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Showing off my Willys

184K views 678 replies 77 participants last post by  GTOffroader 
#1 ·
Thank heavens, finally forum where i feel inspired to start a thread and show mine off. this won't be the most cutting edge or interesting thread by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm stoked about it.

Adding our latest toy to our collection has brought me a ton of happiness, more than i would have ever thought. i never saw myself owning an antique jeep, it just sort of happened.

So last April, i moved out of Chicago Illinois and landed myself in Louisville, CO, just outside of Boulder. To make a long story short, i've been heading out this was for years for the climbing, biking and skiing, and i'd always crash at my friend Ambers house. eventually Amber moved on from climbing partner, to girlfriend, to fiance, and we had to decide which one of us would relocate.

I didn't put up much of a fight with her, but it took awhile to convince the corporate headquarters down in Dallas that we needed a front range branch office for our exterior facade consulting firm. fortunately, the economy tanked, the workload in Chicago evaporated, and convincing them that we best expand into other markets got easier.

So, with our newly combined household, our toy collection was pretty well rounded out. 10 top of the line mountain bikes, enough climbing gear to cover El Cap, The Diamond, K2, Moab and everything in between, and we found ourselves punishing our general adventure mobile a little bit harder than i'm sure Ford ever intended. Our little Ford Escape has done more wheeling around Utah and Colorado than most peoples Jeeps ever do, so the next logical step was that we add a Jeep to our collection.

In beginning my research, I was pretty well set on an LJ, but knowing it would take awhile to get the business off the ground, this was going to be a distant goal.

Then Amber solved that problem. Unbeknown to me, she was harboring a fascination for something a little more vintage.

So we were out and about, climbing around up in RMNP and took the scenic road out to Nederland on the way to home to stop for some pork and beers, coming through the roundabout she spotted this:



Amber was quite clear that this was pretty much what she had in mind. i was a bit skeptical as i knew NOTHING about jeeps of that vintage. I vowed to do some research, and we'd talk about it. As i learned more, i became a bit obsessed and determined we had to have it, if ka willed it so. we were both pretty busy with travels and the wedding, and decided to shelve the idea for a month or so until things calmed down a bit.

3 months later, it was still there. I called up the guy and made an offer, one quite lower than his asking price, but fair a round number that Amber and I could split 50/50 out of pocket without much damage. To my surprise, he readily accepted and even towed home for me.

My bride is obviously stoked about our first piece of common property.





I'll elaborate some more, but at the moment i must be off to the airport. Here she is as of last friday:

 
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#4 ·
Yeah, i'm a lucky guy to have such a rad partner in crime. Yeah those fender flare were hideous, the PO was pretty good at bolting crap onto this poor thing, i think i pretty much spent the first month improving it by taking stuff off.

Those are actually 32x11.5 GY MT/R's, i hope this still meets approval. :p

Sweet Jeep, pretty much what I want one day to pootle round the desert in.. :smokin:
Thats pretty much exactly as we intend to use it. pootling around the CO mountains and utah dez.
 
#5 · (Edited)
Okay, so to expand on my little project here, let me finish setting the stage.

The Overall Goal:

The concept here, is make this thing as much of a capable, drivable, little fun wheeling adventure mobile as possible, without upsetting its vintage character. Primarily we are climbers and mountain bikers and we intend to use it to augment those activities and fill in the rest days. sometimes ya want to go play in the mountains, but just aren't up to the cardio output of pedaling or hiking yaknow.

we also need to stop beating the snot out of our escape. We love climbing at Turkey Rocks down in the South Platte area, its about a one hour drive from home and includes a bit of wheeling, pretty much right on the edge of what we feel we can get away with in the escape.

So to meet those ends, we won't touch the body. as much as it makes sense to comp cut the thing and stretch the wheelbase, we ain't gunna do it.

I am very glad that it has the 225 Dauntless engine. it appears to run very well and fits with a ton of room to spare.

The stock tranny has to go. It works for now, but the syncro's are toasted. In the next week or so, i'm going to be doing a tree removal job for a guy i met on colorado4x4.org, in return he's hooking me up with an SM465.

The stock steering also has to go. I've been through the whole thing, new sector shaft and bushings, new drag link bushing, rebuilt the bellcrank pivot, and new TRE's, all to little benefit. Then i trigged to the fact that the PO shackle lift f'd up the caster. Adding some 2deg. caster plates made a big difference. this week i'm picking up some higher quality 4deg. plates, i expect this will help allot, but i'm still not going to be 100% happy with it.

Saginaw power steering is definitely coming soon. Oddly enough, i'm originally from Midland Michigan, right next to saginaw, and my father now retired is enjoying his pension earned while working at saginaw steering gear back in the 60's and 70's.


so.... this is going to be a bit of a slow process. like i said, i'm busy getting a construction consulting office going in a down economy, so it will take a bit for the money tree to get growing.

for the time being, i've kept myself busy enough just doing the little fix-em-up jobbers, and its actually yielded some fantastic results.


first and foremost, i attached the body. not much rust, and though i can't say he was an excellent fabricator, the PO managed to keep it pretty much whole. A bunch of sanding, some bondo and several cans of primer made the body presentable.



