Bryce posted this junk yard sign. Nice try, but I ain’t buyin’ it.
Update: here’s a close up, and a shot of one in better condition:
When I first looked at this picture in its small format, it looked off in too may ways, especially the roof line over the front window. And the grille has obviously been replicated. But I’ve come around to believing that the shell is the real thing. That still doesn’t mean I have to buy it. 😉
My first thought is how successful this sign is in luring all of the owners of beater RRs in on Saturdays to pick up used parts for their rides so that they can get to work on Monday. Good thing about an old Rolls, its so easy to swap out an old steering box or a carb to keep the old beater a-runnin. There’s a reason why there is an old Rolls outside of every third trailer in the park.
My second thought is that this does not really look like a real RR on close inspection, but I can’t figure out what they did. Bondo on some other upright-styled car? No idea, but it is a nice try.
I would say that this is a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow circa about 1976 maybe earlier
IDK, something seems really off with the proportions, esp in the greenhouse.
It looks as though it may have been heavily damaged or rolled (no pun intended) then only minimally reshaped, probably for this display, but who knows?
Perhaps they picked it up with their fork truck by the roof. The roof seems to be dented out, not in.
I do know what your mean by the Rolls outside of every third trailer in the park
5,000 bonus CC points to Ottomobill!
The red truck is actually a 1977 Dodge W200. (See comments in the CC below)
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-capsule-mercedes-s-series-w108-pickup-for-those-times-when-you-really-do-need-a-mercedes-pickup/
That ol’ truck gets around
Yes! +10
The horror…the horror!
Somehow sad nevertheless…at least I feel that way every time I see this Bentley on the streets of Santa Monica.
That is a sad Bentley
The wheels look in a strange position when I enlarged the picture.
I say we turn this thread over to Gem and our other friends from the UK to settle this one. 🙂
They’re well out of my league JP,when it comes to English cars it’s mainly been Fords & Vauxhalls.I still think somethings not right with the Bentley’s wheel position in the arches.
I think it’s just the angle, and that the air suspension in the rear has peaced out (causing minimal tire gap) that makes it look like the front wheel is too far forward. Who knows, though… I’m guessing that poor car has several other problems that aren’t visible.
I am impressed that somebody is still driving it, however!!
Those wheels are way off. Undoubtedly this was just a body shell, and they welded/bolted on some wheels, but not in their original position. They’re too small, and the track is way smaller.
Here’s another shot I found, if it helps…
There is another one at Johannes Auto in Jackson, Mo (http://johannesauto.com/) – 3239 E Jackson Blvd. It was made from a totaled RR , which is what I suspect this one is.
You’d think they would have a name like “Klassy Kars Auto Sales”
Thank you! I grew up nearby and saw this sign a lot. They were the RR of salvage yards.
It’s been there since the late ’70’s.
I grew up in Swampeast Misery in city of beautiful homes, churches, and schools(aka Jackson). Otto, it was a wrecking yard way before the RR showed up – They kept the family name.
That’s wild; I was born in Cape and grew up just across the river. Still have some family in Jackson.
I suppose you left the area also?
Yes, I’ve been here, there and everywhere. I’m currently in Albany, NY, working on a govt. contract. Been trying to get back there since I had to move my mother into senior living in Memphis about 2 years ago. Most of my Family(that I can trust) live there. No luck, but maybe one day. We just took a trip back 2 weeks ago. Was surprised to see the Brennecke’s lost the Chevy franchise(Auto related).
I did not know Brennecke lost the Chevrolet franchise; I suppose Coad was too close and selling too many units. That’s sad, but then again I still think that Dean Taylor still has the Olds / Cadillac dealership next to the police station in Cape! 🙂
There have been a few times I’ve attempted to go back, but it hasn’t panned out.
It looks like a true Rolls and you can see on the roof at the passenger side front that there is a bend, so maybe it did get rolled or a tree or something came down on it and they beat it into shape and added plexi windows to keep the elements out. I would be interested to know if the motor and trans and interior are still in the car or is it just a shell?
Bryce is in a Commonwealth country so they maybe loads of RR plying about the roads and loads could be beaters. For all we know there could be beater Rolls Royce on practically every corner of Auckland or Wellington just like there are 1980’s beater Cadillac on the streets of a lot of U.S. cities.
Just a shell Leon – the interior was completely burnt out in the late 1980s and as a result the car was written off by the insurers. The engine and trans have been removed, although when I was taking my photos in the weekend the front suspension is still in place. It was featured in the local paper this year when the wrecking yard owners removed it from the plinth – locals thought it was gone for good, but it was just getting a repaint (yes in that pink…) and was put back when done.
Sadly there aren’t herds of Rollers plying our roads, but we certainly have a few beaters – I’ve seen three rough Shadows advertised on our trademe internet auction site over the last couple of years.
The closest to a beater RR I’ve seen in the metal was a ’67ish Shadow here in my town that was painted white for the wedding market and gained the cheapest, fakest-looking wire wheel covers I’ve ever seen. I believe it was repowered with a Chev 350 too. It was driven for a while, but then spent a year or three sitting under a tree on the owner’s driveway, slowly growing slimy green.
