This is the Snap-on tool trolley that was in that famous glass pavilion garage in the iconic 1980s movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
After filming wrapped, it was given to the garage’s owner, who then later gifted it to a mechanic who had restored one of his cars. The tool chest was then based in a professional classic car garage for decades and saw regular use – it’s now being offered for sale out of Des Moines, Iowa.
Above Video: This is the famous scene where the “Ferrari” goes out backwards through the glass. At the 15 second mark you can see this Snap-on tool trolley on the lefthand side.
History Speedrun: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The car Cameron Frye’s father kept in that glass garage in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was introduced as a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spider. Ferrari built 56 of the short-wheelbase cars, on top of 50 earlier long-wheelbase examples. They were far less expensive back then, but they still cost enough that even in 1985 no-one was going to toss one into a ravine.
The film’s director (and writer and producer), John Hughes, turned to Modena Design & Development, a small shop in El Cajon, California, run by Neil Glassmoyer and Mark Goyette, for three California Spider replicas to handle the driving and stunt work. Hughes had read about the company in a car magazine and personally called them on the phone – as the Henry Ford Museum tells it, Glassmoyer hung up on him, assuming a prank.
The production leased one finished car and bought two more – a partly completed car and a rolling shell. The two runners split hero and stunt duty between them, the rolling shell was the car that went out the window.
For the tight insert shots, where the camera first finds the car parked in the garage, the production rented a genuine California Spider.
Under the fiberglass body of the replicas sat a steel tube frame, and in the leased car a 302 cubic inch Ford V8 pulled from a 1974 Torino, driving a 3-speed automatic. It wasn’t quite as exotic as the Colombo V12 from the Ferrari, but then again, that was the whole point.
The garage used in the film was real – it was David Haid’s 1974 Pavilion at Ben Rose’s Highland Park house, and it sits cantilevered over a ravine. Its original glass was carefully removed for the stunt and later reinstalled, with breakaway glass standing in for the crash scene.
Here you can see the tool chest on the left, it was gifted to the garage owner after filming wrapped.
Haid, the architect, supervised the proceedings personally, having told the crew that cracking a single window meant replacing all 24 of them. Producer Tom Jacobson recalls Rose asking what kind of car would be going through it, hearing the answer, and remarking that he’d previously owned one himself.
Ferrari sued Modena after the film was released. The case settled out of court and Modena no longer offered the model for sale. Original surviving Modena cars are now closely associated with the film and it’s helped their resale values – one of the cars from the film also sold in 2023 and we wrote about it here.
Interestingly, the crashed Modena shell sold at Heritage Auctions in December of 2022 for $337,500. