Want to Water Proof A Jeep? Is This How
Want to Water Proof A Jeep? Is This How:
If you could Water Proof A Jeep and drive it through water up to 3 1/2 feet deep, would you be interested? Of course!
No B**S, I was fishing around YouTube looking for something a bit different but interesting to make a new post and came across this video.
During WW2 the Military had to figure a way they could land the beloved Jeep and other lighter vehicles from out at sea as the landing craft couldn’t get close enough to shore to be able to drop a ramp onto shallow water to allow the Jeeps to drive off.
So the option was, can we modify them so the Jeeps can ‘swim in’ Not an easy task as these werent diesel engines.
Initially I thought this could be a “have” and searches on authority sites didn’t provide any supporting evidence except for the extract below from Wikipedia on waterproofing Jeeps so they could ford rivers.
In the case of a WWII-era amphibious Jeep, all of the engine openings and electrical wiring are sealed, and the driver must first operate a damper that prevents water from entering the intake manifold. After fording, all vehicles wheel bearings must be repacked with new lubricants due to water contamination. Modern military vehicles typically come from the factory with waterproofed wiring systems. Thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_snorkel for this info.
Landing on a hostile beach wouldn’t allow the crew to stop, clean and repack the wheel bearings so I would expect they were either packed with a waterproof grease beforehand, or were driven carefully until such time they were able to attend to the front wheel bearings, and remove all the waterproofing compound.
Did the Jeep driver do his own waterproofing, I suspect so for his own safety.
Special thanks to J&C Military for this War Department Film
Ford actually produced an amphibian Jeep in 1942 to 1943. It was named the Ford GPA Seep and was a failure.
Apart from being too heavy and sitting low in the water limiting its load carrying ability, its performance on both land and water was rather dismal and the vehicle became a dead duck.