On a slight tangent, someone local has a black Phantom which I’ve spotted being driven covered in mud. Always makes me smile that someone wouldn’t be too proud to get a Phantom dirty and then be seen in it!
Its just south of Hamilton on HWY1 been there decades and it now looks like its been replicated in plywood it was originally a car.
NZ Skyliner lives near here he will know
I remember once when we were in Henderson, NV (which is essentially southeast Las Vegas), and toured a subdivision of nearly new houses. We saw a driveway Rolls-Royce in front of one of them…that is, a Rolls-Royce that is parked there and never moves. The evidence was slightly low whitewall tires with white stains on the driveway paving from each tire.
Ran when parked? 🙂
This reminds me of a rather careworn Silver Shadow that I used to see parked out in the weather (well, sometimes it was in the carport) when I’d drive through Pe Ell, Washington. If you google “Pe Ell,” you’ll discover that it is about 50 miles from nowhere, in an area where the vehicle of choice is typically a muddy, dented 4X4. A Rolls in Pe Ell (population 632) was an odd sight, to say the least.
I used to see a somewhat beat-up, hubcap-impaired black one rolling down Hollywood Blvd from time to time. The driver had long hair and wore a cowboy hat (sort of a Kid Rock type) and his woman. They looked like a fun couple. I thought of their car as the Rock ‘n Rolls Royce.
The 1965-80 Silver Shadow is to me the quintessential Rolls-Royce — no doubt at least partly due to its being the Rolls-Royce that was around when I was growing up. A friend of my father’s, who made it rather bigger in the business world than anybody in my family ever did, treated himself to a gently used Silver Shadow when I was about 11 or 12. The friend one time came to visit our humble street full of Fords and Chevies and Oldsmobiles in his R-R, and my dad famously instructed him to be sure to back the car into our driveway so the neighbors would know we had a visitor with a Rolls, because “from the rear it could be anything.”
Not sure if our neighbors were suitably impressed or not with the mighty Parthenon radiator grille and the sublime Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament. But somewhere amongst my souvenirs in long-term storage I do have a B/W snapshot of a prepubescent me seated behind the wheel.
I used to know an older attorney who owned 2 or 3 of them. His reasoning was that he rented them out for weddings and such, which paid for their upkeep and allowed him to drive them when they were not out earning their keep. I’m not sure how that worked out in the long term, but it sounded good.
Is it me or does Paul’s picture of the real thing have wheel covers that are from a base model Crown Victoria?
For many years there was an RR parked in a cow pasture facing the road in Bastrop, TX. In those days (late 90s early 00s) we would make the trip to Austin, TX every couple of weeks so I got used to seeing the poor RR minus its grill. Some years after that we were on our way to Austin and the RR was gone.
Lol, that’s totally the CC effect – I popped over to Hamilton, NZ, today to take photos of that Rolls, but Bryce beat me to it! The shell is real, the story behind it is the car was burnt out in the late 1980s, and the car has been at that yard since. It was originally gold I believe. The owner of the wrecking yard at the time has the original grille in his house. Here’s one of the photos of it that I took today, with the mighty Laurel; I’ll post more pics of the Rolls on the Cohort (as well as pics of a Nissan Leopard J. Ferie and an MG Montego that I also found today)
My shot was the first time in ages Ive been past in daylight next is the Mercedes graveyard near Tirau at the Galvo sculptors place I shot the Hillman graveyard south of Tirau recently
Closer-up
Really close-up:
I am just old enough to remember when the Shadow replaced the Silver Cloud, which to me was THE real Rolls-Royce. Even to the 10 year old me, the Shadow looked like a Peugeot 403 (or worse yet, an early ’60’s Rambler) with a Rolls-Royce grill, like the ones you’d see on VW bugs. Nearly half a century later it just looks stodgy compared to a ’66 Lincoln, Caddie or Mercedes 600. But it makes an eye-catching sign.
Hey there fellow CCers, for anyone who’s interested here’s the newspaper clipping from my archives about how the Rolls came to be in the wrecker’s yard. It’s a 1968 model, and apparently burnt out after a rear brake calliper seized on, overheated and then caught fire from the brake fluid. Details herein:
Nice story, thanks!
“My first thought is how successful this sign is in luring all of the owners of beater RRs in on Saturdays”
I had a garden client who was a car collector. His everyday ride was a ’60s silver cloud. Among it’s chores was the weekly trip down to the feed store to bring home bales of straw in the back seat. He said The leather interior made it way easier to clean then his ’50s Jaguars and the massive backseat was an obvious choice compared to his Corvettes, Ferrari or the ’72 Chevelle SS set up as a full on drag strip beast.
Back in the 80s I knew an interior decorator who bought a Silver Cloud. He thought it would be a cool and distinctive car that would make a suitable impression for his sense of style and taste. His dream soon collided with the reality of trying to drive an old Rolls as an everyday car in the States. IIRC, not long after, he filed bankruptcy and then left his wife. Not saying that the car caused all that, but was perhaps indicative of some flawed decision-making abilities.
Am I the only one who noticed the maroon Rolls has Crown Vic wheelcovers?