There's a lot of 'em out there. Not too many that were owned by little old ladies only on Sunday in the winter, either! Having had NO coffee or any other stimulants today, allow me to step (softly) onto the soap box simply to explain why I think you'd enjoy an older jeep. You apparently enjoyed building and tinkering with your LCB. Every time you built something new or modified something, and it actually worked the way you had envisioned it, you were like a proud new papa. You built stuff that either was not available or what was available wasn't fitting your needs. You seemed to love working on it and learning as you went equally as well as driving it and getting it all muddy. The older jeeps are very simplistic. They are not nearly as difficult to work on as your LCB was. You mentioned aftermarket parts. For a 1953 CJ3A, think of every other car in the world as being a contributor of an aftermarket part! Anything is adaptable. Think outside the box. You aren't limited (or shouldn't be after your previous experience) to buying bolt-on enhancements! Newer stuff where I live cannot be tinkered with due to all the laws. The old stuff - the sky's the limit as long as it's safe. I guess after tagging along with your exploits through your postings and website stories, I kinda "over-projected" myself back there. I remember all the fun I had working on my old WW2 jeeps (5 jeeps before I graduated high school - started working on them and driving them at age 10.) With what knowledge and experience you gained with the LCB, you could have a CJ3 stripped down to the frame in an afternoon (no exageration!) Whether you get one that has a Chevy V-8 in it, a Pinto 4 cyl, a Buick V-6 or ideally, a stock F-head
4-cyl Jeep motor, you can build it very easily into a real monster machine and just as easily switch it into something else. Parts are not as available as they used to be, granted, but as I said, there is no need to stick with original equipment at any level! As for where you use it - the pix you posted were neat. The playground where the LCB was almost at home, but lacking ground clearance and traction is definitely home to a flatfender jeep. One of my favorite memories with my GPW was going up into the Cascade mountains on an old logging road that all the 'binding' had washed out of (binding is gravel, dirt, sand - all the stuff smaller than a breadbox!) leaving the roadbed as monster rocks of washing-machine proportion. Add to it that on one side was a cliff a couple hundred feet down and the other side the cliff went up - leaving enough room for the track width of a f-f jeep. In low gear, low range, the jeep just crawled up, over and through all the massive rock pile for mile after mile. The climb was probably over 1000 feet per mile at its steepest. The agility of the older jeep and the visibility afforded the driver made it perfectly suited for such a situation. I had an opportunity a few years later to drive a CJ5 with a V-6 up the same road and it scared me so bad in the first section that I backed down and hiked in (fishing lake!) Yes, I've had jeeps buried in mud over the hood, flown off of jumps with 8-10 feet to the ground, been upside-down a couple times, done wheelies, driven with one side up in the air, driven where a passenger HAD to hang out as an outrigger to prevent rolling down a cliff - many times. It's all part of the bug once you catch it. I broke trail in the CJ5 for a couple miles in the area I grew up in - through snow that was about six inches deeper than the top of the hood! That was about midnight and it was powder snow - flowed up over the hood like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I've also been sideways at 80mph on I-90 on black ice - the short wheelbase fits the worn highway surface better sideways than frontways! As I was growing up, my "hero" was a jeep enthusiast - why he was my hero, I guess was because he had a neat jeep and could handle it off road better than anybody else in any of the clubs around the northwest - he was a drunk though and ended up killing himself and causing his best friend to be paralyzed for life in an accident at over 135mph in a CJ5. Anyway, I thought you'd like all the possibilities that are there with something older that are not there with the newer iron. Maybe you need to get that more recent stuff first, for a few years, and maybe you'll understand the passion that I had (have?) for old flatfender bobtail jeeps. I know you're very capable of figuring stuff out for yourself, but one thing to keep in mind is that every magazine and every book published by a magazine company depends on advertisers. The masses are the marketplace. There is a much smaller market for the down-and-dirty enthusiast - plus, they don't buy that much bolt-on stuff; they tend to build their own or adapt something else. Anyway, good luck on whatever you choose. It's been fun, thanks for sharing.
- Dave