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My Wife's 1941 Chevy Tow Truck - PLEASE HELP ME

41Chevrolet created this thread 2 months ago

I am writing to you with the desperate hope you will help me make my wife's dream come true.

My wife has always loved rockabilly and the hot rod car culture. Working two jobs and going to college before she was 18, my wife's fantasy car had always been a '49 Merc... until one day, driving on I-35 in Waco, TX she fell in love. Like a bad movie, she spotted this car 5 miles away on a hill, in a junkyard, in the pouring rain. After her THIRD visit to buy the car she fell in love with.. a 1941 Chevrolet Special Deluxe.. she saw her dream '49 Mercury sitting not 15 yards away from it - after someone pointed it out to her !

My wife, now 27, emptied her bank accounts at the age of 18 to buy her Chevy coupe. She signed up for automotive engine classes just to be able to work on her car herself, and that's when the creation began. In her backyard, at the age of 19, with the help of her boyfriend's brother, stripped the body and removed it from the frame. She has step by step pictures where the two of them took a 1972 custom ford truck with was used as a race truck, and replaced the truck's cab and bed with the body of her car with nothing more than 4X4's and a cheap engine crane from Harbor Freight Tools!

Her interior sat in an upholstety shop for close to two years, so in the meantime, still in college full-time and working overnight fulltime, she saved up enough money to buy all new glass, gauges, an engine rebuild kit for what was now a Ford 390 rather than the Chevy Straight 6, and several nice add ons for the car. Another 6 months go by and she yanks the untouched seats from the shop and takes them to someone else for repair..

Before the car was finished, she moved from Texas to Florida. When she moved she left a second car in her Texas driveway to be shipped to ( a Jaguar project she had bought for her Mother) Florida, and packed it full of all the goodies for the '41, including the car dash, windows and rebuild kit. The city of Waco towed it out of her driveway with only three days notice and 1800 miles away! Heartbroken, she paid $1900 to have her shell of a Chevy shipped to her new home. The bill was originally quoted at $1200, but the drivers stated halfway to FL on the phone if she wanted her car, she'd have to pay the extra in cash for their "hard work" having to help push it in and out of the yard.

My Wife's dream career had always been to work with animals, and in fact was working at the Lowry Park Zoo and working towards her dream of being a naturalist, discovering new animal species when I told her about MY dreams of owning my own auto shop. I asked her to quit her job and help me run a Mom & Pop shop which was successful for a while, and we opened a second location. Throughout this she never complained about her career, but helped me with mine. Creating business cards, designing all of our own banners and even the ads we put out. We couldn't afford a tax accountant, ad designer, tire shop manager and office manager.. so she did it all. I drive a tow and do mechanic work, and not much else. If it needed to be designed - from the ads to custom car ideas, my WIFE did it. If a customer wanted a custom mud flap plate, my WIFE whipped out her plasma cutter and make it by hand.

She sanded, painted and helped me build 9 tow trucks. She bought me a 1915 Ford C-Cab for my 33rd birthday. She made a custom back window that was a skull with crossed wrenches by hand. Since we have been married, I have gone through and scrapped, or sold or traded over 20 cars. My wife, alone, cut her car body in half to start her creation, alone. I made some very bad desicions and lost our shops. In the process I ruined her credit, and my Mother-in-law's. I lost the hot rods, and the tow trucks. I had some bad friends at the time, and one bad employee, who ran off with most of our tools.. which belonged to my wife before I had even met her. They even stole her Christmas present from her dad, her prized plasma cutter. I used her speakers and radio she bought over 5 years ago for her car in my own cars, several of them, until they eventually got damaged beyond repair. She has been driving whatever truck we have handy, never with a radio on her hour-long ride to work, which is bad since her relaxation is listening to her tunes.

After all this, I got into a car accident - a young woman ran a stop sign and flipped my Wife's ranger which I was driving at the time. It totalled her truck, but it also disabled me. I went through back surgery and a spinal fusion - and my Wife's response to losing her credit, her career and me not touching her dream car? She immdiately went to school to get her degree in Orthopedic & Medical Massage to be my personal therapist for the rest of out marriage. She even became nationally certified as a fitness trainer to help through my exercises to rehabilitate my back.

Two and a half years after the accident, my Wife keeps pushing me to succeed. We have two tow trucks now, neither in great condition but workable once fixed up, and she is helping me start a new business with a fresh start. Her car? She works for a doctor now, and although stills dreams of working with animals, has a great clientele. She wants to turn the back half of her car (still sitting on the ford truck frame) into a little custom bucket rod she can do mobile massage to her disabled patients with - just large enough to carry her massage table and a few fitness tools. The front half of the body? She must be CRAZY, but she still wants to work with ME. So we have a diesel conventional tow truck with a boom she likes. She wants to remove the 90's model cab of the truck off, and put her '41 cab on it. She'll have to fabricate a dash because hers was towed away along with her glass and other new equipment, but she keeps trying. The tow truck runs, just needs a cab swapover and some severe makeover work.