For the Fourth of July, I celebrated by heading back to the formerly snow bound roads near Boise’ only ski area, Bogus Basin.  As you can see in this pic, the snow is gone (see snow pics here), the mountains are now in bloom, and more progress was made.  More on that tomorrow ….

A 1950 CJ-3A: Today, Darrel had to talk to me.  So he stopped next to me, while I waited at a stop light, rolled down his window, and started asking me questions — what year was my jeep, who did my roll cage, and more …

Now, I had no idea who Darrel was.  However, in the time it took for the stop light to finally change colors, Darrel had explained through his passenger side window that he A) liked what I had built, B) had a 1950 CJ-3A, C) wanted his jeep rebuilt for his daughter, D) had his jeep nearby, and E) wanted me to follow him there.  If I learned that much at a stop light, I wondered how much I would learn about him once we stopped to see his jeep.

True to his word, he lived very close and had a 1950 CJ-3A that needed some work — hadn’t been run in 15 years.  It had a V-8 conversion, solid body, rotted top and plenty of potential.  And, to my surprise, based on my jeep, he asked me to do the work (and will pay me). I don’t have pics of this just yet.  I’ll share more about this if we go forward with the project.

Brian wrote to me late last week to share a sad tale.  As a part of the continued testing with his new build, he learned the hard way what happens if the oil in the front pumpkin housing gets too low AND the 4wd somehow gets accidentally shifted into gear (how that happened is still a mystery to him).  The result:  his front pinion started freezing up, resulting in some ugly sounds and a twisted driveline. See the pics to the right.

The good news is that everything else continues to behave well.