#2 - "Cheep"

1991-1995

This was not my first jeep but the first jeep I ever built frame & everything. At this time in my life I had been building 67-72 Chevy’s, painting and doing body work and everything else I could do to make a buck. I wanted to build a circle track car and was half way done when, Randy Ellis showed up with his jeep and said, “Hey lets go wheeling”. After all the beer we drank & fun we had I was hooked. I sold my car and bought this 1966 Willys. When I got it home my dad and his friend Cameron pretty much laughed & said it was a piece of shit. The floor was rusted out, running gear was junk, frame was broke everywhere and I paid about $1000.00 for a body that wasn’t any good. We cut the whole rear floor and a lot of the front out, stretched the front fenders, hood and kept going. The frame was made of 2x3x1.20 rectangle tubing then flange mounted the body between that and the roll cage making a full chassis with ½ ton chev truck springs front and rear minus a couple of leafs, narrowed up 10 bolt axles with my very first ARB. A 410ci small block, a quadrajet carb, turbo 350, Dana 300 and power steering. Back then everyone wanted a stick shift, thank god my dad raised me right, automatic & powersteering! Great control in the rocks not to mention holding a beer and the wheel in one hand and your girl with the other this came in handy. She was one bad machine & drove like a dream. We called her the “Cheep” pronounced “sheep” since she was all chevy with a jeep skin. I wheeled her almost every weekend until 1995. I had just finished my second jeep and had to sell her to put a down payment on our first house. Hated to see her go, with Wayland due in less than a month it was time to own our own home and we needed room to cage the little animal LOL. Some of my favorite memories are meeting the owner of Republic Offroad, Rick Pewe a true pioneer of rockcrawling, whom I learned a lot from. We became great friends. He is now the editor of JP Magazine and also in the Offroad Hall of Fame. Wheeling one weekend w/best friend Randy Ellis we broke one of my custom 10 bolt axles which was a c-clip, had to leave it, we had no spare and not to mention it was 10:00 at night. Luckily my dad showed us a new trick, we got a stock axle cut it down, welded it back together went back to the desert to retrieve it and were home before the sun came up and pissing off the neighbors roasting the shit out of it in front of the house trying to break the axle we had just welded. It’s still in there to this day. Then having it show up in my shop 21 years later in exactly the same condition I sold it in with maybe 100 more miles on it. So crazy that the kids got to drive something that I built 20yrs ago and see the evolution.