Eric's Willy's
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Hey guys, I wanted to share some pics of a Willy's build I was stoked to be a part. But a little story first..!
About a year ago I reached out to one of the members of this forum for help. You see, I had just discovered the 1/6 Willy's from watching Race730 vids on youtube, and absolutely had to have one. I bought a Hasbro Jeep on eBay for about $70 and had a beat up old wraith I was ready to use for parts. My problem was because of my disability I can't hold onto a screwdriver, let alone take on a build of this level. I began to despair as the amount of work became apparent, but as a last ditch effort I contacted a fella named Bitter End on this forum that I noticed was also from Washington. I was bummed that he didn't respond right away, and after a few months I sold my Wraith and forgot about the build... I didn't realize until later that I had left him a message in the wrong place on here,and to my surprise he got back to me, and was actually interested!
Long story short, Mark and I have been working on this build together for months. It's already pretty far along, and I don't want to show it all at once, so if you're interested in tuning in, I'll be revealing pieces of it in the weeks to come with some breakdowns of our build process.He had recently done a sweet Willy's build (here) using a Wraith skid plate which seemed pretty plug-and-play, so we started there. Of course, if you've done one of these builds before, you know it's far from plug-and-play.
To get the wheelbase right we decided to cut out the center of the skid and epoxy the two ends back together. We then filled the frame rails with epoxy for strength. The wraith plate is a little wider than the frame, so we had to cut some chunks out of it to fit.
Here's a few more picks of that skid plate set up. Mark, aka Bitter End, cut some pieces of Delrin to use as spacers between the rails and the transfer case. I don't think he even had to cut twice. This guy is goooooood
Mark had been digging around for some reference of other Willy's and dropped the bomb that an exo cage might be possible!!!
While Mark was getting the base ready, I started mocking up the cage in 3d. This allowed me to easily iterate on design ideas without having to actually lift a finger. I use a program called blender that's free and open source. Not the best, but 3ds max is $3500, and blender has enough tools to get the job done.
During this process Mark and I started an inspiration board on Pinterest to get some ideas on where to take the build. I really love the Ultimate Adventure summer camp jeep and the icon cj-3.
Here's a shot of the motor and electronics area. Mark cut and bent a piece of metal to serve as a platform for everything. One really cool thing about this set up, is that you can run this rig without the body or even swap out for anther body...
I bought MIP driveshaft's originally but there was too much binding at the angle they were at, so we switched to Junfac. They seem to handle the angle much better with little to no rubbing.
The first rollover is going to be painful.
Around this point in the build Mark fabbed up a hood hinge out of brass. This thing is tits!
Pay no attention to Sly photo bombing the last pic...
