V8 Austin-Healey built by THE CARROLL SHELBY himself?!

[Music] good morning and welcome to coffee walk last week mr thomas weeks gave me a call i took his phone call yes the same one from misfits garage we have actually bought a lot of cars from him in the past or i've bought a lot of cars from him in the past i said he had a very interesting one i've heard about in the past there was some folklore about it everybody knows i buy a lot of austin heelys there's been an austin healey around dallas forever the story goes that mr carroll shelby yes carol shelby himself built three v8 healies thomas says he's got one of them he's gonna bring it up show it to me try to sell it to me now the reason i'm doing this lean in here is because this is coffee walk tomorrow i need you to grab your cup of joe listen carefully we focused real close on the serial number of the car so you can see what it is i love to prove the progress of this car that it was actually one of the v8 healeys that mr kell shoved itself built that would also uh if we had the providence this car might be more likely to restore it it'd be neat to get it back out there so grab your cup of joe let's go and listen this whole conversation oh are you close so you're in a hurry as always yeah come on in i'll meet you i'll meet you up front all right so we're going to meet thomas weeks from misfit's garage he's bringing in a austin healey and he's always in a hurry so over the past 35 years i stopped counting at 500 big healeys and probably approaching 600 by now and here comes another one this is actually the second healing that we bought this week now there was a hundred ports i haven't showed you and as my ads always say [Applause] i always say i'll buy them dead or alive and this one looks like it's dead [Music] okay all right so we got another one over there we got 106. yeah but it's gonna be a storm okay yeah i know you dig storm absolutely sometimes story sells a car stories do sell the cars but now listen you know me and you how many of these cars are we done together i started buying cars from you 35 years ago and one of my favorite quotes your dad gave me your dad gave me which i have yeah he goes you guys can't buy every car out of the newspaper we damn sure tries i told him i said sir we're going to try if he if you got to it first or something i really wanted i could call you and sell it to be a fair price yeah or if you was across town the other side and i needed you to go pick up something for me it was always a good marriage between us i got to say that yeah we bought a lot so we ran the thrifty nickel the green sheet the morning news the times harold and the four star telegram between the both of us i will guarantee you we got 90 of the goodbyes yeah but i'm gonna tell you somewhere that you had the edge on everybody no do you remember the um the book that you had that had phone numbers that was linked to addresses yep so if the person wasn't there that day this was cool okay i gotta say when the when the person wasn't there that day before we knew the phone number you can link that phone number to the address and sometimes you remember that time that mean view over my white right leg sit in front of that house all day long until the man came up the guy was like honey don't y'all know where i live and he was uh you really didn't know what to say you just said hey you know i don't know we didn't ever give the guy time to go inside and listen to his message machine and i can't tell you how many times i gave you some most leads too that people actually got upset because i always show up on their doorstep at 5 30. i mean if it was the car yeah i would i would be knocking on that door if it was a car was gonna make 500 grand back there that was big money you know i was on the i would wake people up you know dennis i gotta say something back then we called it hustling and making money today they'd call it an ocd i'm sorry i truly would you know the other way i had you early on though i said since high school because in junior high we didn't know each other but in junior high i had the dallas morning news and the time zero i threw both the routes so i got the classifieds for anybody the only thing i had was only through the saturday and sunday paper but i delivered a paper which was a good one yeah you know so sunday but i had to finish my route before i could go chase cars but i'd be driving stuff and papers and you're looking at the classifieds like this thinking man i gotta have and you always you never left home without a pocket full of change because back in we didn't have cell phones but to go back to the original question if i had to guess and you guys are going to think he's exaggerating no no i probably have bought at least 200 cars from thomas probably i mean for real i mean we used to you know every day we'd speak on the phone and i'd say what are you buying today you'd ask me what am i buying today you know if it was something that you needed something i want it it'll always go back and forth but it was a i don't know it was hard to explain it was a it was so fun it was so interesting that still you never knew it was like gold digging you never knew when you was going to chip away and find that vein of gold and then chase it down you know and i'd never stop chasing the british sports cars oh no well you know muscle cars i've kind of gone back and forth on corvettes back and forth mustangs back and forth and by the way i buy mustangs again so 64.5 to 73. well there's still plenty of those out there but you know the thing about these cars is is that that they're internationally wanted not just in america countries all over the place yeah what it is you had a big buyer's you know market for it that's what it was okay and you were more connected with that than i was i was kind of a good finder for you and then you knew the place to go but you might sell one of these to england tomorrow to sweden the next day germany over here i mean what's the furthest way that you ever sold a car no matter what it was everywhere no no the furthest away from