David and Glenda

From Fargo Forum, May 4, 2007

From willy-nilly to Willys

WWII rare car built without a lot of direction
By Tracy Frank


Rural Pelican Rapids, Minnesota

Without an instruction manual or even a prototype, David Bengtson built a rare World War II-era vehicle. Bengtson, of rural Pelican Rapids, used a black-and-white photo he found in a magazine as his inspiration for the sixwheeled Willys, a type of Jeep that never actually entered production. “It’s all assembled pieces, you might say,” Bengtson said. The frame is part of an old Chevy pickup. The engine is also from a Chevy. Bengtson made everything else from parts he had on hand. The cowl, windshield, hood and fenders are all original Jeep parts. Bengtson stamped out the body himself. He even managed to find military seats. “First off they told me I couldn’t do it,” Bengtson said. The difficulty was in figuring out how to make all three axles run independently. He started with the transmission because he wanted it to pull on all wheels. “Sometimes it doesn’t engage real easy,” he said during one recent excursion in his Willys. But once it gets going, Bengtson’s Willys climbs a steep embankment as if it’s driving over an anthill. Shortly after he started the project, Bengtson was hospitalized for 3½ months after heart bypass surgery. “Nobody thought he’d ever be in the shop again,” his wife, Glenda, said. But the man who has owned a Jeep of some sort for the past 60 years – and who has worked as a mechanic for just as long – couldn’t stay away. “He said he had to finish the Jeep,” said Cole Bengtson, his daughter-in-law. And that’s just what he did. Within six months of restarting his project, Bengtson had solved the triple-axle dilemma and numerous others. “I didn’t think it was hard, but everybody else did,” Bengtson said. He didn’t map out the project. The ideas just seemed to come to him. If he couldn’t figure out something, he would sleep on it and by the time he woke up, the plans would be in his head, he said. “I couldn’t understand how he could think ahead long enough to get it all together,” Glenda said, adding that it was fun to see the progress. Throughout the process, Bengtson said he was in a hurry to get to the end. “It seems to take forever, then it looks like something,” Bengtson said, adding that once he’d finished half of it he “couldn’t wait to get done.” Bengtson shows the sixwheeled Willys at area car shows. He said it “gets more lookers than you can count.” “He’s known for always having something different from everybody else,” Glenda said. Bengtson said the vehicle is not exactly accurate because the front end is civilian and the headlights are not recessed. But as far as he knows, it’s the only six-wheeled Willys in existence, aside from the original prototype. Bengtson plans to show it at the Art Olson Swap Meet and Car Show at Bonanzaville in West Fargo this year if the weather is nice.