Backroad Bus

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Technical Article #3













Getting Unstuck:
(Some Extrication Methods for Escaping the Inevitable)


- As submitted by Gene Cornelius


OK....you're knee-deep in mud, and you haven't even gotten out of the bus yet. This is not good! Perhaps you should go back in time and reconsider splashing through this mud-bog without checking it out first! I wish you luck....you've got a bit of work to do. Anyway, stop screaming--it won't help--and it might just attract the attention of nearby Sasquatch clans. NOT what you need right now, unless you can speak fluent Sasquatch, and can somehow convince them to pull you out.

Keep a calm head....your mind does not really help you much if you're in panic mode. Assess the situation calmly, with mind to priority: What is the most important factor in your current situation? Is it time? Could be....it usually is. Are you stuck in the sand on the beach and the tide is coming in? Yes, time is an issue. Are you caught three day's walk out of town without a spare distributor and yours just self-destructed, but you have a week's worth of non-perishable food and camping gear? No, time is not the primary concern for you. Does anyone know where you are, or where you should be, within the next several hours? If so, are they going to come looking? If not, maybe next time they will, because you will have developed the presence of mind to inform someone trustworthy of your travel plans ahead of time! Do you know how best to get help if you should be truly stranded without means of self-rescue? Pay attention! It is the little details that can keep a stupid mistake fun, instead of deadly. At the very least, you might be a little embarassed....no problem. Could be worse: This is your first date with so-and-so, and she/he has a job interview for their dream job coming up after the weekend....yes, back to the time issue!

OK....enough of this theoretical nonsense. Here are a few extrication techniques that I've used, as well as a few that I've not yet had to try:

Weight for Traction!

Got a problem making the rotational motion of your tires cause a linear motion of your bus and therefore, you? Well, you should possibly consider taking steps to induce an increase in the amount of friction between your rubber and the road. This can be quickly and easily accomplished via the re-allocation of available objects of mass to the rear-most partitions of your bus, thusly adding weight, and thereby causing the ability of your tires to slip unduly to decrease. Remember that co-pilot mentioned in the article about what to bring and preparedness? Well, those things are usually worth a good 125-200lbs, and are also equipped with their own motive abilities, so wake him/her up and indicate to them their new position in the grand scheme of things: The back of the bus.

If you've a truck, you're in luck, you can shift most of the bodies, floor jacks, toolboxes, crates of spare parts, what-have-you that're heavy, etc., to the rearmost portions over the engine and rear tires with ease. If you've a full bus without a rack, that's a bit of a bummer for the poor passengers who now have to work for their escape, as they need to be on the rear bumper...hanging on with their fingertips clamped onto your rusting roof gutter. A rack can really help, but is not always feasible, since they are generally just out of reach. Anyway, get all that weight to the back, preferably to the side that spins more easily depending on the situation, and go for it! Remember to avoid causing the bus to "hop" at all costs! Such sudden jolts can cost you dearly, as it stresses your engine, and basically jack-hammers your crucial tranny internals, the most notably delicate of which include the reverse gear and carrier, and the differential.

Recently, and caught on video, I made my doublecab hop, saw the tires spin a lot and then catch, and I consider myself very lucky. Speaking of luck, during this same road challenge incident, I was using the "copilot in the back" technique at the suggestion of said copilot, and during the resulting lurching and bouncing, my hapless navigator was flung catapult-style around in the back, and almost fell out, despite very secure and thoughtful placement of limbs. She came away from the situation with a bruise and a slight scrape/cut, and still thought it fun, but both of us know that there was some luck involved, as we were basically under-estimating a danger, and that's a good way to get seriously hurt. So, having learned somewhat, we'll give more thought to safety prior to the execution of anything potentially dangerous.

Abusing a Jack

My first experience with a situation "off-road" was in my first vehicle: A beat-up '64 Beetle. Sorry, this is a bus website, and a bus-specific topic, but I can make no apologies, as many of these techniques are, how you say, cross-platform, at least in concept. Anyway, I was toodling around with a worn bug but a fresh license, and I noticed a little track running up off the road through the redwoods, and instinctivly, I turned back to explore it.

