644 miles on a towbar with a M1008!

[BobM]

My avatar is a recent pic of my M1008 military truck. I am the second owner of this truck. Wanna guess who the previous owner was?
I am a member of the Steel Soldiers site: Steel Soldiers
I became interested in buying a CUCV military blazer or pickup and went to Drexel Gardens (aka Stout Field) in Indianapolis to preview some blazers, which are M1009s, that were being sold as surplus. The company that sells these for the govt is Government Liquidations and their site is: Government Surplus Auctions at Government Liquidation
While at Drexel/Stout I looked at a couple of pickups (The pickups have several designations determined by how they are outfitted/used.) Both the M1009 Blazers and all the pickups are 6.2 diesel powered. If you don't like the 6.2 diesel, better bail now!
Anyhow I started the pickup up and I was hooked. Only a pickup would do. Unfortunately they were not selling any pickups at Indianapolis nor anywhere nearby at that time(August 2008).

 

[BobM]

I don't know how much to put in each post, so I'll spread this around a little.
Well, being a curious old one-eyed fat man, I wanted to know EVERYTHING about buying one of these trucks. And to find out how much one of these sold for I had to bid on one. If you don't bid GL doesn't let you know what it actually sold for. So I put in a low-ball bid on a M1008 pickup at Ft Mead, Md. I did NOT expect to win this auction. But just in case, I bid low enough that I felt that I could hook up my tandaem axle trailer and bring it home.
Good thing, since I WON the auction with a bid of $540! However, now I had to deal with the US Gov't. I had to sacrifice half of a forest sending in paperwork to convince them that not only was I not a terrorist, but a somewhat OK guy! (OK, you might as well know that I exagerrate a LITTLE!)
I won the auction on Aug 8th and finally got the paperwork approved near the end of Sept! Now I had PERMISSION to retrieve the truck from Maryland. Ft. Mead is smack dab in the middle between Baltimore and Washington, DC.
If anyone is still reading and wants me to continue, let me know.

 

[dice dealer]

AND ?

 

[4sarge]

2 very similar trucks were for sale on IN 59, South of Brazil this past summer. He also had an M37 but the wife wasn't thrilled with me purchasing the M37. It was decked out as a Military Fire Truck.

PS - Thinking back, his were not PU's but Blazer type but were definitely Military Diesel

 

[NateIU10]

I've done the drive multiple times from Bethesda, MD to Bloomington, once in a Hummer with 18 foot trailer. Fun ain't it?

 

[BobM]

OK, where was I? Oh yeah, I FINALLY got my paperwork. But in the meantime I found that my trailer would probably not work. The M1008 is the same width as mt trailer. I mean exactly the same! And did I mention that Ft Mead is about 644 miles from home? So I figured I'd just go rent a bigger car trailer, right? Nope. Nobody had one that they would rent to haul a one-ton truck on. I could lie to them, but if I had any problems I was toast!
Well one of the guys on the SS site had modified a towbar to pull these vehicles home. He lives in Columbus and said that I could borrow his towbar. But when the paperwork came, he was busy using his towbar to bring home three 1009 blazers from Drexel?Stout Field! And we only had a 14 day window to retrieve the truck and we could only get onbase on 6 of those days!
So, using just a pic that he supplied, I bought and modified my own towbar. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to try this towbar out before the trip. The tow from Ft Mead home would be the trial!
Thank goodness I have a wonderful wife who is as interested in the 1008 as I am and we gathered up every tool, chain wrench, jack, etc, etc that we could imagine using. We put them in the back of our '03 Silverado and off to Maryland we went.
We had great info from some of the SS members and went to the right gate and entered the Post. However, they forgot to tell us that the GL map was inaccurate once you got on base. We spent an hour wandering around before we found someone who knew where we were supposed to be.

 

[BobM]

Once we were in the right place we had offers of all kinds of help from the other SS members who were also making pickups that day. We moved up the "hill" where the vehicles are kept. There we hooked up our new towbar for the first time!
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And it worked!

There were other little issues like the magnetic taillights were too short, the turn signals didn't work after dark.....etc,etc. Just normal stuff!

But we had company along the long trip home.


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I'd like to have one of those APCs!

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[BobM]

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Well we made it home with the M1008.
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We found that we needed a new driveshaft and an adapter between the tranny and transfer case. GL has a nasty habit of using a forklift to move these trucks and bending the shaft and breaking that adapter.
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But with these and a couple of new batteries we have a working diesel pickup with only 43,XXX miles on it! Add to that a friend was parting out an old truck that had outlaw 2 mag wheels and new tires on it. I actually MADE money putting the new tires/mag wheels on the 1008!
I FINALLY got time to pull the commo shelving out of the bed and take the racks and troop seats off of it. This is how it sits today.
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[spainy79]

I am jealous! I can't believe you only paid $540 for it! Gives me hope. I would personally want a Blazer. My other vehicle love besides Dodge trucks are GM 2 door suv's (full size). My first was a '86 GMC Jimmy that I regret selling to this day (sold in July '04). This pic was taken not long after I bought it in '98.

Here's my current '96 'Hoe.

 

[BobM]

Well my truck was listed as "Does not run" in it's auction. However one of the SS guys had been in there previewing this bunch of trucks and was told that all of them had been driven in to the site. The two other pickups that were picked up the same day sold for about $1600. But they were both listed as running.
And there are still a lot of 1009 Blazers for sale thru GL. But they do not have 700R4 trannies. They have three speed TH400s in them (My 1008 has the 400 too.) I am hoping to install an overdrive 700R4 in my truck this summer. Those 4.56 gears sure make the engine wind up!

 

[NEOCON]

Does your truck have the dana 60 front axle in it???? There isn't much wrong with the 6.2 diesel they do get decent mileage. Power is not that great but they some of them do last several trips around the odo. If you know how to do the required fixes and maintainence on them it will make a great truck. Congrats!!
I once stoped along the highway in Il to look at an old 1964 Powerwagon that a fire dept was selling at a sealed bid auction. I put a bid of $200 on it and went back 2 weeks later and drove it home. Great truck.

 

[BobM]

Does your truck have the dana 60 front axle in it???? There isn't much wrong with the 6.2 diesel they do get decent mileage. Power is not that great but they some of them do last several trips around the odo. If you know how to do the required fixes and maintainence on them it will make a great truck. Congrats!!
I once stoped along the highway in Il to look at an old 1964 Powerwagon that a fire dept was selling at a sealed bid auction. I put a bid of $200 on it and went back 2 weeks later and drove it home. Great truck.

Yeah mine has the Dana 60. It is an open front diff. The 1028s had the front locker in them. But have the gov't bomb rear locker.
I've owned 6.2s in the past and had good luck with them. That was one of the reasons I wanted one of these trucks. I got REALLY lucky. My truck evidently was kept inside a lot and the underside is really clean and almost no rust.
Your buying of the Powerwagon sounds like a neat buy also. Do you still have it?