Excepting half a year in Pennsylvania when I was a very young child and a few scattered years in southern Illinois between birth and early grade school, most of my life has been spent well west of the Mississippi River. In fact, outside of those exceptions, I tended to stray no further than the section of Colorado between the mountains and the start of the prairie and if if I must be honest, I’d rather be there. One of the first things I got to deal with when I moved to Kentucky at the tail end of 2013 was that anything that is from about Louisville, Kentucky northward that rolls on four wheels is absolutely riddled with rot. The first time I drove through Cincinnati and again through Columbus, I was left aghast…1990s Rams that looked like they had been driving through the Gulf of Mexico for years, GM full-size vans that looked acid-dipped, and Ford Crown Victorias that actively dusted out rust as they went over expansion joints in the Interstate. Ohio rot scares the hell out of me. Badly.

I know that Ohio sprays salt heavily during the winter, but what the entire state suffers from is beyond saline spray. This 1966 Shelby GT350H hasn’t seen the roads in over forty years, which is a bit of a shame for a Rent-A-Racer. It sat outside, in the elements, under a tree, over mostly rough ground. And every gearhead in unison cringed…that’s a recipe for metal cancer if there ever was one. And this Shelby has it, in spades. Happily, this Shelby is on it’s way to a multi-year restoration that will involve more metalwork than we care to think about. But before this beast gets shoved into it’s teardown spot, it has to be extracted. And we’ve seen photos of cars literally ripping in half due to a lack of structural integrity and enough rot to scare even the most die-hard individuals. It’s not so much an extraction as it is a full-on scientific excavation. Check this out: