Red Jacket Jeep
There are crossover demographics in many areas of interest, some bigger than others, but it’s a fair guess to say that most guys in the “guy” demographic like to (a) drive fast and (b) blow stuff up. Maybe that’s a vast oversimplification. But it works for this story.
Truth be told, we had never seen Sons of Guns before we drove the Red Jacket Jeep, and opinion even among firearms enthusiasts varies on the devices built and used on the show, but this isn’t Gunweek, so we’ll concentrate on the Jeep part.
The Red Jacket Jeep is the brain child of P.T. “Pat” Muldoon, longtime chief engineer at Mopar and the impetus behind such Moparized Jeep classics as the immortal Power Ram Wagon and the NuKizer, to name just the ones we got to drive in Moab a while back. Now Muldoon is in charge of building cool stuff at V Werks, a wholly owned subsidiary of OE supplier Venchurs. Venchurs supplies that pickup bed conversion you see on the back of the Jeep JK8, as well as most of the rest of the stuff adorning it.
“This is a JK8 conversion so it started its life as a Rubicon four-door JK and was converted to the pickup truck,” said Muldoon, walking around and pointing it all out. “We put our four-inch lift kit with a one-inch body lift, 40-inch BFG Krawler tires and then we updated a lot of the internal driveline components to take the 40-inch tires: upgraded brakes, oversized master cylinder, internals from Dynatrac, 538 gears, our rock rails, our fenders, our front and rear bumpers and our new cowl induction hood.”
There apparently was no V Werks kitchen sink available.
As is, if you wanted this exact Jeep it would cost you $115,000, minus all of those layers of deep red paint slathered on the body. There already is one fan of the show who has ordered exactly this, costs be damned. And there will be more orders, V Werks hopes.
“We’re going to offer a two-door, four-door and a JK8 package with Red Jacket,” Muldoon said. “There’s been a big outpouring and a big interest . . . it opened up a new market where we’re getting a lot of face time with people that are into what Red Jacket did with weapons and vice versa.”





