Great video! Would loved to seen two trucks one with eco hubs and one with highway/ 3.07 gears. I’m curious if the 3.07 would require less braking while negotiating the down hill areas. All that on and off braking worries me with air brakes getting too low of pressure causing problems. I do like seeing the capabilities of these trucks. Pretty awesome. How did you air pressure hold up while doing all that braking?
The crawl ratio for the 3.07's is better in first gear, though the braking is really only an issue when dropping off ledges.
Even in our jeeps which have first 4L crawl ratios of 87:1 we are on the brakes dropping off the ledges.
Here is
a short video coming out from a camp about 40 km down John's Canyon Road in the Cedar Mesa area of Southern Utah in my Jeep Wrangler pulling the Hiker trailer,
another one climbing. The roads and paths I have planned for the M1078A1 with the habitat will be challenging, though likely not as challenging as Hidden Falls Adventure Park.
I took Ted to Hidden Falls because he off roads a lot, he and his wife travel months at a time and wheeling days in a row. We talked about the crawl ratios noting that it might reduce the braking some on steep stretches between ledges, though not much. More significant for my use case: build out habitat for extended travels flat towing the JLUR Wrangler behind, it would be unusual to have the habitat on a path as technical as in the Hidden Falls video. We would likely camp nearby and use our Jeep to go exploring.
About the air brakes:
1— While I was driving I had the buzzer sound breifly on a ledge after ledge after ledge downhill. Moving slowly between ledges brought the pressure right up. On we went;
2— Ted set the alarm off more times and kept going. She never dropped into the red. Brakes worked the whole descent and tanks refilled as we climbed up the next set, pressure quickly back to 120+#;
3— This was both Ted and my first time driving such a vehicle off road. The break over points are completely different being you are sitting at the front edge of the wheels and the air brakes are touchy near their release point compared to our jeeps. Think about in traffic when you are edging up to a limit line: do you stop smoothly or suddenly? With more practice I think I will learn to edge up to the break overs more smoothly and learn to better 'walk' the tires down one at a time like we do in our jeeps.
Our day off roading proved the use case, for me (plenty of capability), we had fun driving the LMTV, and spending a beautiful January day outside—
