Moab is different but Bebe had a stock front end for years before the Bebemonster build with a lot of successful California wheeling on the Rubicon, Fordyce, etc. I've done one or two non-Moab trails myself with no lockers, base t-case, etc. and never broken anything. I think I've been lucky, as confirmed by others who've watched my, uh, aggressive style.
I think breakage is a combination of conditions, sturdiness of the components, luck, history and good/bad decisions at just the wrong time. Obviously I can't speak to your exact scenarios but I think we can all speak to breakage that has been framed in the discussion of "If he just didn't do X, he would't have broken Y".
This guy broke his rear axle not because it was a tough climb but because he wouldn't listen to a spotter, couldn't follow the right line and made a bad decision.
Jeep and Hummers will never be an apples to oranges discussion. But, neither will be vehicles that have seen 60 trails vs. ones who are still in their first few trails. Heck, I've been seeing a pattern where we wheel with someone with a new-to-him H1 and that vehicle ends up failing on the trail because of unknown or missing maintenance or history on various parts. It's not that the H1 is poorly designed but parts may have begun to fail under a previous owner, were not realized upon inspection of the vehicle, and then failed on the trail. It's easy to blame one component, vehicle or brand when we cannot truly evaluate the situations with a consistent, understood and quantifiable measure.
I think the point 06H3 was trying to make is that many H3s have been wheeled hard and have not had the problems you've experienced. Maybe Moab isn't the best example, as it isn't apples to apples to the CO mountains, but there are many other unquoted examples that can be pulled up. I'm not saying your driving is the problem, though it could be. It could be the history of the vehicle. It could be that frame members, cross members, mounting points are out of whack so replacement pieces are already leveraged for failure. I will say that the circumstances you are realizing are not representative for H3s and to broadly compare Jeeps to the particular history for your H3 isn't a representative example for the brand.
BTW, if you want 36 pages of Jeep fail simply Google "Jeep JK regear limp mode".
Yes the H3 has its weak points like any other vehicle. And Jeeps have more replacement parts, perhaps because they sell in 10X the quantity, are still on the market and have been around for I don't know how many years. The oldest H3s are now seven years old - the history of component failure is being written today and isn't already logged in the minds of guys who have been working on Jeeps for 30 years.
This 20 page thread is you and others pioneering the development of solutions for our H3s; it isn't addressing an incurable problem or a massive engineering failure. I love the development we're seeing here. It's similar to the progress over the years and different solutions we've seen with the rear leaf spring hangars. Great ideas, great execution, and new ideas building on the original ones. Note that it took until 2012 for this to become such a big issue and these were built beginning in 2005 - that's a pretty good track record.
I realize you're just making comparisons and trying to reconcile the failures that have been experienced - nothing personal on your end, not personal here either. I just think this evaluation of the H3's steering design and components is excluding some important information.
(BTW, I just Googled "jeep jk steering failure" and came back with 64 pages of fail on jk-forum.)
