Junkyard Find: 1972 Jeep J-4000, Used-Up Snowplow Edition
Most ’60s and ’70s Detroit cars I see in big pull-yer-own-parts wrecking yards show signs of having spent a decade or more sitting in a yard or driveway. This is not the case with pickups, because just about any pickup that can be made to work at not-too-great expense will be kept on the road. A 45-year-old long-wheelbase Jeep pickup with a snowplow will earn its keep pushing the white stuff around until something really expensive fails.
Here is such a truck, spotted in a Denver yard.
The lack of an area code on the phone number and BIG SKY COUNTRY mudflaps indicate that this truck may have been a recent Colorado transplant from single-area-code Montana.
The plow hardware is gone, no doubt transferred to a youthful Dodge or GMC from the mid-80s.
There’s Bondo. There’s rust. There’s a driver’s door from a different-colored truck. How many miles are on this thing? A half-million?
The base engine in the ’72 Jeep pickup was the American Motors 258-cubic-inch straight six, an engine family used in Jeeps well into the current century. This one has the optional AMC V8, either a 304 or a 360 (and if you can tell the two apart from this photograph, let us know). You can only wring 175 horses from the 360, but that was plenty for plowing with the no-doubt-crazy-short gearing in this truck.
AMC found a particularly gruff-sounding hired voice for this in-house 1973 Jeep truck ad. Coming on stronger and tougher than ever!
[Images: © 2017 Murilee Martin]
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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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Growing up, my best friend's dad had a 1964 Jeep pickup. It had a camper shell that we rode many miles in. We thought it was fun back then. That body style didn't change for over a decade. His truck had an odd 6 cyl engine made by Kaiser, I believe.
The promo film talked of turning "suspects" into buyers. LOL!