The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

is getting worked on but my cars, so I’m not quite sure what the hell hap- pened there. We’ve gotten some pretty cool cars to work on. We’ve done two of the FIA cars from Europe and we’re working on one of the Sebring cars right now. There’s a lot of cool stuff. SAAC: David Kirkham in Utah is building some very nice cars, nicer than any Cobras being currently built. In fact, I’m amazed that the supply hasn’t outpaced the demand. Maybe that’s because the value of the original Cobras has taken off and is presently around a million dollars or more and they are beyond being affected. But be- tween the Shelby CSX4000 cars, the Kirkham cars and all of the other replicas, we keep waiting for the bot- tom to fall out of the market, but now we’re not sure it ever will. SERB: I sell a lot of parts. I’ve got a little website and we sell some parts. And I buy or make 50 of something and I think, well, there’s a lifetime supply and I’ll never run out of those. And after a year I have to reorder them. A lot of that stuff we make our- selves. We built all of the tooling to make bumpers; that was like sending a man to the moon. But we sold out of the first run. And I don’t know where they’re going. SAAC: It’s like guys restoring Shel- bys. They’re selling a lot more parts than there are cars, so you know they’re going on to Mustangs. I know that more Cobra valve covers have been made than were ever made in the 1960s. And they keep selling them. SERB: Kirkham has built more cars than Shelby back in the day. They’ve sold more 289s and 427s than Shelby did. And now they’ve doubled the price, so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. The supply is very limited coming out of Poland and the demand is still very high. SAAC: They do a good job and nobody can complain about the quality. SERB: They used to be a lot of bang for the buck. I’m not so sure any more. They have doubled the prices two or three times now, mostly because of the supply chain problems we’ve been having. It’s still a great aluminum recreation. SAAC: Well, we know that very few original parts will fit on a lot of origi- nal cars. When they built the cars in England back in the early ‘60s, they didn’t have templates to match the fenders together. The guy making the right fender was a different guy from the one who was hammering the left fender out and a lot of the dimensions didn’t match exactly. The cars were so rare that nobody really put two or three of them together to compare them. SERB: That falls under the title of “hand-built.” What happened at AC Cars is very interesting. AC didn’t build the bodies. They subbed it all out. So, they had three or four subcon- tractors and they had three or four dif- ferent bucks. So the bucks weren’t the same. One might be higher on the right side and the other was higher on the left side. The 289 noses were all over the place on those early cars. The bucks were that way. A whole run was made that way. SAAC: People don’t realize it but when you use a buck over and over again, the dimensions start to change. SERB: If you make the buck out of wood, it can. Because we’ve made so many bodies we’ve had to go back and replace all of the jams with steel. And the leading edge of the nose is all steel now, because it just gets pounded on, day after day. SAAC: There’s a whole “story behind the story” about the Cobras that peo- ple don’t really know about, unless you work with them every day. SERB: Those guys were some of the best craftsman on the planet. We’ve spent thirty or forty years trying to copy what they did. They were really good craftsmen. They would work for AC Cars for six months and then go and work for Rolls Royce. They had their little groups of guys and they would just subcontract them out. There was a whole cottage industry just making body panels. AC Cars was mostly World War II tooling. If you look at what they used to build those cars with, it was ancient. There was no technology whatsoever, even into the ‘60s. Nothing at all. It was pretty crude. SAAC: At that point it didn’t really have much to do with Shelby. SERB: It had nothing to do with Shelby, really. All the way up to the day he died, I don’t think he fully ap- preciated them. SAAC: Others have said the same thing. He really didn’t know what he had and just saw it as a stepping-stone to get into Ford’s pocket. SERB: Yes, and he did very well at that. SAAC: He was the right guy who came along at the right time. SERB: As a few of the old timers from The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 42