WWII hero makes comeback

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | Monday, April 21, 2003 | Marylynne Pitz

[Willie Green]

It's the mother of all jeeps, as well as all those Humvees prowling the sands of Iraq.

The last jeep from the original batch of 70, made in 1940, is going to be parked in Pittsburgh for a while, not far from its birthplace.

[Willie Green]

ping

[martin_fierro]

Kewl stuff.

My mom and I stumbled across an Austin Bantam in Florida once:

Just to introduce her to the research power of the internet, I did a search and tracked down the car's history -- and discovered its connection to Butler and its WWII competition with the Jeep.

[martin_fierro]

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[Lokibob]

http://www.wmspear.com/Bantam/recon.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Paraclete]

Did I see somewhere that there were surplus jeeps available for $80? ;)

[Billy_bob_bob]

Yes. In the back pages of comic books published in the 60's. Your age is showing!

[Paraclete]

Yes. In the back pages of comic books published in the 60's. Your age is showing!

Ha! A fellow sojourner? There was more than one disappointment advertised in those comics. Geez, for a pair of those X-ray glasses!

[joesnuffy]

Ha! A fellow sojourner? There was more than one disappointment advertised in those comics. Geez, for a pair of those X-ray glasses!

Hey those X-Ray glasses really worked......

They saw through you didnt they ? hehehehe

[Badray]

Thanks for the ping.

[ErnBatavia]

[Billy_bob_bob]

How about the "real working two-man submarine" they offered? Hoo boy, did they tell some whoppers or what?

[Born to Conserve]

I know a guy that bought surplus jeeps for about that price. The only problem was that he had to cut each jeep into four pieces diagonally corner to corner before he could take possesion -- something about not flooding the 4x4 market. He'd take them home, put them on a big welding jig, and weld them right back together, but if you looked really hard, you could see the seams.

[bmwcyle]

It got me through this winter.

[Paraclete]

The only good buys I've ever seen on military surplus jeeps were ones in failed parachute drops. Not very pretty.

[archy]

The only good buys I've ever seen on military surplus jeeps were ones in failed parachute drops. Not very pretty.

When my neighbor's Ford Pinto needed a new engine before he sent his daughter off to college with it, we picked up a M151 Ford Jeep engine from one of those *demilitarized* sliced jeeps and dropped it in with no significant problems. She even came to prefer the stick shift and clutch to an automatic transmission. For under $200 for an engine with 288 miles on it, we both figured it was a pretty good buy.

As for the engine out of the Pinto, it got rebuilt, and I traded it to a fella with a 1948 CJ2 looking for 12 volt power and a few more horses for his gas station's runaround truck. He got it, and I got the old Willys flathead out of his Jeep...which went into a WWII military MB Jeep undergoing restoration.

I always wondered if I could have shoehorned a Model 60 flathead Ford V8 in there....

-archy-/-

[tubebender]

The Pinto engines fit nicely but the venerable GM 3.8 V6 are very popular here. My first ride in a CJ2A in about 1947 and in four years we put many miles on it in Fresno County especially weekend trip to Kearney Bowl in Freno to watch Billy Vokovich and his brother Eli race midgets . It was bought for a farm vehicle and had the rear pto.