I am new to the forum, we own a 1945 DUKW fully restored and operational for our tour business here in the CNMI on Saipan. Saipan is located due North above Australia and in between the Philippines and Hawaii. Woody is awesome and lots of fun to drive. My name is Mike Dilley and I work for and own, Island Turtle tours. The name of our DUKW is Woody, we bought her from Chicago in the states from a well known vendor who has been nothing more than miraculous at helping us to get everything done and prepared for our business. Woody is the 1st original DUKW to operate or even go into the waters here since the Battle of Saipan in 1944 over 70 years ago. She is all original, with the exception of a raised canvas canopy.with original, GMC 270ci engine, all framing, bulkheads, and running gears, she is a marvel to look at and see operating. For this location she is very historical as most other items on island that are her age are lying on the side of the road rusting away. I believe she is the only original DUKW operating within the pacific region, as i have not seen or heard of any other originals, just the aftermarket types like Ride the Ducks which are a combination of vehicles refitted together to look like a dukw and usually with diesel engines, which produce 3 to 4 times the torque of the original 270 engines and cause all kinds of mechanical issues for the running gears. If you are interested you can see our 7 minute video of woody's 1st splash down here in the CNMI, we are very proud of her and she did great for her initial try out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsf5w69dPNk You can see in the video we are quite excited and proud of this moment. Since this video was taken woody has undergone a complete change of appearance from yellow to patriotic red, white, & Blue with murals depicting american icons. Not sure if anyone else has ever spent this much time or money trying to make a dUKW stand out like a sore thumb but I have to say I have learned a lot about the DUKW's, their uses and operational capabilities. what fun they are. We are still looking for original schematics for the DUKW's if any one knows where I might be able to download. I got one but it is to small to blow up, I think it was called schematic 402 from Sparkmen webpage, but even they did not have a big copy as they told me it was locked away somewhere in a military vault, lol So if anyone has any cool paperwork or other documents not commonly found, please let me know.
Thanks for reading the post and i look forward to hearing everyone's comments good or bad, its all a learning curve
P.S. I will post some pictures of the new paint job shortly, need to get them loading online 1st.
