Jeep Friends
In this special flagship episode of the Jeep Talk Show, Tony is joined by Chuck, a fellow host from the show, and Greg, host and owner of Unofficial Use Only. Together, they dive into discussions about Jeeps, the Jeep industry, and the amazing products created by Unofficial Use Only. Don’t miss this episode packed with expert insights and Jeep enthusiasm!
Hi, boys and girls, it’s time for another Jeep talk show and we’re talking with Chuck and Greg. I probably should have started with Greg because you’re on the screen. If you’re not watching us on YouTube, you should, because it’s always fun to see what’s going on as well as hear what’s going on.
Greg, thanks for being here today. Man, so you sound like you’re right there by the road.
Yeah. So, and it’s hilarious because I’ve got 20, you know, 20 acres, which is nothing in Chuck’s world, but I got 20 acres and normally I’m in the shop or I’m way at the back of the property, but today Verizon was not fruitful and Verizon did not want to cooperate. So my internet signal was abysmal and I ended up driving all the way up and I’m sitting in the front yard about 50 feet from the road just to make sure that I have a good clean signal so that I can have a little bit of fun with the Jeep talk show today.
That’s great. And Chuck, you’re actually working today, but you’re out in your shop for lunchtime, right?
Yeah. I sent the guys to lunch. You and Greg reached out to me and said, let’s do a show right quick. So I said, hell yeah. I don’t, obviously I don’t miss too many meals. So missing a lunch is not going to be that big of a deal. So I come out here and had some learning experience. My hearing aid was not working right. And then the phone overheated and we’re having a blast today already. We’re halfway through lunch.
And just so people know, it’s not, you’re not, you don’t have the hearing aid because you’re old. You have a hearing aid because you were in the army defending us and our freedom and all the rifle shots and stuff took a toll.
Yeah. The joke is, is that I dropped my hearing and lost it overseas. So yeah.
Well, thank you for your service. I’ve told you that many times.
But it says important day for it.
Yeah. That’s right.
That’s right.
Yeah.
I’m looking in your background there, Chuck. And I got to tell you that I am envious of that Jeep you’re sitting on your hoist. I know your dad’s standing next to you, but the one on the hoist just gives me a warm and fuzzy. That’s the Jeep that not only won the war, but created the life that we all strive to live today.
A lot of new Jeepers don’t even understand what the hell that thing is. And that’s just beautiful.
I’m going to unplug my phone here. I know the YouTube thing is not going to like this, but I’ll actually show you. So that’s a that’s a 46 CJ two A and the Jeep that won the war. I don’t know if I can see it is that one that’s up there. That’s a that’s a 44. OK. So that’s called a nine slap. That’s a nine slap Jeep. And that is a Ford GPW. And they and that one that’s behind me on the horse.
That’s my son. They bought 336,000 of those Ford ones.
I don’t know how many they made.
I might be wrong. I might be wrong. But I think it was 336,000 that Ford was forced to make because Willys couldn’t make enough and the government told that you’re going to make them. And Ford was such an amazing dude. Like he decided he wasn’t taking parts from anybody. He made all his own parts even stamped his little ideal sized F on every nut and bolt. I mean, it’s a pretty cool thing.
If I if I may, Tony, I might walk off screen and I can show you what the grill of a 1941 looks like.
Go right ahead.
We love it because Ford because Ford Ford is the one that designed the Jeep grill because the Willy’s Overland grill was too hard to make. So let me let me come over here to the other side of the shop. I’ve got a 41 that we’re rebuilding over here. Let me let me snag the grill if I can. Boy, I hope I can find it.
Yeah, take your time. I’ll just mention it right real quick.
Chuck has recently embraced the plastic Jeeps as he called them and has a I think it’s a 2023 gladiator gladiator
Mojave.
Yeah. And it’s he’s been having a lot of time, a lot of good time modifying that. Hey, Greg, you’ve been helping him with that, right?
Yep, I helped a little bit. He’s got one of our prototype bumpers on it and we helped him with the winch and we’ve got some wheels on order. But for some reason, they’re not they’re not available to ship yet. But it’s a pretty cool wheel. It looks like an old CJ wheel. It’s made by Quadratec. So those are on order. But yeah, Chuck’s Chuck’s been having a blast. But honestly, those those original ones are so special. And a lot of people don’t realize how special they are.
