After 5 days of riding in Taylor Park the poor Grizz was starting to look like one of those gals you meet at the bar right before closing time. With a few beers in you and in low light all looked good to go. But in the light of day and a clear head you look at the damage and say, "what was I thinking?" LOL! If you don’t understand my comparison send Ridgway a PM and I’m sure he has a few diagrams and/or pictures and videos to support this. Or google search beer goggles.

On the second to last days ride I was hauling the mail down a trail and jumped a woop only to find in my landing a large solid rock crushing right into my front glide plate. I hit hard and was probably lucky i stayed on the machine. I hit the rock square like a dozer. I was going to fast, and it was my fault….or should I blame RedRocket and rwreuter for leaving me trail side….but thats a whole different story all together! LOL!

Here are a few pics of the fix in progress. I Have a new glide plate on order and am thankful the glide plate held as well as it did. You can’t see in the picture, but its cut almost completely in half along the front. Had the stock skid plate been there I think the damage would have been far more severe.

I didn’t load a picture of the initial damage because the night i tore into into it the lighting was so crappy the pictures didn’t turn out.

here’s the glide plate….all in all it doesn’t look that bad.

here’s a couple of pictures of my welding job. the cross member was bent up badly and I straightened it as well as I could with the tools I have in my shop. If you look at the left side the threaded tab that covers the end of the round tubing on the front of the frame was completely pushed in and up slightly. which after straightening required me to fill in the gap with slag before they could be welded completely together.

here’s a picture of a chunk knocked out of my wheel from another rock at some point in time.

DISCLAIMER…..for all you fabricator guys out there I realize my welding job is probably probably average at best, but better than leaving it the way it was. After I got done I shot some black spray paint on it to avoid rusting.

All in all I was very lucky and after more inspection I don’t believe it affected my a arm mounts and was primarily cosmetic. So while the Grizz will look a little better once the glide plate is on, in the mean time if you meet her in a bar and offer a few drinks you could possibly go home with a blue grizzly 700 by the end of the night.