'd hit Moab 4x4 Outpost to see if they could help straighten my frame. After further inspection you could see that the frame had bent right at the coil spring bucket on either side of the frame, this is also when we noticed (Stephen did anyways) that the coils were binding. I tried to convince people that I had a dump bed with bad hydraulics, but nobody would buy it:
You can see the drivers side is bent worse than the passenger side:
Good thing the dogs are dead tired after 12 days of camping and were content to just be left in the cabin to sleep on the bed:
While Amber was doing laundry and shopping, I went to M4O. They couldn't help me, but sent me to Jimmy Foy Collision Repair. I met Jimmy and he told me to come back at 2 and he'd help me out.
I showed up at 2 and Jimmy pretty much let me have free reign in his shop with his crew. He had some concrete anchors in the slab that we chained to my rock sliders, then we put some jack stands under the front of the frame and used a 20 ton air over hydraulic jack under the bumper. We went side to side and pushed the frame up until the cab pretty much touched the bed:
Since the bed was bent to match the frame at this point, we ended up popping the welds on the front bed mounts on both sides of the frame. With the frame somewhat straight I headed back to camp to weld the bed mounts back onto the frame.
With everything back together, all the tools put away, shopping and laundry done we decided to hit the trail. We went out with a few of the Blazer Bash crew (Fred, OGB, and Chris H) we headed down to hit Moab Rim.
Unfortunately, the fun ended quickly... About 500 feet into Moab Rim on the first real obstacle, I popped a chromoly Superior 14 bolt shaft... The break was not what you'd expect. I've broken a stock 14 bolt shaft before and it was quite an event, the shock exploded my Detroit Locker, my ear was ringing and the whole truck jumped (I was on 42s in the old Blazer) when this one snapped it was nothing, I thought the Magnum box just popped out of gear. I put it back in gear and tried to move again only to get yelled at that my rear left wasn't spinning.
We limped off the trail and headed back to camp to figure out what happened. It was getting dark when we got to camp, but I just needed to swap a shaft so I didn't think it would take much time to get back on the trail. We acquired a spare set of stock shafts (thanks Jack!), borrowed a Jack and impact (thanks Chris P!) and borrowed a jack stand (thanks Caitlyn!). The shaft snapped inside the spindle, we pulled out the stub and found out why it broke so easily. At some point for some reason, the shaft rubbed inside the spindle, this wore a grove in the shaft (several) and created a big weld booger inside the spindle. The heat caused by this killed the temper in the shaft which is why it broke so easily. Now the inner half of the shaft was stuck behind the weld booger with no way to remove it. I have an ARB so there is a cross pin and no way to push the shaft out the other side without removing the carrier, which you can't remove because the broken axle can't be pulled out to allow it.
About this time Jimmy stopped by camp to say hi and found us working on the S-10 again. The entire Blazer Bash group kicked in along with multiple trips to Jimmys shop we all worked on finding a way to get the broken part out. The best solution we came up with was to use a hacksaw blade to slide between the shaft and the spindle to slowly cut at the booger. The cheap hacksaw we ended up with wasn't making any progress and the brittle blade broke so it was barely long enough to use at all. At about 11PM or so we called it a night. The S-10 wasn't by my campsite, so we had to put the broken flange back on to hold in the oil and drove it back to our cabin so we could work on it in the morning.