Tag: willys jeep
Bringing the Jeep home
OCTOBER 7 – FIRST DAY
I first got the Jeep on October 7, 2018. A friend, Michael Wilgus, who was a member of the 82nd Airborne Living History Association (LHA) reenactment group was looking to part with his Jeep. It was a tough decision, but he was moving out of California and felt the Jeep wouldn’t be appreciated for what it is stuck on a ranch in Arizona. I mentioned I was interested, and about a month later I had sealed the deal completing a 20 year wish of mine to someday own a Jeep.
Mike brought the Jeep to the house on October 7th, 2019 along with a few boxes of spare parts and some pieces he had intended to replace. At the time, the Jeep had been sitting for about a year in a garage and was in need of some work. She wasn’t running, although the starter and engine would turn over. After giving her a quick bath later in the day I rolled her out onto the driveway and took some ‘before’ photos. I should have taken all angles of the Jeep that day, but I was on cloud nine being a new owner of a World War 2 Jeep! I wasn’t sure yet what exactly I was going to do with the Jeep, be it just a quick tune-up and new paint job, or a full frame-off restoration. In hindsight, knowing how much I document every little thing with this restoration, I wish I’d taken tons of photos!
WELCOME TO THE RESTORATION BLOG!
Welcome to the restoration blog! I will be documenting the re-restoration of my 1944 Ford built GPW Jeep! I purchased the Jeep in October of 2018. When I first got the Jeep, it was in okay condition and was up and running with a little work. It had sat idle in a garage for a year since it last ran. After reviewing the entire Jeep, I decided it needs work to get it to an accurate restoration. So I decided to give it a frame-up restoration. Follow along as I slowly re-restore it with updates every Friday on the progress until I finish the restoration!
2021 UPDATE: This all started as a page on Facebook (https://facebook.com/1944gpw) but after nearly two years of getting more and more followers, it became clear finding specific posts of the restoration updates wasn’t easy on Facebook. So I had the idea to convert the entire page over to a WordPress blog so it was easy to search and look up information from the restoration. It would also be cached by google, so people googling specific questions as they restore their Jeeps might find their way here. It’s a slow process as at the time of copying everything over from Facebook, there are well over 400 updates with thousands of photos and captions!
My hope is that this blog will help people who were in the exact same position I was, with no automobile knowledge nor military vehicle knowledge, but have purchased a Jeep in need of a full restoration. Continue reading “Welcome to the GPW #208102 Restoration Blog!”