I Drove My Jeep Comanche 2000 Miles To Pick Up 1500 Pounds Worth Of WWII Jeep Parts. Here’s How It Went

A few months ago I drove to Idaho to pick up a Jeep Comanche I had bought sight unseen. This little truck’s first task would be to haul large parts that I bought on eBay back to my house in LA so I could turn those parts into an entire World War II Jeep. Hilariously, I shortly thereafter found the motherlode of WWII Jeep parts on eBay, though the seller was located back up in the Pacific Northwest. So I essentially re-traced much of my trip in the Comanche, but this time I headed to a legendary Jeep parts supplier in Oregon and to an eBay seller ever farther away in Washington state. Here’s what that 2,000 mile trek was like picking up almost a literal ton of Jeep parts.

It’s been about a month since I mentioned that I’d scored the motherlode of WWII Jeep parts on eBay, The Autopian’s brand partner in this extremely ambitious journey to build a brand new WWII Jeep from scratch using mostly parts sourced from eBay. Up until that point, I’d managed to snag a body, frame, and engine from eBay sellers, though I was still missing a transmission, transfer case, and axles. Those are some pretty big parts, and given the point of the build was to get as much as I could from eBay, I found myself keeping a keen eye on the website for a listing.

That’s why this motherlode was such a big deal, even though it was far away in Washington state:

I prepped my 1992 Jeep Comanche longbed for the journey by gifting it some brand new all-terrain tires, and by adding the world’s cheapest air suspension.

Initially, my plan was to install some brand new leaf springs, but I was having trouble sourcing them in time, so at the last minute, I ordered some air shocks. I wrote about this in my article I’m Driving My Jeep Comanche 2,000 Miles To Pick Up 1,300 Pounds Of WWII Jeep Parts I Bought From Ebay, and though I was expecting a bit of pushback for my rather simply solution to my rear springs’ lack of load-carrying capability, most readers seemed to think it was actually a good idea.

Essentially, air shocks just replace the shock absorbers with a combination air spring/damper. The air spring provides some support to help out the leaf springs, with the amount of support adjustable via a Schraeder valve I have mounted just ahead of my rear bumper. Without this, I understood, the four axles, transmission, and transfer case I planned to haul back from Washington would certainly have bottomed out my rear suspension, making the handle rather sketchy.

 

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I topped my little truck up on a Saturday evening and I headed north. As this was the weekend right after Thanksgiving, the traffic from LA all the way up the 5 even past San Francisco was nightmarish, with the GPS at one point sending me and seemingly ever other human on the planet on a canyon road instead of the freeway:

Once back on the freeway, the traffic was intense for hours and hours. What I had hoped would be a chill highway cruise up in my Comanche started out as a true slog:

I had started off from LA at about 5PM, a little later than I’d hoped due to my rear air-shock installation job. As I’m somehow no longer the road-warrior I once was, I’m not able to consistently grind out 8+ hour driving sessions, so after about three hours on the road, I chose a random town ahead and booked a hotel.

As I neared this random town I’d chosen on the map, I decided to google it, only to find that there had been a national incident there recently, and that the city, Stockton, is ranked by numerous sources in the top three most dangerous towns in California.

Aside from a bit more noise than I’d have hoped between 2AM and 5AM, the motel was honestly fine, and I hit the road early the next day, cruising through one of the most fertile, crop-bearing parts of this great nation.

In short order, the landscape shifted from farmland to an alpine paradise, with Mt. Shasta marking the boundary:

Visiting The Ultimate WWII Jeep Parts Supplier

My first destination was Ron Fitzpatrick Jeep Parts, whose eBay store looks like this:

In addition to being an eBay seller, Ron is the founder of the biggest WWII Jeep community on earth: The G503 forum, named for the U.S. military’s standard supply number for the WWII Jeep. G503 is a legendary message board where enthusiasts from around the globe exchange knowledge, share parts, and become part of a beautiful family. That is to say that, in many ways, Ron is the godfather of the global WWII Jeep network.

And above all, he’s just a nice guy:

And his store is filled with absolute gold.

Look at these brand new seat frames:

Here’s lots of Olive Drab green paint on the right:

Check out all these 6-volt voltage regulators; not shown is complete wiring harnesses made in-house!:

Here are a bunch of exhaust pipes for WWII Jeeps and CJs:

Here are some parking brake shoes:

Here are some bumperettes:

Check out all these leaf spring brackets:

Behold a bunch of body panels and braces:

There was a whole section of just hardware, with the staff at Ron Fitzpatrick having individually bagged many of them:

Look at all these engine mounts:

In the middle here you can see some flywheels:

Here are a bunch of frame sections:

And then there were the loads of transmission cases and transfer cases, which Ron and his team painstakingly cleaned and primered. Here’s just a small portion of the transfer cases he has:

Here’s a photo from up high:

I elected to leave the parts I had ordered ahead of time at Ron Fitzpatrick’s store because I knew I had to come back. Walking through this amazing facility full of parts made me realize: This was an opportunity I’ll only get once; I have to capitalize on this and buy pretty much every part I still need for my Jeep project while I was here with an empty pickup bed.

 

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Picking Up The Motherlode

Of course, my bed wasn’t going to remain empty, as the primary purpose of this trip up north was to pick up the motherlode of Jeep parts from Washington. So I bid Ron and his team adieu for now, and hit the road. My trip was basically broken up into three five hour chunks, with the first five having taken me to Stockton, the second having taken me to Central Point, Oregon (the location of Ron’s business) and the third chunk now taking me to Longview, Washington.

