Military Vehicles, May 1997,: Re: [MV] Roll Call
Re: [MV] Roll Call
GIjeeps@aol.com
Sun, 11 May 1997 23:57:03 -0400 (EDT)
>From what has gone around the web it looks like there are between 5 and 10
thousand jeeps left of the MB/GPW type. But as I mentioned you never know how
many of these will actually be jeeps again. For example I have a slat grill
body and frame with one fender and the hood. Now if I took a Ford front and
rear axle, an MB transmission, and a CJ Engine and put them all together
and made them run, painted it green and put white stars on it, what have I
created? A Slat Grill Willys? I think not. Situations like this probably
account for 1/3 of what is still out there and hardly count as a jeep in my
opinion. But what if I swear I'm gonna fix it up later? It must count as
something don't you think?
If every restorable WW II jeep was restored right now by magic or miracle
I'll bet there wouldn't be many more than 7,500 of them. I mean I've got 12
jeeps here now, of which 9 really deserve to be counted as jeeps and the
other three could probably be fixed with serious effort, but most folks
would call them parts jeeps. Among all my friends and associates who are
jeeps nuts we only know of 10 or 11 other WWII jeeps in Nebraska in anything
like restorable condition. That means I have almost half of all the known
WWII jeeps in Nebraska! Now if we are generous and assume that there are
still at least 12 out there that no one has discovered it still leaves me
with around 1/3rd of all the known WWII jeeps in this state. I guess we can
safely assume that there are around 40 WWII jeeps in Nebraska. (Many of them
I have imported from other states.) Now if we take it one step further and
assume that there are 40 jeeps in each of the fifty states that's only 2000
jeeps in the US!!! Now some states will have more and some will have fewer so
lets go even further and assume that each state has an average of fifty
jeeps, that's still only 2500!! Think back to the past MVPA conventions, how
many WWII jeeps show up generally? 10 or 15 at most of them I suppose. And
that's from a multi-state area. Now assume that for every restored jeep at
the convention there are 10 unrestored ones in that area. 150 maybe 200.
Thats not many.
So, in conclusion, I guess what I am saying is that it does seem possible
that you could own nearly 2/10ths of a percent of all the WWII jeeps
surviving worldwide!
Kinda' sad isn't it? Take good care of them.
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