Ridge Running with Mariko

 A cloudless sunrise this morning but I took this picture anyways, I liked the glowing color.

I spent a couple of hours wiping off the oily dirt and grime that had accumulated behind Mariko's engine and on top of the transmission's bell housing.  Samurai's apparently are known to leak from the o-ring located at the base of the distributor where it mates to the engine.

I also discovered, to my chagrin, that Suzuki had left some sharp edges in the vicinity of the distributor and transmission bell housing, ended up with a pretty clean area and some scratches on my arm.

Now I can see if replacing the PCV valve (as mentioned by RichardM) would possibly preclude further leakage from the base of the distributor.  That would be nice as replacing the o-ring, while it looks doable, involves also verifying the engine timing and I've not researched that procedure yet.

I then went off for a test ride to ensure I'd not managed to break or knock something lose and to check out a trail that ran on top of a ridge next to Monticello Point Road.

That road turned out to be a bit gnarlier than I expected, with some very steep down and up hill portions covered in loose rocks and gravel!  I used Mariko's 4WD Low Range and was impressed on how she took on these challenges with no issues!

There were times, when I was just looking almost straight up into the sky or almost straight down ....but low range kept things down to a manageable speed.

Sorry, no pics of the gnarly portions....I was just happy to make it through them!  Conditions were such, in terms of loose rocks and gravel, that I would have had a real hard time with Yagi, my Yamaha TW200 Dualsport motorcycle!  As to using a Ural, forget it!

The value of low range gearing proved itself today to me.  I checked out Mariko afterwards, and no new oil leakage evident where I'd cleaned things off.  Also, no seeming drop in the oil level on the dipstick either.  Mariko had seemed to be using a lot of oil, and I'll be continuing to monitor this.

Oh, apparently Monticello Point road where I am boondocking is a popular transit point for the local ATV crowd. I must have seen over 120 of them pass through in large groups throughout the afternoon starting from noon to perhaps 4:00 p.m!