1940 Jeep Bantam 'Recreation' Is Quite a Story

1940 Jeep Bantam ‘Recreation’ Is Quite a Story

By Detroit Steel - June 17, 2015

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This Jeep certainly puts an entirely different spin on what it takes to recreate an American classic.

Built by Duncan Rolls, this 1940 Bantam, which led the parade for the annual Jeep Heritage Festival in Butler, Texas, is the result of four years of work, 3,500 hours labor, and $80,000. But that doesn’t even begin to capture all that went into bringing this Jeep to life.

Rolls’s journey to build the Bantam started in 2004 after he visited the Smithsonian to get the right measurements for the classic war Jeep, as highlighted in a Longview News-Journal report

“I went and measured the oldest one, the seventh Bantam ever produced, built in 1940,” Rolls told the news source. “I took 200 photographs and 18 pages of measurements. I met a guy there that had the original black and white photos from the factory, even down to double-exposed photos, and I compared the two. I sat there for months comparing them, just to figure out what the differences were.”

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The longtime Jeep enthusiast also had to fabricate a number of parts and built the entire frame from pictures.

“Every penny that I made I put into that vehicle. I maxed out all my credit cards, I had no birthdays, no Christmas, no holidays, no new clothes — it just all went on that Jeep,” says Rolls.

But the “recreation” as he calls it, was well worth the payoff. Rolls is currently building his 15th Bantam and has turned his unique approach to recreating the Jeep into a pretty lucrative business.