A normal Power Wagon is almost unstoppable. This solves the whole “almost” thing
No matter who they are or where they are, they all have one thing in common: they have to climb into their parking spots. A gravel pile or snow pile in a parking lot with Jeeps all over it? Not uncommon. Curbs with a tire on them? Totally common. Give them a barren piece of flat prairie, and they start crawling all over each other’s tires, like a box full of kittens or a hill full of insects. It’s madness. Years ago, I had an old Jimmy 4x4, and I’d try to be one of the cool kids, looking like an absolute moron in the process. With twenty-nine-inch mud tires, stock leaf’s out back, and torsion bars upfront with a slight tweak, it flexed about as well as a steel girder. Anything I did looked ridiculous, as it had the off-road engineering of a Camaro with a front differential.
In stock form, the Jeep isn’t great, but it’s still better than that Jimmy ever was. With the aftermarket support for the off-road community nowadays, however, anything can be well-equipped, just unbolt the stock stuff and start bolting new bigger, badder parts on. Heck, even the Toyota Corolla and Mazda Miata have been proven fairly bulletproof on the Gambler 500. I always think of the 4x4 trend coming to life in the seventies and eighties with monster trucks, but the off-road aftermarket started way before that, for sure in the fifties, maybe even earlier.
The Willcock Truck Equipment Company of Vancouver, British Columbia, had a great idea in the fifties that never really caught on, and it’s a shame. They created a go-anywhere swivel frame cross member that allowed a truck not to flex but actually swivel between the cab and bed, keeping all four wheels on the ground as often as possible across almost any terrain. From what I’ve been reading, the cross member was designed in such a way that it should never be the weakest link in the frame of the vehicle in which it was installed. The cross members themselves were fabricated from quarter-inch plate, with a four-and-a-half-inch steel pipe featuring an incredibly beefy half-inch wall. Each side was fitted with a greasable bronze bushing, and a four-inch diameter tube with the same half-inch wall connected the two pieces. The wiring and brake lines passed through the tube, and chains limited the travel so it couldn’t spin all the way upside-down. Apparently, the assembly was pretty tough, handled as well as stock on the highway, and didn’t cause much issue with the universal joints. They were installed mostly on Power Wagons, but it seems they were willing to adapt to anything, as there are also a few Ford trucks out there with this package. Production numbers all seem to be speculation, but I’ve found zero evidence that they made more than one hundred of these conversions altogether. Imagine showing up to a Jeep meet with something like this? Forget hills and tires. You could park one tire on the next floor of a parking garage.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk