Derek had given me some leftover rubber diamond plate sheet material earlier in the week and the idea was to use it to make extended mudflaps for the rally FX. Friday evening before the next event, I decided to start on the project, should be an easy thing. I then remebered I had stashed in the floor of my closet, a set of Toyota pickup truck mudflaps. Wait, I’ve never had a Toyota pickup, you say. Yes, this set was scavenged from back in the day when we used to ride mountain bike, a lot. If my memory serves me right, this was even way back in the days when Tantalus was open and we rode it. We’re talking at least ten years ago. And if my memory through old geezer colored glasses hasn’t fogged it too much, I’m pretty sure this was the late afternoon ride with me and Dave where we explored down an undocumented trail and found an abandoned wrecked Toyta truck. This was the event that made the phrase “it’s easier to go down than up” famous with Dave and me. We kept riding until it got too narow and grown in, and then continued on foot. We had a good idea where we were, and eventually we got to a point where we knew where the Makiki Valley trail was. But now it was serious hiking, no bushwaking, with bikes. We decended the steep valley side, Dave occasionally having to cut vines loose with his pocket knife and passing the bikes between the two of us to get over rock drops, and finally dropped onto the valley trail, just as the sun was close to dipping below the valley top. Anyway, these flaps are the bounty from that adventure.
So 
this is the fairly ineffectual OEM mud flaps on the FX16. I ended up removing the OEM flaps on the front and back entirely. It was easier to fit and I think I shaved a few ounces off with the simple flat rubber flaps. After a bunch of trial and error, I got them on. The truck flaps don’t extend much further down than the originals, but they are considerably wider, which was one of the desired features. I’m planning to use the pieces Derek gave me and pop rivet them to the bottoms of the truck flaps to extend them, should be good for that since that stuff is softer and more flexible.
This rally event, they kept the water use to a minimum and there was only a couple light sprinkles of rain, so there wasn’t a whole lot of mud, but the “new” flaps looked to work well. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, baby!
Oh, here they are installed as they are right now. They even say Toyota on them! And damn, with those aggro Turkish rally tires, the FX stands pretty tall, I’d say it’s got more ground clearance than half the SUV’s out there! Check it out everyone, it’s the Toyota FX16 “crossover”, hah!
What’s with the “Neglect” in the title? Well, I got so wrapped up in putting on my cool mud deflectors that I neglected to address some driveablity issues I’d been having. Earlier there was engine hesitation issues at cruising throttle. My thought was possibly worn out TPS as it seemed to only happen at that throttle position, give it gas, or at idle it seemed to run okay. If I had paid attention to that, I probably wouldn’t have run into the stalling out at idle on my last run.
It turns out to be a torn intake tube. Well, duct tape fixes all! What kind of hose is that? It’s a new hi-tec hose, duct tape with silcon former! And the other issue I had forgotten about was some kind of electrical gremlin. That one popped back up in the middle of fun runs, complete electrical system shutdown. The 80A fuse on the battery had blown. Must be a short somewhere pretty big. Possibly the starter solenoid as we made an emergency run to NAPA Kapolei and replaced it, and I made it home leaving the starter disconnected. The final misadventure I ran into at the rally was not an issue of neglect, just inexperience, and listening to something on the Net. I managed to debead one of my new rally tires! I was wondering what kind of pressures to run and poked around the Net to see if there were any insights. I found one post stating that with the stiffness of the sidewalls, they were running quite low, in the 27psi range. I decided to start at 36 and lowered and maintened them at 35 as the tires heated. For fun runs I lowered them to 34. Perhaps they cooled a bit, and a combination of the slightly overwide rim and the course getting quite a bit rougher in one spot combined to allow one of my tires to unseat and go flat. Fortuntately with the help of some hands and the air compressoer we were able to reseat and inflate the tire. Do I need narrow beadlocks? Anyway, happy to report I was able to get home under my own power. And yes, it was hella fun, don’t know why none of you other monkeys don’t come out!
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