It’s not too often that a car ravaged by a garage fire is up for sale, let alone with a nearly five-figure asking price. However, when that car was created by a custom car legend, someone may find it worthy of saving. The car we’re talking about is a 1958 Cadillac Brougham that was customized by none other than Bill Hines. Found here on eBay with an asking price of $9,950, the car is in pretty rough shape. What do you think? Is this car worth restoring? Should it be put in a museum as-is? Or?
Classic car customizer Bill Hines was 94 years old when he passed away in 2016. Nicknamed “The Leadslinger,” Hines was a master at melting, applying and manipulating lead to customize car bodies. When modern techniques moved toward fiberglass and body filler, Hines stuck with the lead he knew so well. Small in stature, with a big cigar, Hines lent his talents to countless custom cars over decades in the industry.
The seller describes finding a treasure-trove of really neat memorabilia in the truck of this car. Even though the edges of some of the photos have been scorched by flames, it sure paints a picture of the man behind the car. There’s even a sign that Bill would place at car shows advertising different rates for his autographs!
Here is a photo of what the car once looked like. The beautiful red paint shines and highlights the distinct front wheel openings. It’s a little hard to tell from the post-fire photos what is left of the custom work that Hines did. With the relatively low melting point of lead, you could imagine most of Hines’ best work ended up in puddles on the floor.
Here you can see the roof is nearly caved in. Even if this car is restored, how much of the custom work that Bill Hines did will be preserved? The fire may have also compromised the integrity of the metal. The frame and/or body may not even be usable for a restoration. Do you think this car is worth saving?
Send it to the crusher.
Haul it to the crusher. If they won’t take it, haul it to the dump. It’s a worthless pile of scrap.
Wow, that is just heartless. No offense, but do you even like cars?
Absolutely any car can be saved with enough effort, time, and money. Whether doing so makes sense economically is irrelevant. Anyone who collects automobiles for the sole purpose of making money is in the hobby for the complete wrong reasons, and shouldn’t be considered an enthusiast.
At the very least, this car should be preserved as it is as an artistic/curiosity piece. So no, this car is certainly not “a worthless pile of scrap”.
Man had talent, sadly he and the car have moved on from the mortal coil. He and other builders of the era did an episode of monster garage. Just old hat to them, too bad it was edited down.
Sadly, this is parts for a tribute car at best…maybe?
Plenty of 58 Cadillacs out there yet,and many are affordable still.
This surely was a beautiful custom,done by a very talented
old world craftsman, who will always be an inspiration to many
“custom” builders.Its always sad to see this happen to any classic,
let alone something that had thousands of hours/dollars invested in it.
R.I.P. to both builder and vehicle.
There are no affordable 1958 Eldorado Broughams out there.
The shop photo is like peering into the mind of a madman.
I stripped a burned car once and I’ll never do it again- it’s nasty and creepy.
We should start a burned out car museum.
It goes to show us that everything has a shelf life and I do mean everything. Time is our enemy and in time even great car collections like Jay Leno’s will be gone. The steel in this car will have had a lot of the carbon cooked out of it and it will always be soft now. There simply is nothing left to restore here and I think it’s rather ballsie of the seller to try to capitalize on Bills good name. I say crush it shed it and add it to Coker to make some new steel. If you want a tribute car find another caddy and give it to the next generation of customizer to build it for you. There is new talent out there.
What a terrible shame that a work of art like that should end up this way, it’s painful to look at. Probably beyond repair I’m afraid.
It really doesn’t appear to have any “custom” body features that the 58 Biarritz didn’t have when sold off the showroom floor
The pic shows custom paint, but no obvious modifications to the body
Sadly this is only a parts car at best for the unique Biarritz model
In agreement to crush the rest or sell off souvenirs, maybe a 3×3 piece … not sure there would be many takers
The body looks stock for a ’58 Brougham. Sad end to a very cool car…
do your homework. a 58 brougham is a completely different car than a 58 biarritz except for the drive train,
No matter who built it, sadly it’s scrap now
Wait, wait, WAIT!! I need the fins and rear section for my rattley rod. Ian Roussel could make an airplane out of the rest. And, the Smashed Monkey Boys could turn it into a gasser.
Just like tobacco in a Lucky Strike…it’s toasted!
done
Not rare at this point, well done. What he appears to have done with this one was to restore it. The paint is not original for a Brougham, but the rest appears to be. If it had the original carb setup, that could be worth something, but this car is scrap, maybe the Sabre wheels and bumpers are salvageable. Sad.
