What exactly does "See the factory blueprints & BOM

[w30bob]

Hi Wes,

Thanks. This is a sincere question...........I'm not trying to bust your nuts. I've seen you reply to a number of posts in the same way.........saying to reference the factory prints/drawings. I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are those drawings available? Are they on this site somewhere? Are they in private hands that I need to contact someone offline and beg to see? Or are they long gone and you're saying we'll just never know the answer to what's being asked? I got a feeling your answer is common knowledge to all the folks on here, but either I didn't pay attention or missed it. So what are you saying when you say we need to look at the factory prints?

thanks,
bob

[wesk]

So what are you saying when you say we need to look at the factory prints?

That's it in a nutshell. You need to refer to factory blueprints and/or Factory Production BOM's to get a cast in concrete answer on factory production details.

The problem with that answer is simple. When smaller companies roll over and die they leave a very small foot print.

Willys at Toledo died that way. Instead of supporting an internal Archives system to record their history they decided to allow their history to die with them. But a wee bit survived as the good scroungers attended auctions of Willys equipment and facilities. These good guys were guys like Keith Buckley and Ron Szymanski. Who are these folks? They are the good guys who made it their life goal to rescue as much of Willys & Kaiser Jeep history as would be humanly possible. Ron was a Willys and Willys-Kaiser Jeep employee who stuck around when the factory closed and captured as much history as he could and operated the old Willys Museum at the old Toledo Plant for years. Keith was one of those Indiana Jones guys that recovered tons of blueprints and BOM's at the last few Auctions before the plant was disposed of. There are a dozen others that remain un-named but to suffice it to say these folks assembled a much larger collection of Willys and Willys-Kaiser Jeep history then you'll find at the last jeep owner's palace, Chrysler.

Unlike WWII Jeeps which had a greater following then the post war jeeps and enjoyed a much easier gathering of history by those old well known names in WWII jeep restorations since the factory was still in operation when the bulk of those WWII jeeps hit the surplus market from 1947 thru 1960, The postwar jeeps didn't reach their peak in collector attraction until the late 70's/early 80's long after Willys of Toledo & Willys-Kaiser Jeep had disolved and AMC picked up their remains. It wasn't much longer before Chrysler picked over the last of jeep's remains. In addition the military collected and maintained WWII Jeep historical data and contract copies for years. When the post war jeeps hit production in the 50's the retention of Army Procurement Contracts had been reduced to 6 months after the end of the contract. No one to this date has produced any copies of any Army procurement contracts for the M38 or the m38A1. We can only hope that some day they will start to surface from private collections.

In the mean time we have this very small reserve of data to fall back on which is being documented and indexed by this handful of folks who we try not to disturb from their work very often. These folks do have regular lives and families to tend to so Ryan and I only approach then for help when all other avenues are exhausted.

This is why we always ask for contributions of any documents folks come across so we can build on this data base and just maybe someday answer the last question.

This information highway is a two way road. We need our members to stay awake and when they stumble on copies of documents that may hold valuable data, such as old MWO's, TB's, Willys service bulletins and etc that they share them with us. Simply scan them and email them to us.

These drawings and boms were provided by many of these people:

[w30bob]

Wes......thanks for that! I'm glad you made it a separate post so folks like myself, who are new to the whole military jeep thing, see it and can appreciate what you just said. Now I get it.



regards,
bob

[4x4M38]

And BOM is short for Bill of Materials.
Literally a list of every piece that went into
an M38, or nearly anything manufactured
by a company save a one-off .

I’m referencing a Bill of Materials for a
Santa Fe waycar, or caboose built in 1949.
Every nut, bolt, nail, pipe, wheel, all the way
down to individual pieces of wood used to
make the letter box that sat on the conductor’s
desk is listed, and if furnished by a third party,
that company’s name and reference numbers if
applicable.

These were/are necessary not only to document
construction but allow proper sourcing and budgeting
and eventual cost per basis for each vehicle.

[Ryan_Miller]

The BOM for WWII jeeps has been recovered and documented/referenced.

The BOM for the M38 has not.

On blueprints, they have been scattered all over the country when Willys, then Kaiser, Nash, etc sold out with stuff being thrown away, sold, etc.

We have contacts with blue prints on microfilm and paper. The problem is nothing is organized anymore and after flying across the country, negotiaing to look/copy information then having a roll of microfilm cleaned just so you can look at it only to find out it is for a Willys Aero from 1949 that nobody cares about is a lot of effort, time and money.

Not to mention possible litigation from Chrysler if we were to start posting blueprints on our website.

[w30bob]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for that. Although I wouldn't sell the Willys Aero guys short......there's a number of online forums that would probably love to have that data.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to explain this situation.

regards,
bob

[WillysMotors]

Nobody is selling the Willys Aero guys short. The group of guys Ryan is referring to is bilingual and speaks Aero too.

I think Wes and Ryan may not be giving themselves enough credit though.
Between providing funding for research, and screening requests, they enable activities like the one last Saturday morning in Texas where this photo was taken.

Besides BOM's and drawings, there are tooling instructions.
This is a photo of 11 of the original 54 tooling books, These 11 contain 17,000 pages, and took 72 hours to scan. It took 3 years to find the 72 hours of 'spare time'. Scanning the tooling books began 8 years ago.
Obtaining the BOM's began 20 years ago. The scans of the BOM microfilm contains 161,403 pages.

Some info is not very interesting, but every once in a while a gem appears.
The tooling drawings for each special model, (in this case M38A1's) contains the drawings for the nomenclature plates with information including contract numbers and serial ranges.

This info will eventually be posted here or contained in Ryan's books.
The owner of this material is now deceased, but the estate is allowing the project to continue. When the material is released, it will be posted in honor of the collector that bought it in 1986 and stored it till now.

[Ryan_Miller]

Thanks for the kind words!

Glad to see you got the last of the microfisch done. That person was a great guy and good friend that will be missed.

Wes and I are glad to help others and that is the purpose of the website and the book.

You have done a tremendous amount for the hobby and everyone is greatly appreciative.

[w30bob]

Ditto. Wow.....you guys are really impressive. I had no idea things like this are going on behind the scenes. My hat is off to you guys. My sincerest thanks for what you're doing.

regards,
bob

[4x4M38]

You guys are all amazing.

The fact that we have the information and are able to access and share
it is a tremendous testament to you all. Especially given the treatment
of the WO archival data by Willys and the Military.

We are all lucky we have what we do.

Brian

[WillysMotors]

There is no fancy acronym for the process, but with most items the steps seem to be:

Location
Negotiation
Preservation
Duplication
Distribution

That's a lot of 'tions' that require motivation and dedication, some of which is lacking from time to time as life interferes with hobbies.