I grew up in the same area as Mark Smith,
which is Mark Smith. Of course, the grandfather of jeeping was out of Georgetown,
which most of my dad’s friends were friends with Mark. And growing up, you kind of knew all of these guys, and I was privy to those jeeps back then, you know, and to be able to take dad’s jeep, you know, which is this black one. I don’t know if you guys can see it. To wheel with Chris at EJS was something special for an old farm kid like myself, right? Because those guys are really… they were my heroes, right? Mark Smith and those boys. It was absolutely amazing, tough as nails guys.
And I cannot find… Greg, I fucking lost that damn grill.
No, it’s there. You’ll find it. It’s probably under a jeep or it’s in the back of the one on the hoist or something. But yeah, so Edla, one of the cool parts and one thing that I love about it is the hoods absolutely caved in, right? I mean, it is just buckled.
Yeah, so I noticed that first thing when I saw that jeep.
And he debated when he first got it, should he replace it and should he straighten out the metal and bring it back to its former glory.
But that rollover happened on one of the expeditions, right? So it was on the expedition, it rolled over, it crushed it. I think it was when they were crossing the Darien Gap. But you just don’t fix that, right?
For anybody who’s watched the movie Cars, right? And Mater got little dents and dings and he was telling Lightning McQueen about how that made him who he is, right? That’s all Edla, right? It’s the whole front end’s caved in, but the thing still runs and drives and drives great.
Why would you change that? That’s like fixing one of these scars that I have. There’s no reason, every scar has a story and Edla definitely tells some stories.
I think I might switch this thing around.
So I mean, Greg, you’ve been in the driver’s seat of this jeep. This is a 1974 CJ5.
It’s a…
It looks like it hasn’t had a bath since it came home from Moab.
It hasn’t, it hasn’t. I parked it, I put new gas filler neck in it and we’re putting a new carburetor on it now.
So Chuck got famous with all the Jeep talk show listeners and I think the gone Jeep in people with the amount of fuel he was dumping while he was driving that thing around at the EJS.
He was just trying to wash the dust off the trail for the people behind him.
I was actually being considerate, it’s the same fossil different fuel and I heard that there was going to be dinosaur bones out there. Here it goes. I was just giving back their children.
But when I rebuilt this, this Jeep, it’s a fleet vehicle. There’s one upgrade in this Jeep. It’s a black on black CJ5. Everything is manual, but it came with a V8 from the factory. It was ordered that way.
It’s a single family Jeep. My dad’s been the original owner since 1974, but it’s been rolled a couple times, right? It did the Rubicon. It did the first one through 20 midnight Rubicons. Never missed a single one. It was there every single year.
And people don’t know what that is. It’s a Jeep event thrown by the Dirty Dozen Jeep Club. They’re out of Sacramento, California and they do the midnight or at night.
Excuse me, they do the Rubicon at night, which the Rubicon trail in the daytime is hard enough and these old bastards decided to leave the spillway at midnight Friday night and then get into the Rubicon Springs on Saturday, which is just a whole different thing of itself. But when I rebuilt it, I left the scars where he had rolled it and he actually got in an accident with it and rolled the whole windshield and everything down on the lap of the passenger.
And when I took it to the body guy, I said,
“Don’t get rid of the memories. Just smooth them out a little bit, right? Make it not so harsh.” And when I drove to surprise mom and dad, they were actually up on Loon Lake, which is the spillway of the Rubicon. I drove their Jeep all painted, new motor, everything’s pretty and they started crying as they went through and they were holding their hands on, “Do you remember when we rolled this? Do you remember when Willie Meyers hit us with this thing?”
The scars meant more to them than the fresh paint and the new tires and the new motor. It blew their mind that I didn’t erase 45 years of wheeling. And I firmly believe in, “Yeah, you want your Jeeps to be nice and pretty and pristine, but you can’t get rid of Edla’s hood.” Because that’s her, that’s her soul. And the same with this thing, it’s the Jeep soul to have all those trail remembrances.
