I used to have a '76 Datsun pickup. It was old and only 2WD but kept on running (over 200k miles). It had a simple little engine, easy to work on and fix, but one day bouncing through the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, I broke the right front wheel off. Yup! That's what I said. The A-arm broke! The wheel was dangling by the tie-rod. Luckily it wasn't in the heat of summer and my son and I only had to walk three or four miles to find a rancher who gave us a ride back to civilization. I went back the next day and towed it home. I fixed the wheel and even rebuilt the engine after that, but I never was really happy with it. I wanted a real truck, not a toy.
I looked at new trucks, just for fun, because you see I work for the State of Arizona, and my salary never quite keeps up with inflation. The governor knows that the state employees are a bunch of lazy bums. Hey, he's a state employee too, so I guess he'd know. As corroborating evidence of his character and judgment, I will mention that he has been indicted for fraud by the feds. [He was convicted since my original writing.] When the state budget is short, he just freezes the employees salaries, and when the coffers get filled again, well he knows that the good people of Arizona deserve a tax break. So in bad years I don't get a raise, and in good years I get a tax break and a piddling raise. Anyway, the price of new trucks made a purchase impossible on my salary.
So I looked at old trucks, but by the time they are old enough to be
cheap, they have lots of mechanical problems. And the merely old, not
really old, trucks still have pretty complex engines, so working on them
would be a challenge. I decided to look at really old trucks, with lots
of character and simple engines and other systems I could easily
understand. I'm not dumb, but I never had much in the way of mechanical
training, not even an auto shop class in high school. Since I like to
drive to remote places, I need a truck that is tough enough to get there
and back. One that wouldn't tear out the oil pan on a rock, or get stuck
in the mud. A Jeep seemed the ideal solution. I remember an old WW2
surplus Jeep my dad drove for his work when I was a kid. It was hard to
start in the cold weather, but it was simple, and cheap, and went
anywhere. So I looked at Jeeps, but four-wheeling is pretty popular
nowadays, and in the Arizona climate, they don't rust much. Old Jeeps
retain their value. I was looking at 20 year old Jeeps that I still
couldn't afford. And another thing, even if I had a Jeep so I could go
anywhere, I wouldn't have room to take much. Once in a while I need to
haul tree trimmings to the dump or pick up some lumber. Where do you put
a 4X8 sheet of plywood in a CJ? So I knew I needed something as tough as
a Jeep but with a bed like a truck.
I looked at Jeep trucks for a couple of years. The Comanche's and J10's
I looked at were too expensive or junk, and they don't quite have the
class of an old Willys truck. I found several Willys Jeep trucks that
had been "improved" with engine and tranny swaps. I remember one that
the guy had swapped in a Chevy 350, which put out too much power for the
T90, so he replaced it with automatic transmission (I forget which
model), which meant he'd had to customize the firewall and the floor and
the shift lever came up through the middle of where the bench seat
should be, so he put in bucket seats, but they had a sloping back which
meant they moved forward, so his belly hit the steering wheel, so he put
in a small wheel, like you find in street rods, which meant he didn't
have enough leverage to turn the front wheels without power steering. He
got tired of the whole project and just let it sit for a couple of
years. When I talked with him, he was willing to sell it for $800, but I
wouldn't have been able to drive it without major work.
When I found a nearly stock '49 Willys in March of '96, I was ecstatic. I bought it and drove it home! It has needed new brakes, new windows, most of the ignition parts, and a fuel pump. The carburetor is finicky and I've had to get a new float and put a bushing in holes for the throttle shaft. I had to replace the worn out drive shaft and U-joints. But through all the repairs, it has been my daily driver. Well, to be honest, most of the time it's drivable. Occasionally, I get it apart and discover it needs a replacement part that I can't find. Sometimes it has to wait.
But when I take it out into the desert, it crawls over anything, up any hill, wherever I want to go. It is older than I am. It reminds me of the old trucks I rode in as a child. It rattles and hums, and doesn't go very fast, but it goes!
It has an F4-134 four-cylinder engine, which is not original since it
wasn't available until 1951, but puts out a little more horespower than
the original L4-134; a T90 3-speed transmission (original); a Spicer 18
transfer case (original), the original Timken rear
axle, the original Spicer 25 front axle. It's still 6-volt! The
axles have 5.38 gears, so top speed is about 45
mph (before overdrive). But low-range low is
really low! When I'm down and crawlin', nothing can stop me. And if I
have to drive a continuous fixer, or what you might call a piece of
junk, I'd rather drive a piece of classy junk.
My truck will run forever! It has already run for almost 50 years and through uncounted thousands of miles. (The gears in the speedometer wore out many years ago.) It's harder to drive than a modern truck, and it takes constant tinkering, but as I chug on my daily commute, I feel that I have escaped from the hectic world of planned obsolescence, glossy advertising, and high-pressure salesmen. I drive past junkyards filled with cars much newer than my truck and feel like I have cheated time himself. And when I go driving off the pavement, I never worry about scratching the paint, or hills too steep, or trails too rocky - 'cause I drive a Willys!
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© Richard B. Grover 1997 to 2006. | Last updated: Thursday, March 1, 2001 |