Seller's remorse, who would have thunk it!!!
I grew up in the gasser years of drag racing and was always reading my brother's car magazine, he's 7 years older than me. The gasser coupes were a BIG influence on my vision of a hot rod. So when I started building street rods, I felt I couldn't afford my dream so I just started cheap with lots of work. I accumulated quite a few toys, not real expensive, but more than a few. For just the wife and I, we were insuring 10 vehicles, some were licensed and some were valuable enough to need coverage none the less.
I had been researching Willys' coupe, the real steel ones, and found they were well out of my reach. I started looking at car shows what was available and found Outlaw Performance to be the best available and most accurate in the reproduction genre. Their doors, fenders, hoods and trunks will bolt on to a steel Willys coupe. This process is FAR from a kit car, other than you get a rust free body to start with. You still have to build and engineer lots of the car, tweak the suspension, make all the brake lines, fuel system, design all the dash, AC, wiring, fuel pumps etc. It's basically taking a rust free original and starting with it. I believe I could have built a steel car quicker.
Anyway, the minds view of this car was that it had to have a blown hemi, circa '57 / '58. So I found a '57 392 hemi that rolled over and bought it. Almost $15k later I had a motor that at 6,000 rpm put out 654 hp on the dyno. It was gaining about 35 hp / 100 rpms, but because we used the stock rods and shot peened them for added strength, we shut it down at 6,000 rpms. My MSD system had the 6k chip in it to cut the motor when reached.
Sorry, I'm taking a short story and making it too long...
So here are some pictures of the car I built in 1999/2000 and sold 16,000 miles later in 2001.
Some of you may know who Linda Vaughan is, but for those who do not know, she is the "First Lady of Motorsports"! She signed my dash board and than sat for a couple pictures in my Willys.
Here she is in the my car... She is one of the nicest people you could ever meet! She was around 63 at this time.
She was always one of the Guests at the St. Ignace Car Show every year in Michigan. This year, 2001, I was the car chosen for the T-shirts and all the promo stuff for the show. At the time, St. Ignace was the largest single day car show in the US. It was free for everyone to just walk through. St. Ignace is located just over the Mackinaw bridge in the upper peninsula of Michigan. When you walk down the main street Mackinaw Island is in the back drop, a most beautiful sight.
One of my best achievements was the headers and exhaust system.
I started with fenderwell headers from Speedway Motors for a BBC and '55/'57 Chevy. I then go the 392 flanges from Headers by Ed in MN that were 2" long x 2" diameter tubes prewelded to the flanges. Because the rear two cylinders are behind the firewall protrusions on each side, I had to do some cutting. I cut all four tubes on both headers off just above the downward bends. Then I rearranged the tubes and cut lots of little pieces from other prebent 2" tubes I bought for this purpose. I tacked them all in place and then TIG welded everything up. I tapped out the back side of the collectors with 3" prebent 90's and ran 3" all the way to the rear with Stainless Specialties NASA ceramic packed 5" diameter mufflers. I had to change the lengths a bit to get them to fit into my ceramic coater's oven. But when all was done, I had ceramic coated the full length.
You can see from this shot how the rear pipes have to curl up forward to clear the firewall.
Then only thinks I farmed out was the paint work and the interior upholstery.
Why did I sell it? Good question!
Obviously I knew it was fiberglass when I bought it, but that along with some compromises I made to the suspension, it just kept nagging at me. I had won just about everything I had entered it in and many best of shows, but I guess because it was not a Real Steel Willys, I was able to justify selling it. Now I have remorse for the sale of this car, but that's water under the bridge at this point. If I have the opportunity to buy a steel Willys within a reasonable price range to build another car, I'll probably do it.
Sorry to take up so much of your time reading about someone that is truly sorry for ever selling this car!
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Topic: Vehicles we'll always regret selling or trading (Read 12609 times)