Junkyard Find: 1971 AM General DJ-5B Mail Jeep
Some say the huge US Postal Service contract to buy Jeep DJs saved AMC (well, postponed AMC’s final downward spiral by a decade or so), and everyone will agree that vast quantities of USPS-surplus Mail Jeeps gave cheapskate Americans low-cost steel boxes to drive for the last few decades. These things must have been extremely popular in Colorado, because I see them all the time in Denver-area wrecking yards; in this series, we’ve had this Chevy-powered ’68, this Audi-powered ’79, this AMC six-powered ’72, this GM Iron Duke-powered ’82, and now today’s AMC-powered ’71.
There wasn’t much to go wrong with these things, which were rear-wheel-drive automatics with right-hand drive and enough bodywork to keep most of the rain off the mail.
Did AM General use Dymo embossing label-makers for DJ-5 controls? Just about every one I’ve seen has these.
The good old 232-cubic-inch AMC L6 got the job done.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I'd love to have that as a mail truck instead of the Volkswagens I'm stuck with. Even that scrapyard specimen is most likely more reliable than them.
Actually just bougt one of these just a little bit ago. It was really cool to have it come across! Always wanted one! http://www.junkcarcashout.com/