Active Power

Remember that dream from last night? Do you remember it well enough that you would be able to relay what happened in fine detail to someone 20 years later? It's that kind of clarity of purpose that comes across when you talk with Active Power's Chris Ardern.

Easygoing and friendly, you'd think he grew up in one of the West Coast's beach communities, but you'd only be half right. Born and raised in Ohio, the 48-year-old Ardern remembers talking with his high school buddies in the '70s about how great it would be to live on the coast and build fast cars. A few years after graduating from high school, Chris did just that: packed his bags and moved to San Diego, California.

Picking up the local yellow pages, he opened it up to "Racing" and started calling for work. As luck would have it there was work to be found, and Chris got a job welding in fabrication shops. Though he really wanted to be a race car driver, he was content being a fabricator, and his skills as a welder caught the attention of some of the bigger names in the SCCA and GT racing circuits.

Chuck Kendall (his son Tommy is a former SCCA national champion and current cable TV host on SPEED) hired Chris to work on a few of his race cars, including a Porsche RSR, a BMW M1, and even a Lola T-600 (chassis HU-5, one of the first "ground effects" racers and subsequent GTP cars). But life at the track wasn't all glamour, and in 1985 Ardern moved back to Ohio to see what lie in his future there.

He started up a welding shop and worked on anything that came through the door. He moved away from the racing world (finding the best way to kill a hobby is to try and make of business of it) and concentrated on polishing his fabrication skills. It was during this time, in 1985, when Chris spotted an article in Street Rodder magazine on The Texan--a wild '41 Willys with one of the first street-driven, full-tube, Pro Street chassis under it.

Chris always had a love for the Gasser Wars of the '60s and, being from Ohio where many of those racers were campaigned, he was caught up in the middle of the racing action. If there was a dream to be had, Chris thought, it would be to have a hot rod shop that only worked on Willys. But at this time in his life, Chris' attention had turned away from racing and toward off-road vehicles and four-wheel-drive trucks. He opened Active Power in 1990 in Mentor, Ohio (near Cleveland), mostly to do turnkey and prototype work.

Then one day his old friend Chuck Kendall called him and wanted to know where he could sell a Vietnam-issue hauler, so Chris started checking out Military Vehicles magazine. In doing the research, Chris noted that there were a lot of military HMMWV (or Hum Vee) parts for sale, and that the 130-inch wheelbase was similar to full-size American pickups.

He began thinking about offering a kit so the home builder could have his own Hum Vee, but he didn't know much about fiberglass (the steel bodies used 'glass hoods). After looking into it some more, Chris got into the 'glass business so he could supply his new company, Urban Gorilla, the hoods for the steel Hum Vee-like bodies he began making. His trucks were noticed by everybody, including AM General (who were making HMMWVs for the government), who sent Chris a nice "cease and desist" letter claiming his grille looked too much like theirs.

Chris changed his grille, and ran with it for four more years before selling the company in 2002. But one question remained for Ardern: What if you built a smaller-size Hum Vee, say, on one of those plentiful S-10 chassis he saw everywhere? (This was years before the Hummer H3). But as it turned out, Chris' love affair with the Willys came back to haunt him and he decided he should look for a Willys truck project for himself.

Chris found a builder who was offering a '41 Willys truck kit, but was surprised to find that he also had every other Willys body available, too. That included the small '33 Model 77 coupe (in both stock and 2-inch-chopped versions), a '33 sedan delivery, plus a '41 Willys truck and coupe. Chris was in Willys heaven and soon worked out a deal to purchase all the molds (about 100 pieces in all) from the gentleman.

The concept Chris enjoys most about being in the hot rod business is that there is no rulebook. Anybody can build whatever they want--and do it any way they want. The S-10 chassis idea was never far from Chris' mind, so he began looking at how to modify a '41 Willys body to fit an S-10 chassis. As it turns out, hardly any work was needed on the frame--he just had to reshape the floor of the Willys body to accommodate everything!

Still wanting to build his '41 Willys truck, Chris found the original cab was far too short and stubby for most folks to climb in and out of, so he came up with the idea of mating the front section of a coupe (from about the door jambs forward) to the back half of the pickup cab, thus making a "long-door" truck cab (5 inches longer in the doors and 4 inches longer at the back of the cab). A vehicle's proportions are easy things to screw up when you start moving sections of bodies around. But with a little work to reshape the roofline, Chris pulled off the first extended-cab '41 Willys pickup! It fits on an unmodified short-wheelbase S-10 chassis, and it really looks like it rolled out of the Willys factory that way!

Though he has a couple of Cobra bodies stuffed up on a shelf in the back of his shop (he'd like to one day produce the "forgotten Cobra," the Street 427 Cobra, with its under-car exhaust and no hood scoop, roll bar, or front oil cooler vents), Chris knows he's happiest when he's just building Willys. The nostalgia craze for straight-axle, nose-up '41 Willys is still out there, and Ardern has found a niche where he's able to supply it with quality parts and bodies. He offers a complete straight-axle chassis for anyone who wants a Gasser-style '33 or '41, but also continues to develop his S-10 chassis-based products, claiming: "How can you beat it?"

The Gasser crowd is a select group--not everyone wants a firebreathing, fairly uncomfortable hot rod that would probably see very few street miles. But for that select few, of which Chris wholeheartedly counts himself as one of, that's something only dreams are made of!