I snagged some brackets and yanked the hilift off the escapes roof rack and got it places in the bed.



I yanked out the interior and gave it a coat of rustoleum hammered grey paint. This stuff goes on great and seams to have a nearly magical ability to make old metal look good.



Not being used to old jeeps and the steering being as sketchy as it is, some restraints were very desirable. Thanks to craigslist i got a nice deal on these TRW harnesses. The bottom is bolted into the body mounts, and the shoulder straps are wrapped around the hilift. yeah, i know this isn't ideal, i need to add a harness bar the the cage, but its a whole lot better than nothing, and everybody seams to appreciate the added security.



you can also see that used the same hammered grey on the grill and windshield. the body will ultimately be "horizon blue".


around this time, we finally got it out for its first day of wheeling. my stepson and i drove it down to left hand canyon. we had a total blast, and found it to be much more capable that i actually thought it would be.




The suspension is brutally stiff, but mostly intact. I pulled the front and rear springs, completely disassembled them, flap disked off all of the rust, chamfered the edges, repainted and reassembled the leaves with a thick layer of grease in between. I also replaced all of the u-bolts, hardware, spring plates and added new longer brake lines.



I fabricated new spring eye bushings utilizing parts left over from suspension upgrades on my focus.





After scoring the new tires, i pulled the springs out and removed one leaf from each pack. this made a subtle yet critical improvement in the ride quality.


So, i finally got to take it out biking. strapped my transition bottlerocket to the back and rode down to the golden bike park.




okay, enough for now. sorry for the scattershot image sizing. now that i have a thread to manage i'll get better organized.
 
#7 ·
i manage to maintain working the willys almost daily, but allot of it is not really that photo or post worthy, like replacing my oil pan gasket, or installing some caster shims....

this weekend i was fairly productive though, installed a harness bar into the cage. major improvement in comfort and safety, and now i'll be able to relocate the hi-lift and have room for the back seat.



i also managed to come across a hunk of steel that perfectly matched my vision for a new bumper. really glad to have the cobbled piece of crap off of there.

 
#11 ·
Had her out for a nice, but brief test run today. the wife had some things to do around the house and i was jonesing to get closer to the hills, so i bolted down to left hand canyon for a short drive.



her road manners have gotten pretty darn good, driving into boulder used to be quite an adventure, now its just plain fun. in the trail she's doing well, though i need to get some bumpstops and some wheel spacers. the 32x11.5 tires rub pretty bad in the back, and i'd like some more turning radius in the front. the suspension feels pretty darn good, but i'd like to try pulling out another leaf, but don't think that would be a good idea without some bumps first.

in the meantime, i've been busy trying to clean up the clusterfrig of the front frame rails, griding out the ghetto hackjob reinforcing from the PO and making some plates to box them in.

i've got plates made for the inside of both sides that run from the cross-member to the front of the rails, backing plates so i can weld up the holes drilled in the top of the frame rails, and next i'm going to build plates to wrap the top/front/bottom of the frame rail ends. also made some shackle/tow bar tabs for the bumper. hopefully we'll be welding next weekend, then its time for a winch plate.



havin allot of fun playin with my willys!
 
#12 ·
sprayed on some new blue... super happy with it!

tomorrow after work work i'll be taking it over to my buddies house to burn on all the parts i recently built.

 
#13 ·
Scored an unknown condition T90/D18 for free from a fellow colorado4x4.org member, going to rebuild that then swap it in. I planned to go with an SM465, but you can't beat the fact that i'll have a nice running setup for the cost of a minor rebuild kit.



in the meantime, aside from some total crap syncro's, she's running great and got her out for some nice play, and her longest trip yet. drove her from louisville up past lyons to button rock resi for some trout fishing.



an awesome day to drive the willys in the foothills, and even had some luck with the fishing.

 
#15 ·
Thanks for the compliments! The little rig is coming together into a great little machine, I actually drove it from home in Louisville into Denver the other day and picked up my trans rebuild parts at Mile Hi Jeep, he longest drive yet, so i'm comfortable to declare that she's fully roadworthy and will have her out and about quite a bit. If you see my driving give me a vigorous wave and i'll be happy to pull over and BS for a couple. Obviously if i'm in the willys i'm not in any sort of hurry!

Sorry for the totally crappy cameraphone pick, i'm excited to have gotten her new to her T90 reassembled. got the new D18 torn apart yesterday as well.

In other news, work is picking up, so hopefully i'll be able to earmark some cheese for some more progress on the rig!

 
#16 ·
About time i update this, before i put it to sleep for a bit. Closing on a new house in a couple of weeks, so obviously that will keep me busy for a bit, and sideline the jeep.

which is all good, because the trans n tcase proj is done and really i'd be happy to just drive it for the rest of the summer. huge improvement, i found the existing trans didn't even have syncro clutches.... the PO was one hell of a mechanic.

rebuilds done, i scored this cheesy little skid plate as well. better than the one i had! (none).



final coat of red per my co-owners request.



getting that heavy chunk of metal back up there was lots of fun. very intresting come-along / ratchet strap gymnastics.

