Vintage Shelby GT500 Owner Crushes Car to Make a Dining Room Table
Cubing this salvage 1967 Shelby GT500 back in the ’70s seems like a terrible decision today, but not so much then.
These days, any vintage Shelby GT500 is worth huge sums of money, no matter what kind of condition it’s in. But that hasn’t always been the case, of course. There was a time when an old Shelby was as disposable as any other car, long before collectors came along and drove prices up into the vicinity of the moon. Thus, perhaps even this crushed 1967 Shelby GT500 is worth something today.
In this footage from the Hagerty series Barn Find Hunter, our host stumbled upon the alarming find in the garage of a collector in San Diego, California. As the story goes, the owner found the old Mustang in a pretty sad state of disrepair, but still figured he could do something with it.
“In the mid-’70s I was in a junkyard in New York state,” the owner said. “From a distance, I could see what looked to be a Shelby with probably an eight or nine-inch tree growing out of one of the side windows. It had been there a long time. I got up close and it still had the serial number, and I ended up buying the car.”
At this point, most people would have set out to restore the Shelby or perhaps part it out. But the new owner had a different idea. “One of the most influential movies as a kid was Goldfinger,” he said. “Being a little twisted, I remember that one segment where they cubed a Lincoln to hide a guy’s body. Being an artist, I thought it would be a pretty cool cube. So I ended up selling the serial number and all usable parts off the car, and found a place in Albany, New York that actually cubed and crushed cars.”
It’s a cringeworthy thought today, but decades ago, not too far-fetched. Now, this “compact” Shelby GT500 cube weighs a mere 1,100 pounds, and the owner plans on turning it into a dining room table. Which, we imagine, might be the most expensive dining room table on the planet, theoretically speaking.
If we were this guy, we’d be kicking ourselves for making this kind of decision so long ago, but it doesn’t appear that he’s too broken up about it. And at least he’ll have the coolest dining room table on earth when his little project is complete, we suppose.
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