The sky turned dark as soon as I hit the road, and before long I found myself once again struggling to drive just five hours to my destination in Longview. I don’t know if it’s my age getting the best of me, or if I’m just not getting enough sleep as a new dad and business owner, but not being able to complete a five-hour stretch without fatigue setting in is pretty sad.

I did eventually show up in Longview, where a reader named Mike was kind enough to still be up awaiting my arrival at his amazing home along the Columbia river. Here’s Mike and me in his Garage Mahal. Not shown is his heavily-built Jeep XJ or his sweet JL:

After a bit of sleep, I followed Mike’s Silverado to the home of eBay seller gpw9167, Brent, who had sold me the aforementioned Jeep parts Motherlode.

I arrived at a giant ranch property with a huge garage at the back filled with Jeep axles, transfer cases, hubs, and all sorts of other great hardware. I was there to pick up an old generator engine, which I snagged for $1000:

Unfortunately, the crankshaft pulley had been welded to the crank, but otherwise, this looked like a good motor — a backup in case my brand new France-built engine didn’t work out for whatever reason.

I was also there to pick up four axles, a transfer case, and a transmission — all of which were already loaded up into the bed of an old F-150 just outside the garage:

Mike and I lifted those heavy parts into the bed of my Comanche, and to be honest: It sucked. The front axles especially, with all the steering gear still attached, probably weighed 250 pounds apiece.  I had to pump up my air shocks to 110 PSI (the range for them is 25 PSI to 200 PSI) in order to keep the rear of my truck from sagging.

After strapping everything down and covering it with a tarp, I went back to Mike’s, we tried fixing a squeak in my Jeep’s accessory drive, and then I headed south back towards Ron’s.

Making A Parts List And Picking Up Lots Of Parts From Ron Fitzpatrick

This was a particularly rough night for me, as I remained rather fatigued and really needed a night’s rest. But I knew I had to sit down and create a list of parts to buy from Ron the following morning, as this was an opportunity I could not waste. My friend Brandon, an old engineering buddy from my Chrysler days and a true WWII Jeep expert, had helped me compile part of it, but I had lots of work to do.

So I pulled over, checked into a motel, and got to work. Just as I was finishing putting together a parts list that I used to order parts from Ron’s eBay store (I also emailed him the other parts that he didn’t have listed on his eBay store), I looked at the clock to see that it was morning. It was time to hit the road again.

When I got to Ron Fitzpatrick, he was there ready to help me, and in short order I had a giant stack of parts. While he didn’t have a few of the smaller parts listed on his eBay store (I just sent him a direct PayPal for those), the bigger parts were either already on his eBay store, or in a few cases, he went ahead and listed a couple. Here’s a look at a portion of my haul:

That’s a distributor, an accelerator pedal linkage, and a new steering sector shaft to go along with the rebuild kit below:

How about that windshield glass! And there was even a passenger’s side seat frame! And a voltage regulator!:

Ron sold me a brand new oil bath air cleaner, a gorgeous muffler, and a rebuild generator to go along with that new voltage regulator:

The big score was the wheels, which I’m surprised hadn’t sold out, as he’d put them on eBay just before I’d arrived. I managed to snag the last five combat rims, which are extremely hard to get these days. I’d been looking for months!:

Here’s a look at a cart loaded full of the parts I snagged from Ron:

[Note that, when you order parts for pickup on eBay, you simply provide the seller with a special code, which they can use to confirm that the order has been picked up. It’s quite a seamless system that worked well with both Ron and with Brent up in Washington.]

Thanks to my Comanche’s 7-foot 4-inch bed, I found room for all those boxes even among the engine, four axles, transmission, and transfer case:

The Jeep sat fairly level thanks to those air shocks, it rode really smoothly, and it even scored about 17 MPG. Acceleration was a little slower than usual, but it wasn’t really that obvious. My old parts-hauling pickup, a 1985 Jeep J10 (and the Comanche’s predecessor) had a 112 horsepower inline-six, a 4,300 pound curb weight, and a 2.73 axle ratio. By comparison, the Comanche’s inline-six makes 190 horsepower, the truck only weighs 3,500 pounds, and it’s got a 3.07 axle ratio.

Honestly, the 1,500 or so pounds I had in the bed didn’t strain the powertrain at all, and the truck tackled steep inclines with ease, scoring even better fuel economy than I had expected.

I trudged on into the night, shifting down into fourth and occasionally into third to put the engine in its sweet spot up the steeper grades; the 4.0-liter hummed under the hood, with the truck dutifully and proudly hauling its great grandpa’s parts without any drama.

Night fell, so I found the most random Indian food truck at the back of a warehouse site:

The food was fire, though, as I discovered in my motel about an hour northwest of Sacramento.

Heading Back To LA To Prepare For A Wrenching Marathon

The following day I bombed back to LA to be with my wife and child, whom I hadn’t seen in five days. It’s amazing how what I thought would be just a few days had turned into five, but I wanted to make sure I was getting all the parts I needed while I had the opportunity, because the following week my friend Brandon would be coming into town. I wanted to make sure I had the parts that would allow me to maximize my time with someone I consider one of the greatest wrenches I’ve ever met.

More on how far my wrenching pal Brandon and I got on this incredibly ambitious eBay WWII Jeep adventure in an update next week.

[Ed note: David mentioned the idea of building a brand new WWII Jeep to the team at eBay, and they loved the idea so much they said, “How can we help?” Their financial support and David’s Jeep-obsession are the fuel behind this crazy build. – MH]

Top graphic images: David Tracy; DepositPhotos.com