Well, I think this is one of the things that people, maybe people don’t get about the Jeep thing. It’s the memories. It’s not necessarily the Jeep itself. The Jeep is integral into making those memories, but it’s the riding off road with people and having these experiences. We sat around a campfire there at EJS that was wonderful. That I guess really the only person we were missing was Greg.
And but it was a great time. We had about 10 or 15, maybe 20 people all sitting around the campfire. And I’ll remember that for a good long time. That was just a wonderful situation of actually being around an open fire and this bullshit with people about Jeep stuff that we’ve been doing at Eastern Jeep Safari.
Right. Yep.
Yep.
So Greg, you started you started with CJ’s. You said your first Jeep experience as a child was a CJ. What was this now?
Yeah. First Jeep experience as a child was in a CJ.
I don’t remember exactly who it was. I’m fairly certain it was one of my uncles had a CJ and we lived way up north in Michigan. So we lived right on Lake Michigan in the northern part of Michigan. And my uncle would come over and pick me and my dad up and we’d go to the beach and it was always a twofer. So we’d go to the beach because my dad needed to fill 55 gallon drums with sand so that he could sandblast on the cars he was working on. And my my uncle would have me swim out into the water and find the big Petoskey stones, the ones that you couldn’t carry out. And what’s up?
What’s up? What’s that? What is that?
A Petoskey stone is Michigan State Rock and it’s it’s basically, you know, medieval coral. Right. So it’s it’s coral from dinosaur period and it’s our state rock and they have some value to them. So we know some beaches up there where you can go out and you can find pieces that are the same size as the Jeep. Oh, shit. But but I’d swim out there, you know, like a lot of people pick up ones that you can fit in your hand and that’s what they find on the edge of the beach. But if you swim out to the water where the water is a little too deep for the average person, you’d swim down and I’d find the big ones and I’d wrap a rope around him and he’d use his 82 74 to winch him up the shore. And then he takes then we’d all gather together and put him on a car, hard jacket or whatever we had and load him into the back of the Jeep and then drive back to his place and he’d unload him and he’d polish him and sell him. But that was that was one of my first Jeep memories. And then we did the sand dunes, you know, back then when I was a kid, we’d go to Silver Lake sand dunes or we’d go to the oh, geez, what do they call it? Sleeping bear sand dunes before they stopped allowing cars on it.
You know, now everybody’s so particular, you don’t want to hurt the sand so you can’t drive on the sand.
You can’t bruise the sand.
But but yeah, it’s you know, so that was my first Jeep memories. And then as a as a teen, you know, my dad was always bringing it home. Cool Jeeps, you know, one of ones and one of twos and, you know, prototype things. And because he worked in those departments and but it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s, my wife and I got married and I was driving a 77 Ford F 350 with a big block. And 40 inch tires that it got three miles to the gallon. And the wife told me I needed to get a daily driver. They got, you know, good gas mileage. But I was in construction. And so I wanted a four wheel drive and I wanted something small and nimble. So at that time, I bought my first TJ, which it was a 1998 flame red TJ sport with the four liter and an auto tragic. And that was my new daily driver.
I fell in love with Jeep so fast. It wasn’t funny.
You know, constant, I don’t know, four or five suspensions in the first year and a half and different tire sizes. And like I still remember the very first aftermarket purchase we made and we bought it from Quadratec, which was kind of funny now that, you know, I’ve built Quadratec show cars. But the very first thing we ever bought, my wife purchased it for my birthday and it was a super winch, 9.5 Talon. And I still have that winch. That winch still functions, still works.
And I love it. But and then we bought a poison spider trail cage, which this is definitely weak to talk about poison spider because, you know, Hoot again, just filed Chapter 11 and Hoot again and Neil Perros and all them are all one conglomerate and they own poison spider. And we just found out yesterday that poison spider was just sold for one million dollars to a man who was best friends with Larry McCray, who used to own poison spider.
It sounds awful cheap.
Oh yeah, very cheap.
