I happened on an estate sale and after passing on the avocado and brown kitchen appliances, stereo-phonic sound system that can play 78's and fifty-year-old Sears bought furniture in the living room, the kindly widow tells me about her late husband's dusty '69 SS350 Chevrolet Camaro that's buried out in the garage. She's willing to let it go for next to nothing to someone who would really appreciate it too. I fumble for my check book and then the cat jumps on the bed waking me up. Thanks, Ichabod. You just ruined a great dream.
In reality, that only happens in staged YouTube videos where a couple of car chasers find not only a painfully cool car in a garage or barn. Chances are that "Barn Find" is going to be something like this melting, woe-be-gotten, 1972 Ford Galaxie 500 for sale in the Detroit, Michigan area. Well, at least it's a two-door hardtop.
Cost of admission is $1,800 and I guess that's about right for what we call a "basket case" these days. Still seems like a ton. Without getting my hands on it this would appear to be $500 car, when I was a kid, this was a $50 car. Poster of the ad claims it runs and moves. I wonder if the air blows cold?
I like to think there's room in my garage for any cool old bomb, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Despite being a two-door, and a big Ford this GM girl likes a lot, I simply could do not do this. Even at $500 you're setting yourself up for a literal boat or land yacht load of pain. Body work alone might run you ten-grand (to do it right), interior five, retrofitting the air conditioning a good four thousand (on the high end). Tires, rims, suspension, brakes, three thousand. For those keeping score at home we're at $22,000.
1972 Galaxie 500's in decent shape are auctioning these days for around $10,500.
Sure, you could rat-rod it on the cheap and "rattle can" the exterior, but the interior is so bad you'd never want to drive it. Uncomfortable, wobbly, fast old cars are overrated; the novelty gets old literally fast. You want cheap, fast thrills? Head to Coney Island and ride the Cyclone.
More so than Chrysler or General Motors, with cars like the Galaxie, Mercury Comet and Meteor, Ford glommed onto "space names" as interest in the space race reached a fevered pitch in the late '50's through the '60's. Then, we land on the moon and just like that, check please. Even the near disaster that was Apollo 13 couldn't wrangle up enough long-term interest to keep the program going.
I always thought "Galaxie" a cool name for a car; that they deliberately spelled it wrong masked that it was space age related. At least for me anyway.
Ford first misspelled Galaxy in 1959 and through 1974, the nameplate festooned a number of different and massive automobiles. Attempting to figure out where in the Ford lineup the Galaxie was, was always tricky, especially after the introduction of the "XL" in 1962 and LTD in 1965 trim packages. For most of its time on earth, the Galaxie was, warning, incoming pun, "Lost in Space" in the Ford lineup.
Again, GM die-hard I am, I've always thought these '72 big Ford two-door hardtops handsome, the '71's are all but the same. Somehow the "Bunkie Beak" front end works, amazing how Edsel like it is, the subtle coke bottle styling or fluting works well too. In my opinion, Ford's 1973 reboot to accommodate the five-mile-per-hour safety bumpers sent the design to cornfield. Ford let the Galaxie drift into oblivion after 1974 with all full-size Ford's becoming "LTD's" in various guises through 1982.
So, what happens to big old sleds like this? Some yokel will probably chew the seller down and haul it home only to quickly realize what they've gotten themselves into and it will either sit some more, get sold again or someone will have the good sense to call in a flatbed and send it to the shredder.
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