Doesn’t look like the fire got down underneath in the chassis or it would be laying frame like a low rider. Still, I think it’s time to have drink to a talented customizer and let what’s left of this go to that car show in the sky.
At least the Dagmars didn’t melt.
I saw that too, some miracle rubber must have been used that later became “Superballs”.( from WHAM-O) BTW, I got reprimanded on another site for calling the bumper guards “Dagmars”. Apparently, the curator thought that was demeaning to women. A little thin skinned, I thought, as that’s what they were called.
http://fanpix.famousfix.com/gallery/dagmar
Remember Tom Medley, the hot rod cartoonist? His last car was a ’40 Ford coupe which burned just a few years ago in one of the large California forest fires. He was in his 90s when it occurred. Well a bunch of California rodders and friends rebuilt it within a year and presented it to him at a major show. Value at completion? Maybe 75k. A club could take this famous car on; value at completion? 125k-150k? Due to its provenance at the least.
they bought another 40 coupe shell and built that for the guy……..the original was all warped .
Fix it!
How about a new site for cars like this. BRING A SHOVEL
Like stated above, the ONLY modifications that seem to have been done were the opened front wheel wells and the color. The rest looks bone stock Eldorado Brougham. There are so many pieces that ONLY fit the Brougham and they are NOT cheap, even if you can find a parts car. The parts car would likely be more restorable than this one. That was a brushed Stainless steel roof panel on those. These cars even came with a flask and a hot glass set in the glovebox with magnetic bottoms so you wouldn’t spill your 12 year old Bourbon.
Nothing left here but a footnote to history.
@karguy james, -front wheel wells are stock. these cars came with 6 shot glasses but no flask.
I used to have the opinion that a burned car would not be salvageable. Now I am not so sure. This car was obviously not toasted so thoroughly that the items in the trunk were destroyed. Paint and glass go quickly with temperature and flame, but steel takes more. Other than the roof, the rest of the body appears to be salvageable.
A couple of years ago I was in a shop that was just beginning to salvage a ’70 SS Chevelle. It had been pulled from a burning garage, on fire itself, and extinguished. Looked pretty much like this Caddy. A few months later, I was back in the shop, and the body was completely stripped and on a rotisserie. The roof had been replaced, the bodywork blast cleaned and straightened, and it was still in bare metal. I thought it looked great, ready for primer.
This is not at all like the Mercedes.
But the seller wants way too much. He might actually find a restoration-interested buyer if the price was 1/5 or less of the current ask.
Sadly I don’t think this one is savable. Or at least *worth* saving.
Google dangers of working on a fire damaged car, the chemicals in the melted interior can combine, if you cut yourself, and this mixture gets into the cut, it will rot the limb, and the only treatment is amputation, Seriously! Nice car, but it needs crushing,
Toast. Sadly, it’s history.
For the right shop it might be savable but I don’t think most could do it.
Truly a shame but it is what it is.
You would be wasting time & money. When a car burns the metal warps. Good luck with that in addition to all the other problems. It had a good run. Now part what you cant if possible.
Good, well done. And where’s my potato and salad?
Should it be saved? Sure, why not. In the hands of someone with the love, the passion & the talent to do it, it could be amazing! Is it priced at least double it’s current value…? Absolutely, not matter who originally built it.
Sadly, I agree that it is past the point of no return. However, I like Dick Johnson’s positive attitude – maybe it can’t be brought back as a car, but could be a donor to other artistic endeavors.
I remember the monster garage episode mentioned above and thinking to myself how each of those men were part of a dying breed. sure there are talented customizers but i dought any could compare with what those men had done.
Unfortunitly even if someone were to try to restore this car it would never be the same. I dont have any answer to the question, should it be restored.
I would hate to know it went to the crusher but?
I agree with the majority as great as Bill was , I don’t think trying to save this car makes any sense. As for Tom Medley’s car it was saved by many local California Hot Rodders and Tom lived just long enough to see it done. However, it was not burnt in a Forrest Fire it was his own garage,when he was trying to start it and it flooded
Use it for a sign on top of a restaurant. “Hines restaurant, we cook all our meats till it’s done”. He truly was one of the greats.
The picture of Bill working on this car is cool, BUT how could you do anything or get anything done in there. What an unorganized mess. I could never work in a shop like that. Sorry just me
There is a certain type of personality which saves way more mechanical pieces, often in what appears to be a haphazard fashion, than would be considered by most to be normal. Amazingly, at least for the life of the saver, those items can come to hand when needed, and ingeniously put to use. Unfortunately, once the hands that stashed them are gone, so goes the usefulness of the items. They pretty much become scrap.
