Underwhelmed ...
On the strength of Mike Kelly's review, I purchased a copy of Sean's book. It is, just as Sean states, his personal journey to a completed jeep, and good on him for putting it all together in a generally readable tome, which is sometimes enhanced by his use of colloquial expressions and personal views. But be advised: this is not a step-by-step guide for the novice builder. For example, Sean chose not to rebuild the engine, transmission or transfer case, but to have the work done by others (and therefore not provide the step-by-step detail of same), and to buy in major parts such as the entire bodywork and chassis. Even the bolts used throughout were not the original bolts salvaged, cleaned, thread-chased and where appropriate, re-used, but he chose to replace all the bolts with modern bolts and sell the original bolts to others.
I think the only major lesson I took away from reading the book was to avoid the MD Juan body and chassis (frame) parts if at all possible, as these clearly don't fit without a considerable amount of labour and modification. In fact, the largest part of the book seems to be detailing all the rectifications and modifications necessary to make the MD Juan parts fit, and would be quite useful to anyone contemplating using MD Juan parts.
My usual methodology in reading a book such as this is just read and enjoy - it is what it is. However, in this case, I soon began marking the errors I was encountering with orange tabs. These fall into a couple of categories: factual errors including mis-identification of parts which would possibly prove quite puzzling to a novice or would-be jeep builder, and editing errors such as incorrect spelling and grammatical errors. You can see from the image below that I've 'tagged' many places throughout the book - in my opinion, far too many. One aspect that I found a little aggravating was the use of 'Jeep' throughout, rather than 'jeep', the spelling with a capital 'J' being a registered trade-mark of Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles NV, manufacturers of the current-day Jeep range.
Would I recommend this book to a friend, especially someone wanting to get into restoration of a jeep? Probably not.
Mike
|