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About eWillys
Welcome to eWillys.com, a website for vintage jeep enthusiasts. I update this website nearly every day with jeep deals, jeep history, interesting reader projects, jeep related info, and more.
These quick searches can help you find things on eBay. People list in the wrong categories all the time, so don't be surprised to see brochures in the parts area for example. This section used to be split into jeeps, parts and other categories, but recent changes to eBay will require this information to be recoded.
The links to posts below show jeeps grouped by models, condition, and other ways. Some of these jeeps are for sale and others have been sold. If you are unsure whether a vehicle is still for sale or not, email me at d [at] ewillys.com for more info.
Importantly, the allure of buying a project jeep can be romantic. The reality of restoring a jeep can be quite different, expensive and overwhelming without the right tools and resources. So, tread carefully when purchasing a "project". If you have any concerns about buying a vintage jeep, or run across a scam, feel free to contact me for help, comments or concerns .
Recently, I learned that Akismet, the plugin I pay $100 year to manage my spam, announced that eWillys get too many spam requests (which isn’t my fault), so I must now upgrade to the $400 a year program.
Yeah, that’s not happening, especially given I’ve shifted into fewer updates and am no longer charging advertisers (thanks again for your past support guys). So, I’m testing out a highly rated, but free, version, called Antispam Bee. I may also need to add a captcha addition window to comments (where you are given 2 + 2 and you have to enter “4” … I think you fine folks can handle that math).
So, I don’t know how well Antispam Bee will work or if it will interfere with non-spam comments. If you feel like your comments aren’t posting, please email me at d @ deilers.com, and I will see what needs to be adjusted.
For those interested, here are the spam comments from the last few months:
UPDATE: First posted in 2010, this is a follow up to the post below which shows my family’s first jeep, a somewhat modified CJ-5.
One fine, sunny, beautiful Saturday during the summer of 1975 (or thereabouts – no family member can quite remember the exact year) my father drove his CJ-5 up a chuck-hole filled hillside trail at Icicle Creek, near Leavenworth, Wa. He didn’t make it to the top; instead, he rolled his CJ-5 down the hillside. Herein is the story and images.
I suppose it is appropriate that the images of dad’s wreck in the WWJC Scrapbook aren’t as clear as I had hoped, because the memory of it is also fuzzy. I’ve tried to color correct and sharpen the pictures as best as I could, but even the clearest of pictures can’t really tell the story of the impact of his tumble down that hill.
It was a club weekend on the ‘east side of the mountains’ in Leavenworth, Washington. For Washington Jeepers, the east side of the mountains means anything on the east slope of the Cascade Mountain range, where the surroundings transform from western muddy trails, deep dark green of cedar trees, and gray, drizzly, cool weather into Ponderosa Pines, sunshine, sagebrush, and dust. Within an hour of Seattle, you could (and still can) transform your jeeping experience entirely.
This particular weekend I remember, and say this without certainty as these are more like flickers of a 10-year-old’s memory, that we were staying in some kind of community-center-like building where we all slept on the floor in sleeping bags in a large open community room (I later learned this was a University of Washington property). For the club, it was one big campout.
For me this seemed perfectly normal as the club really was a big extended family — these were people I saw more than my own aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpas.
Chris Holmes posted this photo to the PNW4WDA Facebook group the other day. The first thing I spotted was the brown jacket worn by the man to the right of the group; it’s the color of the Wandering Willys Jeep Club. Looking closer, I realized that guy was none-other than my father! Apparently, he had taken part in the shuttle of special needs kids into the Woodland Park Zoo in North Seattle.
Looking more closely, I realized that the front of our CJ-5 was pictured just to the right of Dad’s back. one tell-tale sign is the horseshoe welded to the front of the winch plate. Given the jeep pictured was before Dad’s topsy-turvey roll down the hill at Icicle Creek outside of Wenatchee (summer of 1974 or 1975), this photo was likely taken in the early 1970s.
Morihisa Ochi posted this photo on FB of a GPW in Nagasaki after the Atomic Bomb. The top is interesting. According to him, “GPW in Nagasaki, Occupied Japan 1945 After a big factory near Ground Zero was blown off by Atomic Bomb, USMC used this area as a rifle range.”
UPDATE IV: Barney sent a photo of his rare Whitco Bikini Top attached to a 1971 CJ-5 (with his dog Manny smiling in the back). While not exactly like the bikini tops we saw in the later 1970s, it likely represents the first production example of what became the bikini top (if defined by attached to the windshield in the front and held in place by straps in the back)
UPDATE III: It appears the definition of the Bimini top is that it is open in the front, which isn’t consistent with the tops we’re discussing below …. I’m trying to determine when/where the top cover originated that, in the front, connects to the windshield, then goes over a mid-bar (usually a roll bar), and, in the back, is held in place by two straps from either side of the top.
UPDATE II: This Whitco brochure shows that the company was advertising a “Bikini” top during the 1960s, though it isn’t the design of top (like the one below) I was hoping to document. This top is closer to a Surrey top design.
UPDATE: Vernon notes that these were also called Bimini tops, a term I think came from the boating world?
Maury asked me if I knew when bikini tops were first produced. I don’t have any information on this. My guess is they arrived for jeeps in the mid-1970s as none of my earlier parts catalogs show the bikini top as an option. Anyone remember when they first started seeing them?
“Looking for trade offers only really, not even sure I want to let it go. Just bored and looking for the next thing to tinker on since I don’t have room to store them.
1947 steel tub Willys CJ2a stretched about a foot and sitting on a 1979 CJ5 chassis. YJ springs, fresh built 258 (built by Steve Damon) oil catch can, crane cam/lifters, heavy crankshaft (early model with 7 counterweights great for low rpm no-stall) Keith black pistons, head and block surfaced, T18 4 speed with 6.32:1 low gear, D20 transfer case, Ford 9″ rear end & D30 front (with lockers) 3:54 gears, 35×15 tires, custom oak dash/center console with all SpeedHut gauges (GPS speedo), hi-output single wire charging system, Kicker speaker pods, kicker amp/10” sub, integrated roll bar, Griffin radiator, MSD ign, “monstaliner” coating on body, no rust many more pics and parts but this is getting long.
I like all sorts of vehicles so shoot me a [worthy] trade offer and if I’m interested I’ll message you back to exchange more”
“Great original WW2 poster sent to schools for bond or stamp drives to buy jeeps. It measures approximately 35 by 45 inches. Some condition issues, but a great vintage poster. See other auctions for more WW2 posters.”
“Post WWII vintage matchbook for Jeep – Fort Worth Willys Overland Co., Fort Worth, Texas. Willys Overland Motors, Inc. Toledo Ohio. Great image is very similar to the 1945 press release of the CJ-2A Post-hole digger demo.”
Adam shared this ebay auction for another Quackpot poster. The image below is from a 2013 auction (it’s a better quality image than the one posted to eBay).