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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.
There are plenty of interesting, unusual, historic and surprising stories related to Jeeps and their owners. In addition, some of these features have nothing to do with jeeps. This link will display all featured stories starting from the latest.
Looking for parts and not sure where to go? There are a variety of large and small new and used parts sellers both online and offline.
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 .
eWillys is live on the new server. Now that I’m on the new server, I can finally complete the changes and updates to the site, as well as add some new features. I have also set up a twitter feed which I’ll use to send out updates or announce problems or more.
I will re run a few posts tomorrow. New posts will start Monday. Enjoy your weekend!
Ann’s family is arriving this weekend to celebrate Oolie Christmas. Yes, it is Christmas in February. Why Christmas in February? Because her family (large family) was too busy to gather at Christmas. What’s an oolie Christmas? It’s a family celebration of Christmas started by Ann’s grandmother, who suffered a brain injury in a car wreck. After the wreck, she couldn’t do a lot, but one thing she could do was go to thrift stores. So, she’d go to thrift stores all year around until she had a huge collection of pretty bizarre presents (they’d fill half a bedroom). The presents weren’t addressed to anyone; instead, they were passed out until everybody had one. Then, everyone shouted OOLIE and opened the presents all at once. Then they would hand out another round of presents, yelling ‘oolie’ together again and unwrapping commenced once more. The goal is to have ten rounds.
After Ann’s grandmother passed away the tradition died. However, last year the family decided to restart it. Everyone bought ten thrift store items or made presents from scratch. We all have so much fun, we thought we’d repeat it. This year, as I mentioned, we put it off until February. In fact, we still have the christmas lights on the house, the tree still stands, and decorations still line the banisters. I admit it is strange having christmas decorations up so long you have to dust them. 🙂
Because of all the activity, I’ll be rerunning some old posts and maybe a couple new ones during some down time.
Happy OOLIE Christmas!
A reader named Sam called me today. He told me he had a great story to share. Hopefully, I’ve remembered most of it correctly.
For a little background, Sam is retired after a lifetime of building hotrods, drag racing and owning a shop in Sacramento, but now operates a small flattie-oriented shop in Arvada, Colorado, where he fixes, modifies and maintains Willys (and probably a few other vehicles) for fun. I’ll be explaining more about Sam (and some of his great suggestions) in a future post, but for now you have enough information to understand why a Jeep owner, in some distress, had his Jeep towed to Sam’s shop to investigate a problem.
And now to Sam’s story … The owner of this willys had tried to drive his jeep to work, but the jeep stopped working while driving down the road. So, the owner pulled to the side of the road, waited a moment, and started it up again. Sure enough, it fired up and the owner drove onwards.
Another few miles down the road the jeep shutoff again. So, the owner repeated the process: pull over, restart, and continue onwards.
At some point, this re-occuring process became too much for the owner to bare, so he called a towing company and had his jeep towed to Sam’s.
So, Sam looks the jeep over. He starts it up and, sure enough, after a little while it shuts down. He knows it has an electric fuel pump and suspects that could be causing a problem, so he unhooks the hose from the carb and points it into a gas can. Then, he turns on the fuel pump. Sure enough, after a little while, the fuel dribbles to a stop, yet he can hear pump still pumping ….. hmmmm, Sam thinks to himself.
He decides to try an experiment. He knows the owner only fills the tank to half full, because if the tank gets too full gas leaches out of somewhere (I can’t remember where Sam said it leaked).
Sam decides to fill up the tank all the way, because he suspects there might be something in the tank. Sure enough, he fills up the tank and out pops not one, not two, but three ping pong balls.
As Sam explains it, the sucking power of the fuel pump was pulling the ping pong balls to the outlet area of the tank(where the fuel line connects), stopping the fuel from exiting the tank, which shut down the jeep.
How’d the ping pong balls get there? Well, that still remains a mystery ….
So, the moral of this story is that even the mightiest jeep can be humbled by an even mightier ping pong ball. And, a side moral, is that buying a locking gas cap is a pretty good idea.
UPDATE: **SOLD** Was on eBay.