Working in that type of environment does become a serious challenge, mostly because of space. Not saying that I have anywhere near Bill’s skills or vision, but otherwise we do seem to have something in common. *sigh*
Hey Alan- My Dad is like that and I know other people are to. Every tool box, drawer, shelf, coffee can has wrenches, sockets, screw drivers, nuts, bolts, etc. etc., all mixed together. I spent more time looking for things then getting something done. I guess that’s why I try to be better at putting things where they should be.
GP… wait till you get old ( :
The Hines legend and legacy must be preserved.
It was early in the morning of May 5th, 1973, when a barn I was using to keep my antique cars inside while I was serving in the Army, was struck by lightning.
One of the cars inside the barn was a 1956 Packard Patrician sedan. It had been ordered new by a Mr. James Lawson of College Park, MD, as a Caribbean sedan with Caribbean exterior trim and the dual 4 BBL carb engine, along with a triple color full leather interior and 3-tone paint – light blue, dark blue stripe and white top. It was built this way by the Packard factory to Mr. Lawson’s order, at a cost in excess of $8,000.00. It was a very late production car, and by then Packard was willing to do almost anything to sell a car. The car was ordered with ALL available options, including Factory A/C. I know all this because I bought it from Mr Lawson in 1972 for $100. [He wanted me to have the car, because he could no longer drive.]
After the fire & everything had cooled down, I began taking some of the rare pieces off the cars. The dual 4bbl intake manifold had melted carb pieces that had run down past the open valves and into the cylinders. The nuts holding the manifold to the heads were finger tight, and removing the manifold nuts/bolts required no wrenches. The carb linkages had lost all strength, and could easily be bent [with no effort] until they fractured & broke.
Bringing the manifold back to my little shop, I set it on a flat metal workbench, and I quickly realized the heavy cast iron manifold could rock from side to side almost 3/8 of an inch. It was that badly warped.
Not a single piece of metal from any of those 6 cars could be used again on another car. As someone else pointed out; all the carbon had been cooked out of the steel. Weeks later as I watched the car being winched onto the flatbed truck on it’s way to the crusher, I watched as the entire body & frame twisted & sagged in the middle, from the stress of being dragged across the concrete and onto the sloping roll-back bed.
I sold that manifold to another Packard collector who was a machinist. He was certain he could mill the manifold until it was flat once again. later I asked him how the manifold had worked out. He told me that when trying to machine the new surfaces using a mill, the bits kept ripping out chunks of cast iron instead of smoothing it. the cast iron had become too brittle to machine.
Not a single burned part of that 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham will ever meet minimum safety specifications. I’ve restored flooded antique cars that have gone on to achieve top awards. But I would never attempt to tackle a fire car like this Cadillac. It will never be safe to drive.
I met Bill Hines at the West Coast Kustoms Nationals in Santa Maria a couple of times, just a few years ago. I paid for an autographed photo, the man deserved to make an easy buck at his age! I’m glad that he and other classic customizers were rediscovered by a younger generation before they passed on.
Bill ? this Cadillac does not look like it got nearly as hot as that Packard you speak of. The rubber nipples are still in the front bumper and paper pictures survived in the trunk. If papers survived in the trunk, the engine may have survived as well, too bad we don’t have pics of the engine
You know, when I was a kid I made a lot of money fixing fire damaged salvage insurance vehicles.
The only question is: Is the car really worth it ? Ten grand is a bit much, more like three would make it worth the risk.
Seems odd because anyone with any car knowledge know what “Dagmars” means. It’s a very common term.
Don’t profit from it. Turn it into art.make a traveling exhibit and pay homage to the man at car shows
I think the seller notes say it all. There isn’t even enough left to show it is the car the photo or that he actually built that car.
Now reduced to $6800.
Cut that in half, and it might find a home….
sell bits & pieces on e-bay , there is a rusted section of the titanic hull in Vegas, charge a donation to view it , then donate the proceeds to some burn victim or some other noteworthy cause, 400 were built in 1957, 304in 1958, price $10,000, with mink carpeting
I was investigating, and the scratch red picture, wasn’t car that caught fire in a Chicago car show. Bill Hines, had it in fuchsia, it was so cooled. After the car was back in his possession, it had $25,000 for sale. I think, Bill Hines, was so attached that car, that he had a heart attacked and died, after that beautiful car, catch fire. Bill Hines, taught Dick Dean everything he knew. However, in 1957, after Sam Barris, finished Elcapita; George Barris needed somebody be his engineer, so he hired Dick Dean. Then 2015, he reopened the shop for his son, Keith “Kidd” Dean, in South End Kustoms in Long Beach, CA.