My first introduction to David Freiburger was via reading my stepfather’s 4Wheel and Off Road magazines as a kid. Since he was deep into lifted trucks at that point in time, we had an abundance of old magazines to flip through and those were the newest ones. I knew that DF was into old Jeeps more than most everything else. Rick Péwé’s name was often in print in the same magazines, so when early episodes of Hot Rod Unlimited and Roadkill appeared with Péwé in the footage, it seemed to be the events of a long friendship coming together. But for whatever reason, Péwé only appeared in one episode of Hot Rod Garage, where Finnegan and Freiburger unearthed Péwé’s mother’s old Buick droptop and got it moving, and the four-wheel battle challenge episode of Roadkill, where Rick showed up in a well-built Toyota that ultimately lost out to a ragged-out Ford Bronco that the duo had brought.

For this episode, Freiburger and Péwé revisit an old magazine project that has been sleeping in one of David’s many garages for years, a flatfender Willys that they had bought…and blown up. With the intent of roadtripping it out to Utah, the two crack into the Willys’ Go-Devil four-banger to see if a quickie rebuild will do the trick…and learn a valuable lesson about rotating parts and belt leather. For people who are critical of Roadkill working on throwaway junk, here’s your episode: thrashing to make a derelict Jeep run well enough to go off-roading almost has it’s own zen to it…especially when they are using gun cleaning tools to remove belt leather from oil galleries.