Day 11 - fixed in Khovd

In the morning, we were faced with finding a welder and figuring out what to do with my CV joint. The CV had been torn apart dropping ball bearings in the desert.

Ladybird was still on the truck from last night. The driver took us over to the garage in charge of helping rally cars. Unfortunately it was already swamped with cars owned by people smart enough to get there early. The driver took us to "the best welder in town" who was, not surprisingly, his cousin.

In this guy's backyard, we had both beetles and Hayden with his Porsche. The right rear corner of Ladybird was quickly stripped and a cacophony of mongols set about prying and hammering the wheel back into position. While the welder did a good job, we ended with a wheel with a bit too much camber and toe-in.

Now we turn our attention to the CV joint. While we were waiting in the desert, we were able to recover 5 of the 6 balls. Someone went to a local used auto parts shop to look for another CV and ended up finding a matching ball in a random bucket of random bearings!

These stories are always a series of emotional highs and lows. At this point in the story, we are at a high. We reassembled the CV, with much difficulty as the cage was bent, and bolted the car back together.

Now the low... the CV wouldn't articulate! It was apparently too badly bruised to work anymore.

Having run out of day, we trucked back to camp. Hayden brought up the idea that the CV had been incorrectly assembled with the inner dog out of phase with the outer race.
me: "but that is impossible because the balls can't be inserted if it isn't in phase, right?" Hayden: "well, with a hammer, you can get them in."
me: "Oh shit, those guys used a fucking hammer."
Hayden: ...
me: ...

And I ran back to the truck to pull off the half-axle again. Once I got to the CV it was pretty obvious that they had done it wrong! This is where our moods go high again. I quickly repacked the CV and Ladybird was back in action!

While I didn't have any problems with the CV over the next few days, we couldn't ignore the fact that the CV was badly bruised and I had to keep the speed down.