Latest Updates & Small Projects

A quick recent photo I took of the Jeep with the flea market original propaganda poster I found at the seller’s request. In the last update, I was looking forward to the Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942 event at Fort MacArthur Museum, but the event ended up being canceled sadly shortly before the event. Even if it wasn’t canceled, it would have been rained out because of all the rain we’ve been getting here in SoCal. Even this photo here is a bit of a rarity with sunny blue skies pretty not being typical for 2023!

I was cleaning the engine bay a few weeks ago when I stopped at my original battery hold-down bracket. This bracket was always a weird shape, making me wonder what it should look like. I went and grabbed the trusty “Ford GPW Restoration Standards” by Mike Wright, and I noticed the photos in the book, and other photos of wartime Jeep engine bays, the bracket was straight with no weird warping. I decided it was time to fix mine.

From some of the wartime brackets I could see, it looked like the top bolt hole and the bottom bolt hole had slight bends to them to form a slight diagonal shape. So I took my flat head hammer and carefully flattened the bracket. I then added those same slight bends on either end. As you can see, that messed up the paint job.

So, after wire-wheeling the bracket and priming it with red oxide, I hit it with the usual 33070 OD Green.

The next day, I went ahead and installed it back on. SO MUCH BETTER! Compare this with the next photo…

This is how it used to look (before). Much better now! Go back to the previous image to see how it looks now (after). Chalk another little project off the list.

And here’s a look at the original F stamp. This bracket is original to my Jeep, which is pretty cool. I think, the majority of the time, these are lost/replaced. So it’s nice to know mine survived all these years!

Moving on, another issue I had recently is my canvas half-door studs. In one of them, on the driver’s side upper rear stud, the two little teeth fell out of the stud. You can see them missing here. It happened when I was driving, so no chance to get them back!

I contacted John Worthing from Canvasco, who made these for me, and he was awesome enough to send me a few replacements, shown here on the upper one. You can see the two teeth in the slot that are missing from the one that is installed, below.

This will be a project for another update, as it’s going to take some work to figure out how to get the broken stud out, then install the new stud without a special tool. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!

A few weeks ago, I saw someone post this photo on one of the Jeep pages (apologies, I forget the name of the individual, feel free to chime in here if you see this!) and I LOVED the idea of having a ‘girl back home’ photo in the Jeep. I originally thought of doing something like this when I saw someone with a pinup gal photo as I checked out Jeeps in Normandy during the 75th Anniversary of D-Day. But I haven’t gotten around to it. Seeing this photo kicked me into gear to move on with it.

I’m fortunate to be a 1940s-style pinup photographer for the last 17+ years, so I have an extensive library to choose from! But I specifically wanted to use my girlfriend, seen here in a pinup shot from a few years ago, since it seemed more appropriate!

I spent a week testing different methods to make a modern photo look more vintage, some different techniques came out great, and some came out not so great.

I went back and forth on various images, horizontal or vertical, staged with props, or just her alone. I also played with different borders, black and white vs slightly yellowed.

I ended up coming up with all sorts of different looks. I have a pretty good collection of actual 1940s snapshots (wartime ones, photo albums, etc). So I was never satisfied with one particular style. Taking a modern high res digital DSLR and trying to degrade the images down to a 1940s 35mm or 4×5 style is not easy.

I ended up settling on this photo of her from the shoot. I decided to do just a waist-up shot since most of the photos from the 1940s were more squarish ratio (or just about), and modern digital cameras are a 6/9 ratio.

So I ended up with this, for now. The edges have the shallow depth of field bokeh look, there’s some degradation of the image and a rough border.

I had that printed on luster paper, and I went ahead and put it in the Jeep. It’s a start, and I think there’s more I can do to refine the image, but I’m liking where it’s headed. Note: Ignore the magenta color cast, that’s from the camera.

I decided to put it here on the dash as it seemed like a spot a jeep driver might have it.

I think it adds a nice personal touch to the Jeep! I’ll revisit this sometime in the future once I decide how I want the final version to look!

I was checking out eBay the other day, when I saw this Ford GPW manual for sale. It didn’t sell the first time, or the second time, so the price was lowered and I decided to take a stab at it. I won, and it arrived a few days later. I had no idea what it was, just that it was some sort of GPW manual.

At first, I thought it was some sort of post-war manual for Jeeps. But it was oddly specific to the Ford GPW, and listed a lot of wartime things (without mentioning the war itself). There were no dates I could see because the cover and first page were missing.

the manual itself is really amazing. It’s original, for sure, just looking at the numerous diagrams. Most reprints are not as clear.

It covers several different TM manuals with a bit more compressed info, but it was an ‘all in one’ manual. I got excited seeing all the great information.

It covered some things that the 1944 TM manuals I have didn’t include, and this manual is more the size of an Ord9 parts manual.

It has a nice illustrated section on setting the ring and pinion, which was nice to see. Great information!

Every page had some great info, and as I read it more, the more I started to realize this isn’t a post-war manual since it only talks about the push-pull light switch with no mention of the late-war rotary switch. It certainly didn’t match any of the wartime manuals I had in PDF form.

So I decided to inquire about what I had with the manual expert, Patrick Tipton over at Portrayal Press. He knew right away what it was, a hard-to-find Ford TM-10-1349 maintenance manual from 1942! It was just missing the cover, first page, and a few pages of the index in the back. Still, for the $29 I spent on it, it’s a nice find! Patrick gave me a super kind offer to ship it to him, and it’d put a new reproduction cover on it with the missing pages, and rebind it in the same style as it was in WW2. Normally I don’t mess with original items like a manual, but in this case, I feel it will extend the life of this manual and protect it for many years to come. A big shout out to Patrick at Portrayal Press! I have his massive all-in-one shop manual for the Jeep that contains all the TMs reprinted so my originals can not regrade further. Well worth the price for everything in on manual: https://www.portrayalpress.com/G503-Workshop-Special-p/bndl-g503workshop.htm

And wrapping up this short update, I wanted to reiterate the upcoming May 6-7 event at the Planes of Fame Air Museum (Chino Airport, CA) that is looking for military vehicles to attend! We’re trying to get the word out to as many military vehicle groups/individual owners as we can for the event! It’s going to be a great gathering of vehicles and reenactors. We plan to have several flights of warbirds throughout the day (B-25, P-40, Corsair, P-51, etc) and all those who bring a vehicle to attend the event will get a chance to win a flight in a warbird! More information: https://planesoffame.org/events/wheels-tracks-and-wings
Vehicle sign-up form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScr3cXUqaNBO0VqpWoQQui-J8Pq8cQzxeWprUkgsJ0h_CIxAw/viewform

That’s it for this week!
Till the next update…