wiley texas there's an island bottom water i think it's the furthest place i've ever yeah i think of all the cars that you've ever did that i thought was the coolest okay was when you got that peerless out of that gold mine wasn't it isn't that how it went down yes it was up in oregon yeah you found out about it it was like a young gold mine millionaire or something that when it didn't get stored there or something you dug it out of there yep i was i one time i had three pairs this is the only guy in the world that did yeah but anyways we can talk about that for hours and hours i want to hear the story on the healing yeah i mean you know what for another show another day let's get a little deeper on some of the cool stuff let me show you this one let's see we got oh the 1981 i found this car because there was a good healing that i think actually you sold okay i bought sold it to you and you sold it to somebody but this car was sitting beside it and the story behind this car was okay this is really neat i i really mean this one turned to the store the man lived out in kingston texas right you know right by uh carol shelby's ranch right there okay and and carol shelby he always just he really didn't he really didn't care about being a race car driver he enjoyed it and all that but you know he had bad heart trouble and he really couldn't that's why he ended up with different guys to drive his cars right but when remember when he was driving for uh donald healey he was driving for donald heal he was a race car driver for hillary clinton that he was running a tv or a tc you know what he started with a td actually yeah but anyway the thing about it was okay is that he wanted a you know he kind of pioneered the uh you know the small sports car with a big engine all right that's what he did sure so he what he did was is he he took this he took a healey and he put three healings and he took it he put v8s and every one of them adapted it to the the transmission and all that stuff and those cars were to hustle investors is what they were take the car and say hey mr mr money man drive this car and tell me what you think you know a man with money would drive and you go man this is one of the coolest things i've ever seen it handles good it does everything right and it's got the power to boot well donald healey bringing british man all the way to through to his phone said no i'm not going to supply empty bodies okay then he wanted chevrolet to supply the motors well that shield they would have been on board because you can just buy the engines okay no big deal with that but golly even wouldn't let it happen i'm telling you the true story here okay so when he was in downtown dallas he built three austin helix with v8 setup and legend has it this is one of them and i'm not playing with you about this i believe one of them was 104 also yeah there was 104 and then he used a real early 2 real early 100 sixes like this is one of the cars quote i don't know you know you're a great man to do research you've got connections everywhere and i'll figure it out but to me i'll go by some of the things that i see okay you know i'm almost like you know missouri or whatever it is you know so i'm gonna walk you through this car i have no proof of anything i'm gonna tell you but i'm gonna let you try to make your own decision about that okay first off let's start off with that just one thing out of the bunch okay uh look at the steering wheel okay i see that is you know early motorlina yep okay and that's one of you know that's that was always carol shelby's signature steering wheel to have on the car all right dude i want you to see this now this this is in here kind of really hard but do you see this how you actually see the adapter somebody made an adapter and they have to cut the top of the transmission off okay to apply this adapter now this is your standard gm pattern like for your muncies your three speeds you know they use that same pattern for everything right right so they adapted this trace but why would anybody adapt a healing transmission with a lake hog on d normandy overdrive to add it to this this is crazy normally we just trash all this and put a monthly four speed in here but as you can see okay it has been adapted all the way so okay yeah but you're you know you weren't you weren't going to do that back then because you're talking this car's on 57 i know we didn't just have four speeds laying around then to top it off this car has a chevrolet 265 which why would you use that it's not at 57. yeah i'm going to show it to you it looks like yellow but it's still in it so is this something a lot of people don't know is the chassis in these cars are incredibly strong that's dual x members they're boxed and they've got high point rear ends in them which are crazy strong right see that's part of the story crazy stronger see the story is that carol shelby wanted to use this chassis because it's better than the ac car that is a better chassis i agree as a matter of fact what half strong is he really ended up building a complete chassis under his ac cars because that old ac ace wasn't handling anybody but that's why he wanted donald because of this you know box girder frame he wants to describe this frame as being like you know a bridge i mean it was just all it never flexing strong but donald healey just wouldn't let it happen so he had to move on to different ideas okay go ahead let's stick back here for one more second i know you know this is something most people aren't going to know [Music] okay so this got a high void rear-ended i have not seen this car how about no but let me just let me let me give it if you know about a 9 inch board yeah yeah it's designed like a 94 with a pumpkin and it is super strong incredibly strong so but if you see it's got bolt-on wheels on here so on 106 if you had an overdrive transmission which is what in this is in this now you would have had wire wheels if you didn't have overdrive transmission this isn't on all of them in general yeah and you had steel wheels and also do you remember that uh i believe