Immediately enthralled by the presence of something new and almost dangerous, I took the little car up through the redwoods, over a few bumpy spots, through a muddy patch and a small creek, and up an incline of increasing steepness. Shortly, I came to a sharp right turn that angled up the spine of the hill. Before long, I had discovered the weakness of having an open differential....one of my rear wheels lost traction and began to spin, refusing to propel me up the hill. The other drive wheel sat there in mute agreement with this mutiny, and I made my first discovery about how difficult it is to hold a vehicle with aged, maladjusted drum brakes on an incline facing uphill....and how difficult it can be to back down a steep bumpy hill.

I managed to get into a wider spot on the road, at the apex of the turn, where it flattened out a bit, and began the careful process of turning around. Unfortunately for me, I had not noticed that the flat spot I was assuming was solid was partially made of a bush covered with sediment from water runoff. Whoops. My left rear wheel sank several inches before the car regained equilibrium (brakes were useless), and I do believe I felt the effects of some nice adrenalin. The problem with the open diff. cropped up again, and I knew I was going to have to get out of this by myself or it was gonna get embarassing.

I had very few supplies of any type in those days, but I did have a stock VW jack, and a few moments later I was jacking up the front of the car...the right rear wheel securely chocked with a big rock... and as soon as the front wheels got lighter on the ground, I pushed the front of the car off the jack to the right. Cool! This was working! A couple more times of jacking it up and pushing it off the jack brought the left rear wheel up onto solid ground, while allowing the right rear wheel to swivel in front of its chock.

I'm not sure what to call that, but it's one way to use a jack. I suppose I was lucky...if the situation were a bit different, I could have pushed the car over the cliff, which would have either ended up with it wedged between hill and a redwood, or as wreckage blocking traffic on the road below. I guess I chose the right rock for a chock!

A jack of any type is a great machine: It can convert your relatively weak efforts to a slow, powerful motion...and do work for you that you could not do otherwise...but you have to tell it where you want it, and also keep yourself aware of the fact that this amount of force (pushing or lifting a vehicle) can be quite dangerous.....try to keep your body away from any possible path it might decide to take as it springs out from under your vehicle, as well as keeping your limbs out from under the vehicle itself (also not between the vehicle and a tree or rock). Volkswagens are relatively light, as automobiles go, but they will still squish you readily. Be alert and be aware of this!

Sticky Situations Mainly, mud. One of the worst qualities of mud is that it follows you around....leaving its smears and slime on everything you step on or into, sit on, touch, or try to work it with, i.e. shovels. Yuck. It also packs itself into the tread of your tires, and can establish one helluva vacuum locking your bus into the bog. Oh, and it happens to be a lot of fun, as long as you don't stop....I stopped once. Same beetle as before, different road. (I was doing fine until I tried to turn around!)

Velocity is frequently a key element of getting through that muddy patch in the road. Don't underestimate the potential impact of hitting deep mud, though. You can do a lot of damage to your bus and yourself if the bottom drops out from underneath and you smash into the other edge of a hole....but then, if you're going slowly, that same hole will grab you anyway....might as well attach the tow strap to the front beam before you head into the mud. (Not a bad idea, really!)

It is widely known that you can de-inflate your tires to maximize traction. With a 'one-wheel drive' VW bus, I would do that mainly on the rear tires, as deinflation of your fronts can make it harder to move forward... thus negating any benefit you might gain from deinflating the rears. A little bit on the fronts is OK....it might keep them from sinking in so much, but I'd go all the way down to 20 lbs in the rear to help spread the tread, giving you increased tire-to-surface contact, helps keep you from cutting in as much, and by causing the tires to flex, can help keep the tread clear of muck. Be careful that you don't go so low in pressure that you risk breaking the bead. That would be a bad thing! I've only felt I needed to use deinflation a couple times, and it seemed to really help....just let some air out until the tires start to squish out at the bottom and go for it! (It would be nice if you had something to reinflate them with later, btw! See here for a list of stuff you should have!)

