I thought you guys might appreciate what the Blazer looked like when I bought it.
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CK5
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Back again..... Vegas to Reno
- Thread starter retroblazer
- Start date
I thought you guys might appreciate what the Blazer looked like when I bought it.
So, some work to do?
My first race with the Blazer, after pulling it from a junkyard, in thirty days, in the 1998 Baja 1000, and the last race 2010 Mexican 1000.
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Keep it coming! There isn't enough photos of your blazer online. Trust me I have searched..
So what's it's story pre-junkyard?
I would like to hear about it's history as well.
Any pictures of the thrash to put it together in 1998?
I am not exactly sure when this poster was issued. I think it was 1990. The truck suspension was designed by Geoff Dorr. Dorr was almost the equivalent of Rod Hall in the Midwest. He was one of the dominate racers for years in Class 3, then later Class 4. There is a picture of his first Class 4 Ford on the poster. Herb raced the truck the first year, then sold it to "Wild Man" Gerald Foster, who when on to win Class 3 for three or four years. The Blazer was going to be converted to a Class 4, shipped to Curt Leduc's shop, stripped, then abandoned when they decided to build a new car from scratch. The Blazer was then deposited in Foster's junkyard, where I found it.
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I thought you guys might get a kick out of these shots. These are pictures from the "freight yard" in Tijuana, MX. The trans on the Sub cracked just in front of the transfer case connection on our way to La Paz in the 2010 Mexican 1000. We had a local shop swap the guts of my trans into a new housing. Well, it didn't quite work. We had 2 & 4th gear, not the ideal combo to flat tow a 5,000lb Blazer, so we found someone that ship the Sub and the racecar back to TJ. It took a few weeks longer than planned. I was crapping my pants that all my stuff, like a big screen GPS, driving lights, radio's, etc., would be gone by the time it made it back. I got the call that the stuff was finally in TJ, so I flew out from Chicago, walked across the border, and got a cab. Freight yard my ass, there were almost no address available, but I finally found it. I hooked up the Blazer with my trusty Harbor Freight tow bar, dropped the Sub into low range to get it moving, and crawled across the border. I haven't touched the Blazer since this trip.
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I'm surprised you even found the Blazer at all let alone intact.
Can you snag a few more pics of that spring under front suspension setup?
This is the coolest thread on here in a while.
And probably one of my now favorite blazers.
This is the coolest thread on here in a while.
And probably one of my now favorite blazers.
I am in the airport in Chicago,heading home. Unlike my earlier proclamation on Father's Day that I was going to start taking apart the truck, I'm going to start when I get back tomorrow. I will take a lot of close ups of the cage and suspension, both before and after.
Like most everyone, life gets in the way of working on the Blazer.
Like most everyone, life gets in the way of working on the Blazer.
The delay will continue because I'm going to leave tomorrow for NYC. I'm helping my 29 yr old daughter move out of Manhattan. She is on her way to med school at USC in Los Angeles. Back on Monday. The clock ticks!!
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nevermind.. I couldnt find jack.. crazy.
I will be posting a lot of this same stuff on class3racing.com once I start generating new material. I feed it, first because the guy that runs it, did it as a favor to help us. He had his webwheeler.com site, where he would post anything local SoCal wheeling. He has a Sammy and a prerunner Bronco. So, he put's up a open website for class 3s, and it didn't matter if you had a Kia, or a Land Rover, Jeep, or whatever, we could show our stuff, and share the stories after we raced. I picked up guys that crewed for me in Baja, and the limited number of races I did domestically, like the Mint or the Barstow races. The parking lot shot before a race in Mexico was fully diversified with everything but a K5.
so long story short, it was a good general meeting spot for a common interest. Two things happened that lead to the drop the activity, the first was the crash, and the second was the start of gofastbroncos.com.
I was running on fumes by 2008, and with the exception of the Moss Bronco, no one was racing. And that has largely been the case, with the exception being for a guy or two, that has come on to talk about their JeepSpeed effort. I would love to see class3 be vibrant again. It's a good common spot and it reflects on the strength of the racing in the class. Having spent 41 years of competing, in the Midwest, and deserts, the concept of Class 3 is universal. That anybody could build one in their garage, should be preserved and encouraged. It is the people's class.
There will likely always be a spot for those like CK5 that have deep base of devoted owners and fans for a single marque or model. We all want real, nuts and bolts content of what we are working on. There is no substitute for the lessons of those that had to fix the same stuff that we're looking at.
There is a great story, with of one of the guys that I met through this website. Ramsey El Wardani. I am forever grateful for his help. He saved my bacon the first time when I raced the Score San Felipe 250. My guys went out for a light test, the night before the race, and came back with steam billowing out from the engine compartment. The oil looked like chocolate soup. We had put a set of fresh production heads on before the race, and we figured out that the milling for the valve springs, had broken through the head. We needed to make a valve spring removal tool, so that we could take the spring off, and JB Weld the hole closed. So we're all staying in a trailer park, and Ramsey took me down to some little trailer in the dark, and after scoping around with his flashlight, he found a flat nail bar. We modified, ground and drilled, then using the rocker stud for a pivot, we got the retainer off, doing the usual stuff, rope in the spark plug hole at tdc. We JB'd it, and fought to put it back together, and prayed that the JB shit would stick.
It did, and a little more than 7 hours later, I finished.
I had no ideal that Ramsey was on class3racing.com I see him on racedezert but never would have connected the dots. I joined in 07 because I saw some pics online of your blazer, I always wanted to turn mine into something cool, that wasnt a ranger or another toyota.. I know chevys just like all the guys on this site so I wanted to stick with it.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear, I met Ramsey on CK5. I thought he was under Baja Blazer. He did an tech article where he converted a later model k5 to a full convert. I don't remember if he ever got on class3 though. I ended up hanging around the shop that he was friends with the owner, Glen Straightiff at Complete Fabrication. Glen is in the same shop, under the name of Agile Off Road, converting vans to 4wd with Dana 50 TTB front ends. Ramsey's wild ass Blazer is sitting In the corner, begging to be finished. It will be, bar none, one of the coolest long travel, high horsepower Blazers on the planet. Extra big/ Big block power and trophy truck wheel travel numbers with 4WD. It's been a couple of years in the making.
he needs to hurry up on that think too.. Raquel has been sitting for way too long.
