Fwd: <VV> School me on Swing Axles/M151 Jeeps

[Tony Underwood]

At 02:12 hours 01/21/2005 -0500, HallGrenn@aol.com wrote:
>Anybody else out there remember the M151 Jeep (Ford)   

Oh boy...    

I could tell a few stories about those Jeeps.   And every single one is
true and unembellished.   



>The M151's had almost unrestricted rear swing axles and the MoMo's were 
>killing themselves on the autobahn at speed because they didn't understand
the 
>dynamics.

They must have been clowning around.   Many times I drove one on the
Autobahn at 80+ MPH (yes a jeep *would* go that fast on a good day) just so
I would keep up with traffic and it never acted odd or did anything wrong.
 I put a lot of miles on a couple of M151s.    


>Nader should have written a book on the M151's.

They weren't that bad.    I'd feel a lot safer around a corner in a Jeep
than I feel in that Fiat Multipla.    


Not to say the Jeeps wouldn't bite you if you smarted off at one of them.
One of the guys in my Sqdn bought it when he pressed his jeep around a
corner and turned it over, rolled it down an embankment at Wildflecken.     

If you understood them and knew how to drive them, an M-151 would do you a
good job and run right along and no surprises.   But you had to respect
them...  

Interesting engine...  intake valves in the head, exhaust valves in the
block.   And unibody, no separate frame per se.    


A-Troop had the dubious distinction of having to DX an almost-new 151A2
that had been driven into a mudhole trying to shortcut their way back to
the road and gotten stuck, so they bugged another unit's crane guys to
rescue them via shackling the cable to the jeep via a couple of
crisscrossed tow cables hooked onto the shackles on the bumpers and
hoisting it up and out of the mudhole.    They had to crank it up pretty
high to clear bushes and trees etc and it *was* a pretty substantial crane
with a long boom... from the road, the crane extended out and picked up the
jeep and raised the boom up, swung the jeep up  and around, still not high
enough, jeep snagging in the treetops, so the crane guy winched the jeep up
as high as it would go (boom already all the way up) until the cable topped
out against the boom, dragged the jeep through the treetops and was almost
through the trees when the jeep hung up and swung bigtime.   Crane guy
stopped swinging the boom, went back the other way, jeep shuffled around
and came loose, back towards the road again and when it dragged the jeep
clear of the branches it swung free and outward and the cable hook hung
against the stop on the boom and came off the looped cables secured to the
bumpers and dropped the jeep straight down onto the road from about 30 ft
up.    It bent in the middle severe enough to break the rear driveshaft.
They plopped it onto the back of a truck and brought it back to Ledward
Kaserne for "explanations" and eventually DX to where ever it was to go to
be repaired or parted out.    

While waiting on the paperwork to get finished and a replacement jeep to
show up, A-Troop mechanics removed the busted rear driveshaft and put it in
4WD and used it as a squadron hack for about a month, driving it around via
front wheel drive.    It developed quite a rep around the post...   as the
"bent jeep".    

Interesting that the jeep took the shot without damaging any of the
suspension or even flattening a tire but the body bent bad enough that it
would scrape its belly on dips or large humps in the road.    It was angled
about 30 degrees dead in the center, just ahead of the seat.    No cracks
or breakage, except for paint that flaked off the stressed metal.    The
A-Troop guys used to run by Sqdn Commo in it to drop off inop radios for me
to write up.   

I thought it was a real hoot, wondered whatever became of it after it got
shipped out.   

Another jeep that belonged to somebody in 1/30 Infantry up the block from
me was stolen, poof, vanished.   It was later found in a creek just off
post between Ledward and Conn Kasernes in Schweinfurt, stripped of
everything including the driveline, and mashed flat as Kansas.   Still had
1/30 on the bumpers... and M-60 track cleat marks on the remains of the
hood.   There was only one armor outfit that mounted M-60s... and it was in
Conn.   Next, a frigging *M-60* ended up missing from Conn and then was
found the next day at a test area (formerly an anti-aircraft FLAK battery
area) behind Ledward known as "Area Mike" aka "Area Mud", mired up in a
stand of small trees with a broken track, damage to the driveline, and pink
paint poured over it and wildflowers sprinkled on it.   No clue how anybody
was able to get the damned thing off the post at Conn and transported the
couple miles to Area Mud behind Ledward.    What followed turned into a
huge fiasco that eventually brought in CID people and a couple of officers
supposedly got relieved of command and someone else brought up on charges.
  I wasn't able to find out much more than that... nobody wanted to talk.
Word had it that the jeep got stolen as reprisal  for a drug deal gone
sour, seeing as how the jeep driver was into dealing "smoke", so said the
rumor mill... and evidently he'd stiffed somebody at  Conn, presumed to
have been an M-60 tanker, sold the guy some bad hash or something and he
took it personal and stole the guy's jeep out of the motor pool.  Or
something.   Once CID showed up, everybody clammed up.    It doesn't pay to
attract the attention of the CID people.     


There are other jeep stories...  there always are.    


tony..