Cosmic Crisp with the spacers removed and the five lug Hurricane rims attached.

On Sunday the southern winds blew threw Prosser, pulling leaves from the poplar trees and swirling them throughout the property. The winds also brought some warm temps, which made it a perfect time to be inside the shop getting some work done. It was finally time to tackle the spacers.

If you recall, right before I went into the hospital in June, I had started to remove the rear spacers, only to find out that they weren’t all that willing to budge. In addition, several Allen bolts were already stripped. Ugh…

So, yesterday, I got out several drills with differing sizes of bits to work through them. On the driver’s rear, all six bolts had to be drilled out. Though the bolts weren’t hardened steel, it still took a while to drill each of them.

Some fo the equipment involved:

The first drum successfully drilled:

Once all six bolts were drilled (about 45 minutes or work), the spacers split, revealing five-lug brake drums:

Thankfully,  on the passenger rear, only three of the six had to be drilled. Once that was removed, I turned to the front end, only to discover that different spacers were used. It turned out that disc brakes were six lug, so that spacers were thinner and the lug nuts holding the spacers were visible, so no drilling was necessary. So, now I have six lug rims on the front and five lug rims on the back. I suppose that doesn’t really matter.

Here are the spacers.

With the spacers removed and the tires remounted, Ann and I took the “Crisper” for a spin in the pasture in the dark. It’s not much of a photo, but at least one photo sort of turned out okay.

The spin through the pasture was the longest test drive I’ve had with the race jeep. I discovered that I am still too tall for the seat setup, so that still needs to be changed. I also learned that I can’t shift into second gear, as my knee is in the way. Yep, there will need to be changes to this setup. But, the engine sounds great and racing around the pasture was pretty fun (even in the dark in first gear).