So, so Clifton Slay is who started Poison Spider and he’s also friends with that group. But and he’s he’s kind of a member of 1941 media with Chris and me and Payway and them. But yeah, so there’s a lot of history there. But but yeah, so my first two mods were Poison Spider Trail cage and the super winch Talon and then multiple suspensions and multiple iterations later.
I probably rebuilt that Jeep almost twice a year for the first six years of ownership.
Yeah.
And then I cut it in half when I started AEV. So professionally, I started working on Jeeps in 2007.
2008, I cut that Jeep in half. I stretched it. I did a bunch of stuff, changed everything. And it’s still in that configuration today. It’s still in Michigan, but I don’t own it.
I know who has it, but he wants way too much money for it. So it’s very hard for me to buy it back.
I wish I could buy my first Jeep back. I had a 59 Willy CJ 5, which is the short fender Willys that the short fender Willys ran all the way up to 1971 or 1970, depending on who you talk to. But God, I wish my first wife, she asked me to get rid of it because I had put a big V8 and a little, it’s like putting a V8 in that thing. You know, it’s like, wow, that’s a lot of horsepower, you know, and had a four speed and 538 gears and really done a lot of neat stuff with that thing. And I think the coolest thing with that Jeep is it had an offset Dana 44, which is a very old school tapered axle thing. But you remember these, Greg, where Willys actually made flanged axle setup for the old tapered 44s? Were you privy to any of that? Nope. Huh? So the old, the old Jeep’s like this one, everything runs right down the passenger’s throat. So your front end and your back diffs are right in line with each other.
And the big deal with these things is it has a two piece axle in the back. It’s a tapered axle with a little totter key, you know, that holds your wheel hub onto the axle, which is fine with a four cylinder and it’s fine with a six cylinder. But when you put a V8 in it and you get on the gas, the tires would stay, but your axles would spin inside of them.
And that’s a bad thing. So I didn’t really want to change, I didn’t have the money to change axles and stuff. So I started doing some research and there was not that much internet stuff, you know, where I didn’t have a lot of access to it. So you called and talked to people.
And Willys, or not Willys, but Warren made a rear hub assembly that turned it into a full floating Dana 44 and you can put locking hubs on the back end of your Jeep as well.
So that Jeep, because it had 538 gears and a four speed, I did have an overdrive in it. So it was eight forward gears and two rear reverse gears. But I can unlock the hubs front and rear and flat tow it because they were free floating tires, free floating wheels.
And it was just a neat as shit Jeep. And my first wife thought that I loved it more than her. So she had to sell it. She did. She did. And that, God, I’ve got pictures of it in my office, of course, but if I could ever find that Jeep again, just the neat shit that we did do it.
I mean, just having that overdrive, you know, a four speed and an overdrive was just phenomenal, you know, in a 59 short fender five, you know, and it had enough power, it could get the front driver side tire off the ground, you know, and it had 538 gears where it would crawl nice and slow.
So, so let me ask you guys a quick question and you can, you can pass on this. It’s probably a Greg question. So you mentioned poison spider and I feel that are, there are several big Jeep providers that are having issues right now. And I think it has to do with several things, not necessarily just the Jeep market, but Jeep itself is having, having problems. You’ve reported on the show that there’s somewhat of like a 21% drop in sales over this time last year. Do you Greg, do you think that the drop in sales for Jeep is affecting these, these third party manufacturers or is it just the economy as a whole?
I mean, honestly, and I’m no economist, but I think it’s the economy as a whole, you know, and we’re spending thousands of dollars more per household a year just for groceries.
Oh, good point.
Than we normally would, right? And everything, right? I have a small shop.
Everything I buy is more than it was a year ago and a year before that and a year before that, you know, all the way down to the steel.
You know, some people say that there’s, you know, we’re, what you see down the news that we only have, you know, five and six and 7% inflation. But you know, my raw steel prices are 200% higher than they were three years ago. So so all of that, you know, in nickels and times to death. And if you’re buying, you know, if your normal monthly expenses cost this much more, it’s a lot harder, even if you’ve got a good job that you’ve been at for a long time. And even if you’re responsible, it’s a lot harder to throw extra money at your stuff. So it’s it’s harder to decide that you need aftermarket wheels and tires when, you know, you need food on the table for you and your kids or your kids need back to school clothes. So I think in general, the because everything is more expensive right now, and you know,
we’re not all getting 40 and 50% raises at work where, you know, most people get their standard one to 3%.
