What's This?

I believe it's for strength of that area, since at that point there is twice the thickness due to the overlap. The other reason is to have another place for rust to form. :hurrican:

 

Just the way they were assembled AFAIK. Out of two pieces....

 

One of the engineer-types may chime in here, but I'll bet it had something to do with the capabilities of the stamping process used at the time. I read somewhere that Willys and Kaiser were both very under-capitalized, and had to make do with less than optimum equipment at times. The idea was to produce their sheetmetal parts on smaller stamping presses that were cheaper to acquire and operate, and could be converted to other non-automotive uses such as stamping out refrigerators and whatnot. That meant that given the choice between buying an expensive press to stamp out complex body panels, or using a cheaper press to pound out two panels that could later be spot-welded together, option #2 won out.

 

Thats what I said....

 

Developmental costs of re-engineering an totally new fender as opposed to adding a coupla inches to an existing panel? (Ever look at how the CJ-5 body tub was stretched to make a CJ-6?)

AMC wasn't exactly flush with capital at ANY point, hence the prevalence of GM, Ford and Chrysler parts in their vehicles. I'll bet that jpflat2 (an old Jeep parts guy) can attest to the nightmares that the AMC parts sourcing process created.

 

Roo is right. The '54 M38A1s lacked these, in '55 they started putting them on.

The seam was weak from what I understand so the plate was put on to strenthen that area.

Tigershark took a good pic of this for the Picture Bank last fall:
http://www.earlycj5.com/gallery2/v/picBank/album_015/album/DCP_0027.JPG.html