Nineteen Year Old Erik and I have been tossing a few emails back and forth over the past two days. He’s another one of these young kids who has found time to rebuild multiple jeeps. He shares his story and his jeep below:
Erik writes, “I started getting interested in restoring jeeps when my neighbor got a 43 MB and convinced me to start WW2 Reenacting. I decided that I wanted to get one too and began saving to buy one, This led me to your site were I spent almost every day looking for just the right one. As I was only 17 at the time I didn’t have much of a budget to start with so I wanted to get one that wouldn’t need too much work. I ended up finding one in california and had it shipped here. When I got it I realized that the pictures didn’t reveal how much work would actually go into it.
I began going to reenactments after I got the jeep (It wasn’t restored yet so I couldn’t bring it) and saw that the majority of reenactors who had jeeps did a work as you go kind of thing, Which caused them to not look very good. This made me decide that I would do a complete frame up restoration of mine.
It took me a year to get the jeep torn down, The frame sandblasted, I Rebuilt the engine, Transmission, transfercase, and did some bodywork to the Hood, Fenders, and grill. The body ended up being replaced as I don’t have the tools to do that. It was then rebuilt, Painted the correct OD green for the time and theater of war. I ended up making the stencils by hand and painted them onto the body.
I was able to bring it to the first Reenactment in October 2011. It was an airshow in Midland TX (I live in Houston). It was there that I was asked by a fellow reenactor to help restore his GPW. He had all of the parts he needed already purchased so it was a pretty fast restore (took around 4 months) with his help. I am now working on a 43 MB for a friend.
More photos of the jeep and My reenacting unit (Able company, 502nd PIR, 101st Airborne) at our facebook site (https://www.facebook.com/#!/ablecompany502pir)”
