Well Boys I put it through "trial(trail) by fire.....an no it did NOT catch on fire:laughing:
I trailered the Bulldog to a 144 ac tract that my wife is listing for sale. I met a friend of the owners that was going to show me the features and boundary lines. Turns out he is a logger and logged it 8 years ago. Some of the old skidder trails were steep......well over 30 degrees steep and washed out with 2' deep ruts. We still have snow melting, so everything was damp to wet even though the sun was out.
So I pointed the Bulldog up the inclines and it went...it did not spin a tire unless that tire was not touching the ground. It hauled 500 lbs worth of men right up with no issues at all. I did slide off into one rut and both right side wheels came off the gound by about a foot.....backed back down out of it ok.
Here is a pic of the trail up...the pic does not do it justice...this is STEEP:
Then down...notice you can not see the bottom real well due to the slope?:
So, at this point I'm thinking..."this thing really can go where an atv can go". Btw, I ride an enduro/dual sport, and have owned atv's for 12ish years, so I am intimately familiar with the steep trails of East TN and know my way around off the beaten path. Anyway, my confidence went from 100% to about 7% when after taking pic's that the top we turned around to start downhill......down....hill. Brakes would not hold it, so I applied the emergency brakes and used them to help out. I still could not slow enough to be comfortable, and thoughts of a Luge tube ran through my pea brain....except instead of being in a light sled, I was on a 1,000lb sled with 500 extra lbs of man fat. Soooo, yep it was Mr Toad's Wild Ride down that there mountain. There were three Black Daimond runs about 100 yrds each and all of them had my passenger and I white knuckling and laughing nervously.
It was NOT fun, and looking back it was a stupid choice on my part to even go up that kind of trail in this kind of machine. I managed to stay out of the ruts which would have flipped us, and to not hit a tree or boulder(there were many) and negotiated all three runs without mishap....well except for the now missing 8 out of my nine lives. Older and wiser?...not so much yesterday:duh:
So after we got down on level dround I noticed the brakes were gone...pedal to floor. I was not surprised since I was pushing so hard on that pedal my thigh muscle went into de-fib several times. My passenger even said he was helping over on the other floorboard mashing that invisible brake pedal. Anyway, I looked at it later in the afternoon and the fluid level was way down in the master cylinder reservoir. So I filled it and started bleeding them all the way around. Air in the fronts...rear was fine.....hmmmm. After 30 min I finally saw a drop fall off the passenger caliper when under pressure. Yep, banjo nut was loose and leaking. Tightned it, finished bleeding and it seems fine. And, no I am not going back up there to see if the brakes would now hold ....nope never again
ullinghair:
Other than the minor brake issue, I really don't think any other UTV could have done any better especially being piloted by a "man a that didn't know his limitations........."
Trama Teaches.........
