What would you do if you were given the opportunity to haul home a ’34 Ford five-window Coupe shell for free? It would be pretty awesome, given that an original shell is pretty hard to come by these days.

When Michael Behrendt saw the shell, he knew that he could make it look just how he wanted with the right combination of parts, as well as attention to detail. Behrendt looked up the owner and tried to buy it numerous times over the years, but had no success. One day, when the owner was preparing to move to Colorado, he told Behrendt that if he really wanted it, he’d just give it to him. “He came up to me and said, ‘If you still want that old car, I’ll just give it to you … if you promise you’ll give me a ride in it when you’re through with it,’” Behrendt explained in The Wichita Eagle.

After a loss of a close friend six years ago, Behrendt started working on the car, not because he had to, but because it was somewhat therapeutic for him. When he was a kid, he built a model of a Ford coupe similar to this, which he used as inspiration for this project.

• 
• 

There is so much going on in Behrendt’s ’34 five-window coupe, that we don’t even know where to start. It’s got an awesome Halibrand quick-change rearend, equipped with 4:11 gears and ’47 Ford axle housings that we fell in love with at first sight. For power the car employs a 1950 Oldsmobile Rocket V8 displacing 303-cubic inches and ingesting air through a stock two-barrel back-draft style carburetor.

For more information on this beautiful beast, check it out here!