Kit cars are the automotive embodiment of grand plans. They’re the means by which anybody with ambition and a set of hand tools can build an exotic or sporty car on par with something that would normally cost a few decades’ worth of salary. They’re also supposed to be rather quick to assemble, with the most basic and straightforward versions taking about a weekend to plop onto a running and rolling chassis. Then there’s the Devin-Crosley kit car that Jim Liberty has taken on, a project that will soon come to fruition after 75 years.
“How does a 75-year-old car just sit as it came from Devin?” Jim asked. “The owner’s only concern was whether he had enough juice to finish it.”
Jim, who is based in Costa Mesa, California, and is best known for his Porsche 356 restorations, isn’t above taking on something a little more unique. His shop truck is a lightly modified Crosley CC pickup, and he’s restored a 1960 Austin-Healey Sprite to recapture the feeling of his first sports car. It was the former, however, that led him to the long-dormant Devin project—the longest, in fact, that we’ve come across.
“I was buying parts for the pickup from the owner and he told me he just had too much work over the years to ever get started on it,” Jim says.
![1948 Devin-Crosley project]()
Photo courtesy Jim Liberty
According to the story that the owner related, the project began sometime around 1948, even before Devin started building fiberglass bodies. The prior owner of the project had a 1946 Crosley station wagon that caught fire and, rather than scrap it, he socked it away in his Ohio basement. Then, sometime after Devin established Devin Enterprises in 1954, the station wagon owner bought a Devin fiberglass roadster body.
Bill Devin, once called “the Enzo Ferrari of the Okie Flats,” only grew up in Oklahoma; other than a few years in Iowa, he spent most of his adult life in California. Cars, however, were a constant throughout his life, from the Chevrolet dealership that his father ran to the Chrysler-Plymouth dealerships that he operated and on to the Crosley Hotshot in which he started his sports car racing career and the Ferraris and other European cars he bought, sold, and raced. While other California-based hot-rodders and racers had already discovered the benefits of fiberglass bodies, Devin taught himself how to work in the medium and quickly became one of, if not the most, prolific manufacturers of fiberglass bodies for existing car chassis. He started by splashing a mold off a Deutsch-Bonnet for his Devin-Panhard, according to Kevin Callahan at Devin Sports Cars, then progressed to developing his own molds, patterned after an unnamed small Italian spider (reportedly a Scaglietti-bodied Ermini 357 Sport, one of three built). Rather than produce a single mold for a single chassis, Devin instead produced as many as 50 sections of molds from which he could mix and match to lay up bodies in dozens of sizes for multiple chassis.
![Bill Devin with some of his production fiberglass cars]()
Bill Devin with some of his production fiberglass carsPhoto via Devin Sports Cars
While Devin later went on to offer his own body and chassis combination under the name Devin SS as well as versions for rear-engine applications after the Volkswagen phenomenon took hold, the owner of the now-stripped Crosley chassis bought a front-engine body along with a couple of fiberglass racing seats direct from Devin. As Jim told the story, the builder got as far as extending the chassis by 24 inches and placing the body on the chassis before other priorities obviously took over. After Roughly 60 years, that owner then took the project to the Crosley Automobile Club‘s Nationals in Wauseon, Ohio, where he offered it for sale in the swap meet and where the Sioux Falls-based owner spotted it.
“It was 100 percent virgin when he bought it,” Jim says.
![1948 Devin-Crosley project]()
Photo courtesy Jim Liberty
Other than adding some Dayton wire wheels to the car, though, he never did anything with it either, so he sold the project to Jim. While the Devin came with a Crosley 750cc four-cylinder, presumably the station wagon’s original engine, and a Sprite four-speed transmission, a common upgrade over the Crosley’s unsynchronized three-speed manual transmission, Jim said trying to mate the two “turned into a nightmare” so he substituted a supercharged 1275-cc four-cylinder out of an MG for the Crosley engine and kept the Sprite transmission. He also widened the rear axle to accommodate the wider wire wheels, but left the rest of the chassis alone and focused on the bodywork necessary for preparing a 60-something-year-old fiberglass body for the first paint ever to coat its surfaces. Plans call for it to be black with red racing stripes and a red vinyl interior using those original Devin seats, Jim says.
![1948 Devin-Crosley project]()
Photo courtesy Jim Liberty
And while it’s not a 356, Jim says it’s still getting the same treatment as any of his projects, which benefit from a number of specialists within walking distance of his shop. “The best of the best,” he says.
According to Jim, the Devin will be titled in California as a 1948 Crosley and will be going up for sale sometime this fall.
