What's in a name?
This thing has been…an experience. I bought it completely sight unseen off of Facebook Marketplace (other than the photos in the ad), and from halfway across the country. Won’t make that mistake again. What you’re seeing here is a 1947 Willys CJ2A with some interesting modifications being flat towed home behind my wife’s VW. It’s like dubbya-dubya-two all over again with the Allies chasing zee Germans, or following in this case.
Vehicular ReenactmentThe seats and taillights are from an early model Mustang. Other than being cracked, the seats are alright I suppose, but the lights just look really out of place to me, and they don’t sit flush against the back of the tub. Speaking of the backside, the tailgate has also been removed and the hole was welded shut. I don’t know if it was done to go along with the rear mounted spare tire holder (that flops all over the place), or if they just decided it didn’t need one. I don’t know, but I wish the tailgate was still there. I’m also not a fan of the flimsy spare mount, but it’s at least mostly functional. Mostly.
‘stang CollageMy steering is not at all stock. It has a Saginaw box of unknown progeny mounted in front of the radiator and the steering column has been replaced with a tilt/telescope unit out of a mid-sixties Oldsmobile. It’s awesome, but I suspect it’s also the reason the windshield is cracked because it has quite the healthy spring on the tilt mechanism that if you aren’t careful could hit the glass when the wheel goes all the way up. I’ve since rotated the column upside down to reverse the way it springs, get a little lower tilt angle, and move the tilt lever to the other side so I can stop stabbing myself on it when I climb in. I’d like to put a different wheel on it eventually and clean up the lower end of the column, but it works for now.
It’s Alive…The brakes on this thing were upgraded at some point in its past. 2As originally came with 9 inch drums that had to periodically be manually adjusted. In case you’re wondering, that means by hand. Fortunately for me, they’d previously been swapped out in favor of 11 inch drums from a mid-seventies CJ7, and those happen to be self-adjusting. Unfortunately for me, the self-adjusters were not installed on all four wheels, and those that were lucky enough to get them had them installed incorrectly. Oh, and the backing plates for the rear brakes were installed on the front axle, and vice versa. That really wouldn’t be a big deal, except the rear backing plates have provisions for emergency brake cables and the fronts don’t. But wait! What’s that you say? Don’t flat fendered Jeeps have a transfer case mounted e-brake? Well, they should, but my junk don’t–just an empty hole in the dash where the handle should have been.
Now, it wouldn’t have been a huge undertaking to just swap backing plates front to rear and fab up cables and a brake lever, and I did swap them on the passenger side while I was replacing wheel cylinders–did I mention the brakes were barely functional when I drug this home?–anywho, the problem with swapping backing plates on the driver side is that someone replaced the front spindle bolts with 1/2 inch bolts instead of the original 3/8 inchers and drilled out the mounting holes on the backing plate to match. I could have still put that front plate on the rear where it belonged, but then I’d have needed to booger up the previously unruined plate on the rear (that should have been on the front–confusing, right?). I didn’t want to mess up another plate (these things are selling for around $100 a set at times) so I left them as is, and drove without an e-brake–not something I recommend; especially on a vehicle that has a single reservoir master brake cylinder. I planned to upgrade to a dual master pretty quickly so instead of replacing the existing one, I rebuilt it. I did manage to drive to work a couple times, but when I was backing out of the driveway at one point I lost brakes entirely. Good times. Of course that also happened immediately after Bonnie was torn apart in the garage so it sat in the driveway until Bonnie was done. Now I’m in the midst of swapping in disc brakes front and rear (with electric e-brakes), but that’s a story for another day.
The upgraded brakes are really a must on this heap-o-junk because the engine that’s hiding under the hood is quite a bit bigger than the flathead 4-banger with 134 cubes it originally putted around with. Someone shoehorned a 283 that I think came out of a ‘57/58 Impala to provide some extra scoot. I probably would have opted for a V6 of some flavor, but it came to me with a V8 so a V8 it shall have for the foreseeable future. There are some persons concerned about the longevity of the T90 transmission behind an 8, but I already have a granny 4-speed swap planned. I picked up a T18 and an NP435 last summer, and one of them will end up getting a rebuild and replacing the current 3-speed.
Who said good things come in small packages?
That pretty much sums up most of what had been messed with before I took over stewardship. This thing has been called many different names over the slightly more than two years that I’ve had it. Sally was briefly considered because of all the Mustang parts, but we decided on Frankie (as in stein) because of the mishmash of parts beyond those just ‘stang. I don’t like the name anymore (and didn’t for very long) so I started referring to it as jHeap. However, the jHeap’s “official” moniker is козел (pronounced “kozel” and intentionally lowercased because I like it that way) which is Russian for “goat” which seems to fit the idea of these old flattys being super nimble off road. It also coincidentally means “asshole” and since my jHeap is constantly being a pain in the…well, ass…I found it to be extra fitting. I still refer to it most often as the jHeap though. I told my younger kids that its name is Buttercup since I plan to paint it yella and I find it slightly amusing to hear it called Buttercup when I call it asshole :)
The biggest change I made (before starting on the current deep-dive into disc brakes) was to swap rear ends and gut the front axle. I pulled the original Dana 41 out from under the back because the axle bearings were so shot that they wallowed out the end of the axle tube, and the pinion bearing was garbage.
Nicht so buenoQuite fortuitously, I already had a 1953 (or ‘54–I can’t remember) CJ3B in the driveway that I’d picked up for parts, and it came with a slightly beefier Dana 44 in it that was in much better (read: “less abused”) shape, so in it went. I gutted the Dana 25 in front after I saw shiny stuff in the gear oil when I was changing it. Now I think it may have just been flecks of moly from the grease in the spindles that migrated past the axle seals, but I was afraid that the carrier bearings were toast and I didn’t want to cause any additional damage with a potential catastrophic failure so I pulled the carrier out. Guess what. The pinion bearings on the front axle were shot too! Along with the disc brake install, I’m also rebuilding the Dana 25 out of the 3B so I can do a quick swap of front axles like I did with the rears, and it’s getting a Powr-Lok limited slip while I’m at it for some extra tractiony goodness.
There isn’t a whole lot left of the 3B, but what is left is still sitting in the driveway. The shot below is from the day I saved it from being scrapped–two years ago today. There isn’t anything left out there other than the custom two piece tub.
Save me!I’m sure the neighbors don’t really appreciate the special way it brightens up the neighborhood, but I have some super secret plans for what to do with it in the future other than just hanging lights on it at Christmas.
How festive