The Farm Journals have a variety of interesting Willys/Jeep stories and ads like this, but finding a free or cheap source of them has been difficult.
“This magazine advertisement features the Forwad Control Jeep FC-170 manufactured by Willys Motors, Toledo, OH. The copy boasts that The Newest addition to the 4-wheel-drive ‘Jeep’ family!”. The piece is 8 1/4″ x 11 1/2″ and is in good condition (see photo).”
I was looking for an interesting jeep photo when I ran across the rarely photographed CJV-35U at Florida Memories. The photo’s caption reads, “Oklahoma Seminole Indian Webster Talmsey Wise sitting in a Jeep”
http://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/164413
Last month when I share pictures of my ‘jeep’ shirt that horrified my wife, Steve sent me a variety of pictures showing his jeep shirt collection.
1) My most “busy” Jeep shirt. It actually has several types of 4×4 on it, including Scouts and Broncos. This has to come in a close second place to, “OMG, are you really going to wear that in public?”
2) Here is my favorite FC Roundup Shirt, because it has an FC Wrecker on it. I don’t own a wrecker (yet), but I came close to owning one.
Pardon the brazen shout out to my nineteen year-old son, Karson. Tomorrow he begins a ten month stint with Fema Corps. He will start in Sacramento, where he will go through ‘boot camp’. Once he completes his training he’ll start working somewhere in the western US.
Fema Corps is a Fema specific arm of the Americorps NCCC program. The FEMA Corps members focus on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery activities, providing support in areas ranging from working directly with disaster survivors to supporting disaster recovering centers to sharing valuable disaster preparedness and mitigation information with the public.
It should be quite an adventure for him; the start of making his own way in the world. Here’s a pic of him sitting on the bumper from 2011 (remember that time I ran out of gas . . .). Good Luck Karson!
These look more like Mini Terror tires rather than Desert Dogs. Still, finding brand new, rather than retreads, is unusual.
“new desert dog tires 92.00 free mounting call 1-304-387-2869”
http://wv.craigslist.org/pts/3439164509.html
I happened across this story by Rob Hardy about a 1942 MB? that was purchased and owned by Howard Hong until 2010, when he passed away. In 2012 it was donated by his son to the Northfield, MN, VFW.
http://northfield.patch.com/articles/wwii-jeep-finds-new-home-at-northfield-vfw#photo-10066780
UPDATE: Was on eBay. **SOLD**
This jim beam decanter includes the antenna.
“ARMY JEEB
JIM BEAM DECANTER
Hard to find one of these in this excellent condition with the rear antenna still attached.
No chips or cracks, empty and no box.”
I plan to do some updates later tonight. Right now, I’m trying a few different ways of logging in and registering. So, the registration might appear and disappear.
UPDATE: Hmm … it turns out my default eWillys WP theme was causing some issues. That might just have been the source of a couple problems. Or, I’m just playing whack a mole …. anyhow, I’ll leave up this theme until I fix the other one.
We aren’t too far away (Monday or Tuesday) from being up and running again on a newer, much faster server. So, why the big delay?
1) SPAM/BOT Traffic: I have reading through log files. The spam bots/spiders are hitting the site with enough frequency that it is slowing down the site to a crawl (or using up all webhost resources altogether). I have tried numerous strategies to reduce the strain of these on the webhost, which has helped, but not cured the resource use problem. Even the back end, which I use to do updates, etc, is nearly unusable due to the busy server.
2) COMMENT SPAM: The amount of comment spam has dramatically increased. Look at this chart. It shows approx 3000 spam comments (automated comments that are junk) in September 2012. By December that number had increased ten fold to 30,000 spam comments. While there are defenses in place to deal with that, I suspect that is helping cause resource problems as well.
3) SERVER HOSTS: Like Goldilocks, I tried a couple different server hosts (experiences described in posts below). One proved too frustrating, one proved too limiting. For the third try, I’ve turned to the McDonagh Brothers, web hosts and developers who, as lovers of jeeps, have a bit of self interest in seeing the site succeed. We should be up and going monday or tuesday.
In the meantime, I’m using Facebook to provide some contact and updates: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EWillys/304123822973935