'We're still searching for an original motor,' owner Robert Touchburn says. BOB ENGLISH FOR THE GLOBE AND MAILThe Globe and Mail
Both the 1932 Willys Model C90 pictured here warming its blue-over-grey paint under a late fall sun and owner Robert Touchburn turn out to have strong Toronto connections.
The Willys was one of just 550 built in 1932 in a city plant once occupied by one of Canada's homegrown automotive pioneers, and its owner was born there too and became well known among fans of horse-powered racing on the area's tracks for a quarter of a century.
The story of the Canadian-built Willys has two starting points - both in the early years of the last century, one here and the other in the United States.
The Canadian connection was the Russell brand, which had its beginnings with the fiscal rescue in 1902 of Canadian Motors Ltd. by the Canadian Cycle and Motor Co. (CCM), which had already dabbled in the car business itself a bit by this time.
By 1903, CCM boss Thomas A. Russell had its Yonge Street plant turning out Ivanhoe electric cars and, by 1905, the first gasoline-powered Russells were on the road, followed by trucks, buses and fire vehicles. The company motto was "Made up to a standard, not down to a price" and things progressed satisfactorily until it introduced a bigger but unfortunately not better luxury model known as the Silent Knight (powered by a not-too-reliable Knight sleeve valve engine) in 1910.
By 1913, then known as Russell Motor Car Co., its car business was beginning to falter and by 1915 Willys stepped into the frame and purchased it. Russell continued to manufacture munitions during the war years and then diversified into other fields.
The Willys brand is long gone now, too, but if the name resonates at all in your automotive memory vaults, it's no doubt due to its connection with the Second World War Jeep, which it churned out in great numbers and which, of course, it later turned into an iconic American brand.
But the company was actually one of the industry's earliest, and for a while the second-largest, with its beginnings in the automotive aspirations of Elmira, N.Y., car dealer John North Willys.
Willys purchased struggling car maker Overland in 1907, renamed it Willys-Overland and went on to dog the heels of Ford's Model T in sales through the 1910s. It found itself the No. 2 car company in the world by 1918.
Part of its expansion plans had included the Canadian market and exports, the reasons it acquired the Russell operation. The Russell plant produced cars for Canadians and right-hand-drive models for export to places like Australia and New Zealand from 1916 until its closure in 1933.
Among them was the 1932 C90 four-door sedan that came into the hands of Touchburn, 63, just two years ago after spending 40 years with its previous owner, the last 28 of them in his garage.
Touchburn's family left Toronto for Peterborough, Ont., where he grew up and went to work as a teen for General Electric, where he stayed for the next four decades before retiring a few years ago. But that was just his day job; for 25 years, Touchburn and his father Charlie were partners in Char Rob Stables, which bred and raced pacers and trotters from their Indian River farm.
One of the benefits of starting work young is a paycheque, and Touchburn says he's had "a lot of cars over the years," starting with a '59 Dodge, but also including a '51 MG TD and a new '65 Plymouth Barracuda. Plus a couple of 1960s Triumph motorcycles and a 1948 Harley-Davidson 74 and, of course, the many pickup trucks used on the farm over the years.
A soft spot for these four-wheeled workhorses led to his first hobby vehicle: a '52 Dodge half-ton found by his car enthusiast son Charles. Touchburn treated this first retirement project to a frame-off restoration that took it back to original condition, doing all the work himself.
The Willys was found just a few miles from his home a couple of years ago. The car had been repainted in the late 1970s, but was otherwise original with just 32,000 miles on its odometer. But the reason it had sat slumped on cracking tires for so long, its interior providing a home for generations of mice, was a catastrophic engine failure.
Unable to find a suitably affordable replacement for the original side-valve six, Touchburn replaced it with a modern General Motors 250 inline-six.
The comprehensively blown-up motor, of which Touchburn has only some of the bigger bits, was bought by Willys from the Continental company, an engine specialist which built powerplants for cars, a variety of farm and stationary equipment and aircraft. It's still building aero-engines today.
Everything else is completely original mechanically, including the three-speed transmission (including the add-on box providing free-wheeling and overdrive) and brakes, although its rodent-ravaged interior was recently replaced.
Even the Willys' famous Finger Tip Control works. This complicated bit of switchgear is located in the steering-wheel hub, a knob that honks the horn if you press it, starts the engine if you pull it and selects parking, high and low beams if it's rotated. "It took a while to figure out how that worked and to get it working," says Touchburn who found a wiring diagram for the 77-year-old device on the Internet.
"We're still searching for an original motor," which will slot right in as no modifications were made when the new one was installed, he says.
"Our first priority was to get it running and we'll likely spend the next couple of years driving and enjoying it until we can afford a frame-off restoration some time down the road."