I personally don't think you can ever take enough spare parts. No matter what you take, you will need something else. Brian Gough and I went to Portsmouth in 1994 and were amazed at some of the repairs the English guys were doing. At the show guys were replacing head gaskets, clutches and so on with little thought. Most were going from there to France. If I had to replace a clutch I would just go home.
Preston Isac had his left front hub and brakes all apart on his Bofors truck and the ferry was leaving in the morning.
Brian drove a Canadian GPW with 19 set and I drove a CCKW from Holland to France for D Day. One of the guys in our convoy (Rien Mudde) had to overhaul his Jeep tranny one night. On the way home one blade broke off the fan on Brian's Jeep so I took the fan off. On some of those long hills in France it ran hot so I cut one other blade off to balance the fan and away we went back to Holland.
The most interesting thing that happened was one night at 22:00 just outside the Novatel (sp) in Bayeux the Jeep quit. I did some testing and we determined it was the coil. All our spares were in the CCKW 2 hours away. It was sooo cold, the Novatel was full and they wouldn't let us sit in the lobby and warm up. We sat on the side of the road and waited. Military vehicle guys kept stopping to offer help but no one had a coil. We started asking guys where they were from and there was 13 countries represented. Finally at about 1:00 a young German soldier in a Mercedes
4X4 (G-Wagon?) Stopped. He was taking a young fraulin home and said he would be back. He did return in about an hour and took us on about a half hour ride in the country to where he and his buddies were staying. They were also current serving German soldiers and had rented an old garage at a Chateau for the celebrations. We were a little apprehensive to say the least. (Play music from the movie Jaws) Brian slept on the floor and I slept on top of a folded up tent. The next morning he took us to the English Camp where a Swedish guy GAVE us a coil. The moral was we were rescued on the eve of the 50th anniversary of D Day by a German soldier. Sorry for the length.
Barry