i am correct me on this if i'm wrong if the car came to north america and all of them had overdrops is that correct yeah no if you had base wheels you could have non-overdriven so this is probably a real 106 rear end then you got bolt on wheels with wire wheels in the front so this would have been obviously this is the way you would set it up that much worse yeah well of course you just rip the spokes right out of the pool rip them off but i mean if you see a an early 106 it's got steel wheels and a lot of people think that's undesirable to me that's super desirable i think less is more in that morning well any of you are going to race them back in the day if you're going to race them there's too much flex in these wire wheels exactly anyways i want to see the motor but this rear end and you know because you're king of building horsepower can handle damn near anywhere it's strong as all hell and the thing about it is these cars were so light anyway that even if you did put a lot of horsepower to it you couldn't keep it to the ground anyway you know what i mean so what a killer car to hey you can't cart a cobra killer because these are built before the cobras yeah exactly but that's what i'm trying to get the three if this car this car could possibly be one of them uh incredible so there's a flat top candy they're keeping the fender out and one of the things that kept the weight down on this car with the top side black t-list forever so obviously i'm excited every time i've had like 600 of them the center shrouds are all solid aluminum that's pretty tricky well you know if you strip this [Music] all right now i got to be honest with you these right here were in the trunk and i just set them on it okay if you'll look down here this engine is coated 1955 f you see that that means it's a 55 265 look at look at this adapter for the generator okay it just bolts up you know when you get it where you want it one single pulley and just get on with the program i mean i know it looks like death in here but i left it only use the heli radiator it was a simple and original radiators were great the original tags here which is nice being four back in the day you and i would kind of go back and forth who knew the most about heelys there was a lot of ideas just in that subject right now okay so yeah you don't want to have the challenge i know so i just believe you okay i'll take your word we'll see who gets that first you know whoever's watching that knows the difference between a long bridge car and an abbey i think you would a little bit more college than i did so i'm gonna go with you on this one this is cool if we can prove that carol shelby was involved in this this car needs to go back to what it was i have driven some of these and man they are so much fun hey when i dug it out of the barn i'm gonna taste them when i dug it out of the barn okay i'm gonna tell you right now it sat there for years and i knew about the car remember i told you we bought a good one and this one was sitting there of course this thing like you know was awful right there without anything is good [Applause] [Music] this engine was completely areas level and horse starts wow okay completely level i couldn't even see the motor and i didn't even want to touch it to see it so i got a shovel and ducked up literally dug this one out to see the engine you would not believe the cleaning that i had done on this car you know just worked part of me bringing it over and it's texas car seat texas a special yeah it's a little tough the back wheels are a little stuck i had to pull it up today there you go guys there's a whole lot of healing information in just a couple of minutes but thomas and i've been doing this together for 35 years it's been a lot of fun uh we haven't been able to have thomas or i together because all the uh legalese over time yeah so hopefully we start doing business again yeah when you're filming a show you know you're kind of almost in jail and now that we're free of that i think we can get back to having a lot of fun and selling a bunch of cars you know the main thing is i'm going to say you know if you're looking in that camera guys listen to what this man is telling you he's he's the most knowledgeable guy that i've ever seen you know we once said that you can't teach people the car business i think you can but it's going to take 30 years in 30 40 years and you're already way ahead of the game but you know what if you had a professor i'm gonna call him professor collins because he's the man to do it thank you for that you're incredibly knowledgeable as well i'll take my hat off to you the muscle cars i know them well but not as good as you do well yeah you know what we all have our forte so when we all come together hey you know what i always said if you get a lot you'll get all horses pulling the same direction you get a lot of fuel plowing and when i commit to a deal i pay it don't i oh yeah no i don't beat you up no no i i've been chewed out a few times for bringing somebody but i still pay but you always you agree he does and he always plays well listen i hope it works out for you i truly do i hope it's something special hey you never know there maybe somebody in dallas hey i remember that shelby did do this i gotta say you know you probably are more you can find out more about this and probably the fbi can't you're the man all right and thomas will tell you because i have run the one at dead or live that's what it is now for 36 years it's still in there i will buy these in any condition any condition at all hey just take this one for instance he said dead or alive this one's completely dead it is so he look at here he just paid for one and it's going to be awesome guys thanks for watching please like tag share and follow and on to the next one take care

Channel: Dennis Collins

Views: 518,947

Rating: 4.8970666 out of 5

Keywords: carroll shelby, coffee walk, car buy, barn find, classic cars, how to buy a car, dennis collins, collins bros jeep, car world

Id: mnUn-_wHdjY

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020