 
#20 ·
thanks for the compliments guys! though i do have to admit, she's not nearly as pristine as she looks, plenty of shoddy bodywork/rust repair from the previous owner smoothed out with too much bondo. but, if your not being too picky she looks awfully nice, and drives great.

She does 45-50 pretty well on a straight highway, and i'm happy to head up and down the canyons at 40 or so. The 225 seams to be pretty comfortable at those speeds, but the stiff springs and ross steering keep the average speeds down more than anything else.

as she is now, she's fun to drive around town and head up for the local wheeling in the front range.

After i get the family moved and some other things taken care of in the new house i'm going to plow into a saginaw conversion and some holbrook springs. pretty confident that i'll need an overdrive after doing that.
 
#24 ·
it has a 2 barrel, i'll be honest here that this is about my extent of knowledge on the thing. this is the first time i've owned a carb'd vehicle, i just sort of missed that generation, even my dad swapped his highly built 64 gto to FI when i was a teenager and told me to never go back. I have WAY more exposure to programming stand alone engine management....

I have a 4 barrel manifold that i picked up sitting in the garage, but i'm not sure what i'll necessarily do with it. as it is, the engine starts easy and runs strong, other than fixing a leaky oil pan and tuning up the oil pump the motor hasn't asked for attention. She's been up pretty close to 11,000 feet without any real notable change in performance. maybe a benefit of buying her in Nederland is that she's been tuned for higher elevation already.
 
#25 ·
So i haven't updated in a little while, a simple reason for that, with moving into the new house i haven't had a chance to do jack squat with the willys lately. Tools aren't even unpacked!!

so, with the holiday weekend upon us, it hit me like a ton of bricks that summer would soon be switching to ski season and motivations would soon swing away from mountain biking and jeeping to racking up millage at A Basin. Basically i had planned myself a handful of "must do's" for the summer and I hadn't ticked any of them yet. Rollins Pass, Jenny Creek, Middle St. Vrain and Coney Flats should all be within grasp of the willys, and making the time to do it.

Thankfully with the holiday weekend we had saturday to work around the house, sunday to shred winter park on the bikes, and monday free. so our son took off with a friend, and my wife and I packed up the willys to head up rollins pass. we had a totally great time and it was nice to finally head out on an all day adventure in the hills with it, we definitely learned some things though.

those stock springs GOT TO GO!!!! we ended up turning around at yankee doodle lake. we could have made the top no problem, but the stiff springs really limited our travel speed and we just ran out of time, not to mention we were getting pretty darn tired of being bounced around that hard. even with the 32" tires aired way down it was just brutal. she's always performed very well on stuff far more technical than this, but being in a situation where we needed to cover miles of rough road vs. a handful of technical obstacles was enlightening.

so, i don't think we'll make our whole ticklist for this summer and will instead save it for next. time to get some work done around the house, get my shop put together, and get to work on making the jeep a wee bit more faster n more comfy.

though i do have to say, its pretty darn rad getting that many compliments on the old jeep. we saw a ton of other rigs this weekend and just about everybody had to hurl a compliment our way.

jenny lake and the jk we hooked up with. nice dude, wish i'd gotten his email or something.



happy wife enjoying her jeep, the view, a pbr and a sammich



this trail would be more fun with some more technical challenge, but it makes up for it in scenery.

 
#26 ·
When you get ready for new springs, assuming you want to remain mostly stock, I highly recommend the Rancho 1" replacement springs. They are made with much more modern steel and have only 6 leafs (as opposed to the stock what 9...10?). It's still not a Cadillac but rides and flexes much better than the stock packs.

Definitely do the Saginaw conversion, and if you can, fuel injection. There is simply no comparison to the drive-ability difference those two changes can make.
 
#28 ·
Okay, have not had much to report on Willy's progress lately, other than the fact that she's doing well and gets driven a couple times a week.

Getting settled into the new house has been a chore, especially when it comes to getting some jeep progress done. The biggest hurdle was getting the garage figured out and hooked up so some work could finally get done, and the biggest hurdle in that project was having to upgrade our electrical service.

so, without further ramblings....



Wilma's all settled into her new spot, it will be nice having this much room on her half of the garage, and i'm even more stocked about the separate workshop space.



So then we had to get a new meter panel on the exterior, nice to have 18 expansion circuits outside. I got myself a hand me down 7.5hp compressor on the way from my uncle, it will get plugged into this and stored outside.



and then WOOOO HOOOO!! a 50amp circuit labeled welder. thank freekin god! of course, spending almost 2g's on an electrical upgrade pretty much hosed the money i'd set aside to buy myself a welder. Thank god for good friends, my buddy nick is basicly done with his jeep and his miller 252 has been collecting dust.

so, with that said, here in the next week or so i'll have the metal gluer hooked up, and this winters willy's progress begins.

first order of business, i believe will be a swap to some YJ springs.
 
#32 ·
Looking forward to the build.
I can't promise that this will be the most ground breaking build on pirate, but we plan to have a good time with it!

very happy to say we now have the ability to glue metal!!

now onto fixing the front of the frame... then i need to scrounge up some new springs!

Amber had fun giving it a try!

 
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