Do you feel like tackling an 81-year-old car that's so incomplete that the seller isn't even sure what it is? The seller's best guess is that this $500 car (go here if the ad disappears) is a 1917 Overland. If so, that means it's the great-great-great-grandaddy of every Jeep ever made! Now, you figure a price that low for a car this old, well, it might be missing some stuff. You figured right! Still, it's a vaguely car-shaped collection of rusty parts, which could be the start of a staggeringly frustrating and costly restoration project... or a marginally less frustrating pre-WW2-style hot rod project. Get yourself a flathead Ford V8 and start banging on sheet metal, and maybe a few years later you'll emerge from the garage- bloodstained, exhausted, and broke- driving something that would have made every hoon in 1939 stagger back in awe.

There's a lot of anti-front-wheel-drive grumbling around these parts, but how could anybody possibly look at a Citröen Traction-Avant and lump it together with, say, a Hyundai Excel? You may have bemoaned the impossibility of ever having your very own Traction-Avant, due to their rarity and high cost... but never give up on your project car dreams! Here's a 1938 Traction-Avant that's only been bid up to $405 at the time of this writing, and we're guessing the reserve price won't be too crazy. Everything seems to be an ominous red-orange color, but the seller says "No major structural rust," so you'd have some sort of longshot possibility of making a drivable machine out of this collection of parts. You get a "later-model" engine (which we hope means later-model Traction-Avant), and it looks like most of the important parts are included. What kind of project to build out of this thing? Keep it original, or go nuts with crazy modifications? Either way, it's French, it's in pieces, and it's 70 years old! Thanks, and a half-credit towards a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt to zweirad for the tip.

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"I am sure of one thing - the kind of trim one can get with a rusty '59 El Camino is not the type of trim I'm into."

No, to win the much coveted "Jalopnik Commenter of the Day" title, you must not only tickle the funny bone, but also tug at the heart strings. Unless you are really, really funny. But I digress... No, a really great comment makes us laugh but also reminds just why it is we love cars so damn much. Ladies and germs, I present to you the story of Goatboy's father:

"Well, this isn't really me, but its a good story. My dad and a bunch of his friends a long time ago got a hold of a military surplus Willys Overland Jeep. Of course, they didn't leave it at that. They somehow fit a 289 V8 into the sucker. Anxious to start hooning, they passed on affixing the throttle to the gas pedal, and merely tied a string to the carb and threaded it through to the drivers seat. Pull the string, light up all four tires. I'm not sure how the rest of the story goes, its been a while since I've heard it. But it ended with 4 Church ministers in a Cadillac chasing my dad and his friends up a dirt road. The Caddy crashed, and the boys got away unpunished.

We once had a French roommate into hot rods and sportbikes. Given that he'd become an American citizen whose nation of birth had been liberated by men driving vehicles manufactured by a company founded and shepherded by one John North Willys, we always thought his prediliction toward referring to the company as "Willis" was oddly, well, French. But it turns out that he was actually correct all along, which is one of the myriad things we learned today from an interesting piece about the man whose most lasting legacies are the Gasser and the Jeep. – Davey G. Johnson

John North Willys (of Overland) biography [Allpar]

Related:
The Girl From Itamaraty: Willys Limo, Brazilian Style [Internal]