Truth is, I wanted a Jeep to be my first vehicle when I got my driver's license at 18. Why 18? My parents weren't exactly looking forward to me having my own vehicle -- or even a license. This was all thanks to my older brother who crashed our step mother's diesel Volkswagon Rabbit into the Junior High School principal's garage door at age 15. The general mischievous activities of my derelict older sister didn't help me either. I eventually ended up with a Toyota pickup instead of a Jeep. In later years I had an eye for flatfenders. By the time I could afford and could physically perform modifications on a Jeep, there was a Bogger and bent-spring uprising surfacing in Arizona. So that's where many of the Jeeps that influenced me the most came from. I absorbed every bit of information I could from the magazine stories about them. These Jeeps sat really low, had plenty of gearing, wide swapped-in axles, and the requisite barely legal-looking 35-inch Super Swamper Boggers on rims up to 12 inches wide. Low, wide, and burly tired are still prominent features in my Jeep build plans today.
I never wanted a Jeep exactly like Jimmy's. It was simply one of the first resto-beaters I had ever seen. It would show up in few-and-far-between Four Wheeler magazine stories in the late '80s and early '90s. From what I could tell, it had a lot of what could be labeled as weird tech on it. Most of it was trinket stuff that I wouldn't have bothered with myself -- things like a CJ-3B windshield frame, three windshield wipers, a Range Rover V-8 mated to a T-90 transmission, strange Sharpie pinstripes, and lots of little do-dads that may or may not have actually added anything to the functionality. What I admired was the sewer-lobster brown paint job and overall beater theme of the Jeep. It seemed obtainable. It had a spring-over utilizing the stock springs, a Dana 25 front axle, a Dana 44 rear, and the Spicer 18 transfer case. It wasn't until many years later that I actually understood why the CJ was covered in often unexplainable modifications. After actually meeting Jimmy in person, it all made sense. Not the modifications themselves, but the reason they were the way they were. If you ever meet Mr. Nylund you'll understand what I mean.
To the untrained eye, Rick Pw's GPW looks uncannily identical to Jimmy Nylund's flattie. But it has a few hundred more dents, a bent-in-the-middle posture, and a chrome grille. It's no mistake that both Rick and Jimmy are good friends today and have been for years. But the very first photo I saw of Rick's Jeep was in a "Readers' Rigs" in a late '80s or early '90s Four Wheeler magazine. Several years later, it surfaced at that magazine's inaugural Top Truck Challenge where Rick nearly took first place in the ragged flattie sporting a then-large and unheard of (for a Jeep) set of 35-inch tires, a Buick 455, an SM420, a Dana 44 front, and a Dana 60 rear. It was a miracle the thing actually moved under its own power. The Jeep was gross with shoddy repairs and worn-out parts. Even in this photo you can clearly see the frame, hood, and grille moving very independently of the rollcage. It wasn't until Rick and the GPW joined the staff at 4Wheel & Off-Road in '95 that photos of it sporting the equally nasty-looking 35-inch Super Swamper Boggers started popping up. I would scan over every image ever printed of the Jeep, looking for build ideas for my own '48 CJ-2A. Fortunately, Rick's GPW was almost always pictured on its side or totally upside down. This gave me the opportunity to see the interesting axles, suspension, and other vitals underneath. The images also caused me to have less respect for the sheetmetal of my own Jeep, which I quickly found out increased the amount of fun I could have in it. The more dents my Jeep got and the less I cared about the body, the more fun I had. The dents were kinda like party favors. Considering the condition of the body on Rick's GPW, you would have thought it had gone to every birthday, New Year's, and after-hours party held the previous 50 years. It was a mess, and I appreciated every scratch, tear, dent, loose bolt, and booger weld.
I didn't necessarily like CJ-5s but Randy's was a version of one that needed a second look. I first read about the lime-green Jeep in Four Wheeler's '95 Top Truck Challenge. It was more modern and refined than the earlier Jeeps I latched on to because it had things like a GM drivetrain, fuel injection, and a trick dual-shackled Wrangler leaf-spring four-link rear suspension. Of course, it still had the requisite 16/35X15 Boggers and sick (for that time) amounts of flex. I remember staring at this very photo dreaming of how I could get my rear leaf springs to bend inverted like those on Randy's CJ. I wasn't a big fan of the auto tranny, but everything else about the Jeep was drool-worthy to me. Randy's ride was built for the rocks, and you could tell by the wavy, pounded-out body panels that he wasn't afraid to use it. In '95 there were other more advanced Jeeps (Shannon Campbell and his father, also from Arizona, had a pair of 'em) but these were at an unreachable level for my building skills. Even Randy's Jeep was above me, but it was close enough that I was able to use some of its ideas on my flattie and aspire to use others.