Junkyard Find: 1975 Jeep J10 Pickup
This being Colorado, I see many old Jeeps in my local self-service wrecking yards. Just about all of them are Cherokees and Wagoneers, so this four-wheel-drive pickup caught my attention earlier this week.
There must be somebody looking for a rugged AMC 360 V8 for a project car or truck. Right?
And a factory 4-on-the-floor manual transmission!
The J10 name wasn’t as cool as the Gladiator name that went on big Jeep pickups until 1970, but it was less import-sounding than the J2000 name used in the early 1970s.
Here’s a fine example of industrial-grade vehicle upholstery. Sweaty, sticky vinyl.
Here’s a dealer training film for the ’73 version of this truck. Note the driver smoking a pipe while off-roading with a load of hay.
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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A very nice find there MM. Love this color as I have a thing for this greenish yellow, generically called Chartreuse. Looking at the photos you took, either there is something behind the seat back in this one pushing the seatback forward a bit, it looks mighty uncomfortable due to the overly upright seatback. Looks to be a reasonably decent shape for the most part, even the interior looks to be intact and I love the old Audiovox cassette deck that has FF/Eject only, and no station presets on a sliding dial tuner. How quaint...
I daily drive an '89 Grand Wagoneer that I would love to see in the condition that this much older J10 looks like it is still in. That said, I would love to get my mitts on that hood and (still salvageable) grille...