Usually, I advise 'feathering' the clutch when traction is an issue. (See my article "Backroad Driving Techniques") However, in the case of being in mud, I feel that as long as you are still maintaining forward movement, you can help keep the tread of the tires clean by slinging the mud out with centrifugal force, and keeping the clutch fully engaged helps keep the rear end of the bus up out of the muck. (In case you hadn't gotten to that part in my other article, going forward in acceleration in a swing-axle bus pushes the rear end up, while reversing causes the rear end to sink.)

But all this didn't help.....you're stuck in the mud. Ha ha! Ok, sorry. So, stuck in the mud, eh? Got a shovel? Ah, good. No? Um....use your hands, then, or a long stick or board or something to try to move the mud which is almost certainly heaped up in a packed mass in front of your wheels. Sometimes, if you eliminate that, you can get going again with a bit of luck and/or a shove from your copilot. Don't dig yourself in! In the Usal Road video, you can see that at one point, it seemed that I was not heeding this advice. In fact, I had one more chance to get out of the muddy rut before resorting to comealongs and digging...so I tried, and it almost worked. With chains on, I could have dug myself in quite deeply had the bus not already been resting on the top of the mud...as it was, I did no damage to my situation by spinning the wheels a bit, except maybe taking a few thousand miles off the drivetrain's useful life. If you can get just a little bit of traction, you can sometimes gently crank yourself out of trouble by using the starter motor as a form of "poor man's granny low". Make sure you've got a robust battery and/or a backup, as there's no push starting from where you're at!

Putting sticks and brush under the wheels sometimes helps, but generally not enough to make it worth doing. I guess if you've tried everything else, and still need just a bit more, then maybe you should try that, but really, I've never seen sticks and brush work as the sole solution to a bit of stuckage....although I once used some rubber floor mats to good effect. If you're in deep, you've got to get the mud out of under the bus...it's likely jammed up against your front beam, your cross member(s), and your heater boxes, not to mention your exhaust. Wherever it is, make it go away, or else figure out how to lift the bus off of it. If you've gone belly-deep in mud, and manage to get out whole, take a moment for your bus's sake and make sure that mud isn't clogging up your sump fins, gotten into your pushrod tube area or anything potentially nasty like that.

Dragging the bus out of the slime is usually considered a last resort, but usually it is the best, most effective method of extrication. Hopefully you have a handy tree within range of your ropes/cables/comealongs, etc. Using another bus to tow you out is an option, but make sure to avoid snapping the tow cables/ropes taut unless you are attempting the extreme "slingshot" method, which I will leave to the experts to describe (and perform!) The only place to attach a rope for the slingshot manuever on a bus is the front beam, and I can almost guarantee that you are going to bend the bumper and/or the front valance....and I can't vouch for the usefulness of this manuever with a bus. I prefer the slow and steady method, if at all possible. And if it's not possible, what the hell were you thinking? The VW Bus is a hardy beast, but it is NOT a 4x4 or a tank! Be a little more strict with your decision-making next time maybe!

If you should find yourself trying to tow a bus using (of all things) a length of non-stretchy rope, cable, or (god forbid) a comealong, make sure to have the towing driver take up the slack slowly, as sudden jerks can exceed the rating of any one of the components of your rig, and send the rest of it flying forwards or backwards in deadly fashion.

Attach a tow strap to the front beam (not the bumper) if you're pulling forward, the lower cross-brace or shock mount (cross-brace is better!...avoid the axle tubes) if going backwards. The rear bumper is stronger at the mounts than the front....but avoid its use if unless you simply can't get to the cross-brace because it's buried, in which case you need to dig more anyway, because your bumper is not going to take the strain! Plus, always make sure that the rope, strap, or cable is not going to destroy or get fouled in any important components as it pulls taut!

Use a "tree-saver" strap....it will prevent your cable or rope from cutting through the bark of the tree and "girding", thus, killing, the poor thing. After all, it's helping you....shouldn't you be nice to it?

If you somehow are reading this because you are stuck, maybe you should put the computer away and start digging. Of course, you could also just email the nearest tow company and hope they're not staffed by Sasquatch. If so, you can start screaming again. Try yodeling, too...that will get the local guys out to help you in no time at all if for no other reason than to make you stop.....

Should you find yourself reading this, and you feel cheated and/or unsatisfied, know that there might be more to come on this topic....

Check back later, or email Gene at mizamookatgmail.com

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