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Okay - so here is the story of our Willys. After Glenn was in a serious accident on 9-12-01 and spent 3 months in the hospital and then had an additional 6 months of rehab, we decided to get his dream car which is a 41 Willys. Life is to short, enjoy it while you can. As soon as he was able, we drove to Willys Works in Liberty, NY and ordered a Willys to be built, but the next day we went to a local show and saw a yellow Willys for sale, Glenn drove it and that was it. We cancelled the one to be built and bought this one, thinking it was a done car.
Well these cars are never done. We redid the engine, the suspension, the wiring, the cooling system and the air conditioner. Now the car ran great and we loved it except someone told me it looked like an Easter Egg. A Willys is supposed to look mean, not like an Easter Egg. So the next thing to do was to get it repainted.
We brought the car to Dale's Custom Auto in Hackettstown, NJ because we knew the work he had done on other cars and the awards that these cars had won. We discussed what we wanted with the paint, but then found that the doors were all cracked around the hinges and the tilt nose was cracked from always opening and closing it. Dale is great with fiberglass and fixed everything and made a custom roll bar inside the hood with actuators so that the hood opens automatically from a switch in the car and now there is no pressure on the hood so it won't crack again. The doors were all reinforced and put back on the car and the front cowl was also reinforced. This car is fiberglass and has a 502 with over 600 horsepower, the body gets twisted from all the torque. We were at Dales just about every week and kept going over designs that he would tape on the car for us to imagine how it would look. We decided on a design he did a test panel for us. We really told him he had free reign since we knew how good his ideas and his work was. Well after 1 1/2 years of work, we got the car on Thursday morning (June 5, 2008) put it in our trailer and drove to the NSRA show in York, PA. On Saturday morning we were picked for the PPG paint award for "Outstanding use of color".
Now we really love this car, except now that the paint is so outrageous, and our Easter Egg Willys is a "Wicked Willys", we need new interior to go with this great paint, so that is next on the list.
We are so hooked on Willys that we have a 1938 Willys Pickup and a 1939 Willys 2 door sedan (both have a 41 nose), so when one is being worked on we still have one to drive to shows.
I have attached a picture of the car when we bought it in 2003, and when we received our PPG award, along with a picture of our other 2 Willys.
Thank you,
Joann Dura
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