So it takes its toll. And I think that’s taking its toll on a lot of businesses that manufacture stuff.
I mean, I have friends in the in the industry who they’re still making their bumpers and they’re still making other stuff. And even though the cost to manufacture has gone up so much in the last four years,
they’ve only raised their price, you know, 10, 15%.
And and even that is hard to do, right? It’s hard to charge the consumer more when they can they can look at an ad from two years ago and go, well, why was it $300 last two years ago? Well, because I’m spending $600 and more in steel.
Right.
You know, so so I think it’s a trickle down and it all affects. But I know some companies are having a hard time. And and I got to say it this way, too, because Poison Spider, right, it, Clifton Slay started it and he was a mastermind. He he designed and developed just some amazing products.
He wasn’t a great businessman.
He had too many skews. He had too many other things. And he ended up selling the company to Larry McCray, who turned it into an amazing powerhouse in a very short time. Right. In in four years, it went from high quality stuff to high quality stuff that you could get everywhere and everybody wanted.
And then he was going and I don’t know exactly why, but he, you know, he had some medical things and some other stuff and he sold it to four wheel parts and four wheel parts immediately changed. All the people got rid of 90 percent of the workforce,
90 percent of the American employees and started having everything manufactured overseas. And the level of quality went downhill really fast. So people stopped buying it. Right.
You know, so some of these big companies.
That most people don’t even know are owned by corporate corporate conglomerates.
You know, they shot themselves in the foot by taking good quality American made stuff and shooting it overseas to save a few bucks. The problem is, is the consumer realizes that the consumer picks up pretty fast that the part they bought four months ago is now completely different when their friend buys it. And now it’s a piece of shit because it was made overseas and it doesn’t have good quality control.
You know, and I mean, I use poison spiders as an example because I absolutely loved poison spider stuff. I loved it.
They were the crammed out of a friend. They were shit.
Yeah. When Clifton had it and when Larry had it, it was it was some of the best of the best armor and simple to bolt on and good quality.
And then the corporate conglomerate bought it and four wheel parts bought it.
Within six within six months,
it was garbage, right? It was it was low quality steel. It was shitty welds. It didn’t fit right.
And and that killed that company. Right. So but it’s still such a powerhouse name. And I really hope that the gentleman who just bought it for next to nothing gets Larry and maybe even Clifton involved in because it would immediately turn back into a powerhouse.
So and there’s other companies right in this market that,
you know, they stop going to the wholesale. They stop selling it to wholesale. They only sell by themselves. And and they’re still doing pretty damn good.
You know, there’s still companies that have growth.
JCR, which is a lot of people don’t even know, but JCR stands for Jesus Christ Rocks. And it’s a group of boys in Southern Michigan, boys and girls who started in their mom’s garage. And, you know, now they employ a bevy of people and they have their own lasers and their own machines and they’re building new buildings. And now they’re even starting to build some really nice workbenches. But that’s a group of boys, you know, a group of people who started in their mom’s garage, you know, 10, 15 years ago and now make amazing stuff. And they don’t sell to any of the wholesale distributors. They just sell direct.
They basically cut out all the middlemen.
But they’re still making it right here. Right. And there’s there’s a lot of stories like that. You know, they’re not the only ones, but you got to give credit to those guys. You know, yeah, they made mistakes in the beginning. They made mistakes in the middle. They’re going to make mistakes at the end, but they just keep moving forward and they keep doing good stuff.
They have good product, good solid products. And they were they were XJ fans as well. That’s how I got to know JCR is because of their XJ products.
And they still make great. They still make great XJ products.
Yep. And then then later for the TJ, I mean, I’ve got two things on my wife’s TJ that is from JCR.
Yep. And now, you know, like me, I’ve been building custom show cars and people know my name because of the builds that I do. But now we’re getting into manufacturing.
You’re my friend, you’re my new friend.