"My Truck" by Joshua Avery

This is my truck. This truck is a ¾ ton Jeep j20.  It is a compilation of Jeep year 77, 84, 86 parts put together.  This summer I am planning on working to get this truck running right and legal.  The truck is mainly from 1986.  The frame for this truck is solid.  The grill on this Jeep is most interesting because I’ve never seen a j20 with a black grill like this, I am not sure where it came from.  The roll bar is newer.  The engine in this truck is an AMC 360, but it’s not working correctly right now and only hitting on 7 cylinders.

This is what the truck looked like at the peak of its trucking career.  This picture was taken in 1990.  This was after my dad had fixed up the whole truck and repainted it to match the colors of his new boat.  I still have the chrome tires to go with the truck and I am planning on getting them re-chromed so I can use them again.  My dad found this truck totaled on the side of the road and it had caught on fire in a crash so he bought it for 125 dollars and fixed it up to look like this.

One thing I find interesting about this truck is how the hood doesn’t go down all the way and there’s a little gap in between the grill and the hood.  This summer I will be taking apart the whole front end of the truck and going through the motor to see what’s wrong with it and to get it going right again.

These tires are the original tires from 1986.  For the past 10 years it has been sitting down over the hill and we finally took it back out again so I could drive it.  The mirrors on this truck are also interesting because they stick out farther than newer ones.  I like this truck because it is so rare and because trucks are awesome.

This is my point of view from inside the truck.  The steering wheel is not original but the gauges and interior are.  None of gauges work yet but we think when we hook the cord back up they will work again.  All of lights inside the truck work and the outside lights do to.  The only downside to this is you have to get a pair of pliers and yank on the switch to get it to work.

             When we drove this truck out of the woods last spring we lifted up on the bumper and the whole entire thing came off.  The truck has a bit of rust so we have to sand blast most of it and repaint it like new.  One of rarest things about this truck is you can’t find these trucks with a working tailgate.