Junkyard Find: Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow
Most of these Junkyard Finds come from big chain-owned self-service wrecking yards that have fast inventory turnover and plenty of fresh cars at all times. This means that I’m going to see lots of Volvo 240s in California, lots of old Subarus in Colorado, and millions of acre-feet of Tauruses and Sables everywhere. Oddball high-end stuff shows up, too, like the occasional Maserati or every Jaguar XJ-S ever made, but you just aren’t going to see a Rolls-Royce in this type of yard… until now.
The Silver Shadow is the least valuable Rolls-Royce, and you can find project-grade examples for the price of a beater Tercel. But they’re still rare, and their parts tend to be worth enough that most won’t make it through the auction process that filters out semi-valuable cars before they go for the standing lowball offer from the U-Wrench-It bidder.
We’ve had a Silver Shadow in the 24 Hours of LeMons, of course; it was purchased for $1,000 and the champagne cooler or something was sold off to get the price under the 500-buck LeMons limit. Of course, keeping the thing running ended up costing plenty, because you just can’t find Rollers at the cheap self-service yards.
I’m betting that this one showed up at this Los Angeles-area yard as a near-completely-stripped shell, probably after some Silver Shadow restorer grabbed all the good stuff. It’s possible, though, that it arrived with lots of bits still on it and got picked clean later.
Given the absurd thickness of the steel used in these cars, the scrap value is likely to be fairly lucrative for the yard, once the employees decide that there’s nothing left to sell on this car.
The Silver Shadow was built for the 1965 through 1980 model years, the VIN tag was nowhere to be found on this one, and there aren’t many clues about its age. Side marker lights were required in the United States starting in 1968, and the holes for those lights are visible on this car, so I’m going to say it’s a 1968-80 model (it could be a Bentley T-series as well, though the yard labeled it as a Rolls-Royce). Can anybody narrow it down further from viewing photos of this hulk?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
The small rear window suggests a long-wheel-base car. This, in combination with the position of the fuel filler and the shape of the holes for the side-marker lamps and the contours of the wings would make it a Silver Wraith II. How the mighty are fallen...
Reading these comments, I realize that only in writing of the glories of Japanese mediocrity are these commentators well informed.