By Jack and Audrey Lee – Dedicated to Merritt and his best friend Ken.
Well this is a bit of a special project, this 53 Jeep CJ-3B belonged to my best friend and father-in-law, Merritt. I personally have known Merritt since the early 70’s when I started dating and eventually married his only daughter Audrey. The Jeep at that time belonged to his best friend and hunting buddy. Ken and I would hear many a story about their hunting trips and how the Jeep was there to literally pull their asses out of trouble, it also hauled more than its share of deer and elk out of the back country. As time passed, Merritt and Ken’s hunting trips didn’t come as often as they used to and after having the Jeep sit for many years, Ken was going to sell it to make room around his place. Merritt bought it from Ken for a buck and moved the Jeep to his cabin in the hills outside of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. This is where it sat for over 10 years and where I would see it when in So Cal visiting. Over the years Merritt would start the Jeep up but it wasn’t driven. Sometime during this period, getting tired of the battery being dead when he would try starting her up, Merritt hooked up a battery trickle charger. Yes a trickle charger, not a maintainer, and one day when he started the Jeep up, the battery exploded. By some miracle, neither he of his wife Bernice were injured. They did the best they could and clean up the mess and used baking soda to neutralize the battery acid. Sometime after this, the Jeep didn’t want to start and he mentioned it to me on one of our visits. I played with it for a while and found the condenser in the distributor had gone bad. Luck would have it, Merritt had one in a box marked “jeep parts” and we had it running. On a different time again the Jeep wouldn’t fire up, and the problem was traced to a bad fuel pump. Merritt decided to install an electric pump with a simple on-off switch, problem here was it was often forgotten to be turned off. In the summer of 2017, I was again there and helped him fire the Jeep up, which took some doing but I did get it started and talk about a cloud of smoke, there wasn’t a mosquito for 50 miles. Long story short, I found the oil was heavily diluted with gas and was causing the smoking. I got the electric fuel pump replaced with a stock engine driven pump and rebuilt the carburetor. Drained and changed the oil several times and finally got the gas cleared out and the smoking stopped.
February of 2018, after the passing of Bernice in 2017, Merritt wasn’t his normal chipper self so when he wanted to fire the Jeep up that year I decided to see what it would take to get it drivable. This boiled down to replacing all the brake components: master and wheel cylinders, all rubber hoses and front shoes. Remember the part of the story about the battery, well one casualty to that was the right front brake shoes, they were turned to rubber which locked the front wheel up, talk about fun getting the drum off. Well by mid-April I got the brake work done, got her fired up and out the garage we went for the first drive in a very long time and the first time I had ever seen the Jeep move under its own power. Audrey and I were able to get Merritt up into the Jeep and out we went for a drive, with him pointing where he wanted to go, couldn’t hear him over the wind noise.
That first drive went well and what a kick to drive, I never drove anything with that low a gear that would just chug along even at idle and crawl up a hill. And yes you noticed the image of our hero adding gas to the tank, why are we out in the street adding gas to the tank, let’s just say we were out having too much fun…
Well now that Audrey and I are the care takers of the Jeep, plans to do some rebuilding are forming so that we could safely drive her on the streets while in So Cal. First on the list was to rebuild the steering system as it had 69 years of wear and it showed when driving over 20 mph. We also plan to flush out the gas tank, who knows what is in there. I’m thinking some sort of safety bar that could go across the door openings for Audrey to hold onto, she isn’t a fan of the open sides. The wiring needs to be cleaned up and the engine compartment and under belly needs a good steam cleaning. And did I mention oil leaks from everything underneath!
Kaiser Willys Jeep Blog Story – Jack & Audrey Lee
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Wonderful story of a loving son-in-law and for the love of an old but ready and willing CJ3. Good on ya Jack!
Wonderful story of a loving son-in-law and for the love of an old but ready and willing CJ3. Good on ya Jack!
Wonderful story of a loving son-in-law and for the love of an old but ready and willing CJ3. Good on ya Jack!
As far as the leaky oil seals go some of the more advanced industrial oil seals fo the same dimension are spring loaded and double rubber lipped. JUST BE SURE THAT the journal they are riding on is not rutted.
As far as the leaky oil seals go some of the more advanced industrial oil seals fo the same dimension are spring loaded and double rubber lipped. JUST BE SURE THAT the journal they are riding on is not rutted.