can't help but think that if you had an incident involving a 5000lb rig and a ski helmet and got a concussion, you came very, very close to having the worst day of your life.
No kidding. I have a few suggestions for that cage design and padding, but he's not interested. Off-roaders don't have the same view of safety that track drivers do. My Rover is not a hard-core rig, it's an adventurer vehicle that is taken to interesting places instead of over the biggest rock in sight. But it will probably end up with a cage someday.
I once had to bring a Jeep down off the Moab Rim trail after it lost its brakes. The front brake line had been rubbing the tire and had worn through the stainless sheath. Needless to say, the nylon liner burst under pressure. The Jeep had already been given a disc brake upgrade in the rear with no thought given to the different pressure needs of a disc system as opposed to a drum, so it didn't have rear brakes to begin with. Oh, and the emergency brake had never been hooked up after this "upgrade". Thus a short and exciting ride that culminated in a helicopter medivac.
I crimped the broken line shut with a pair of vice-grips and brought the Jeep home on one front brake, using all the brake-free driving techniques I developed on the Rover. For the difficult drops, I was strapped to a fully functioning Jeep that was following me.
For those who don't know it, Moab Rim climbs about 1000' in a mile and is fairly technical. Very exciting vehicle recovery, that. Here's one of the obstacles we had to come down - if you go off that cliff, I'm not sure if you'd hit the road several hundred feet below or just go straight into the river beside it.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/the-best-staged-splash-mountain-photos
