[ihc] Spring repair kit

[John Hofstetter <hofs@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After my broken main leaf experience in Death Valley, with my auto 
tranny guy doing an emergency field repair with his on-board welder, 
and with my daughter bringing down my "spare" Trailmaster spring, and 
Joel and the other guys putting it in for me, I was thinking about 
field expedient solutions.  (Some sentence, eh?)

Yawan, the fellow I bought my new on-board welder from in Tulare told 
me that Hellwig made a spring repair kit that should last long enough 
to get me out to civilization.

I ordered one and it looks pretty good, plus it was not very expensive. 
$25 from Summit. It comes with a myriad of warnings about only driving 
5 mph, and only going a short distance, but they'd have to do that for 
liability reasons. I figure that the kit gives me the metal and holds 
it in place, and typically, I'd tack weld it in a few places to help 
keep it in place.

Much as Richard did on my field repair, but it should be a lot easier 
with the kit's U-bolts helping.

I tried to order a replacement spring from Trailmaster, but the company 
in Colorado that handles a lot of suspension stuff, told me that 
Trailmaster is changing ownership right now and isn't shipping stock 
for a while. Hmmm,  On the other hand, I talked to a Kevin at 
Trailmaster who never mentioned things not being shipped, gave me the 
part number, and told me to try the company in Colorado.

Here's the post from the dealer:

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type image/tiff which had a name of image.tiff]
John,

unfortunally, trailmaster is currently unavailable to ship from.  they
are in the middle of a buy out and thay will not be shipping for about
3-4 wks. sorry if this has caused any inconvience.   You may try to
find a company that stocks trailmaster parts and find one in stock but
at this time we aregoing to be unable to help you. 

sorry


John
John Hofstetter
www.goldrush.com/~hofs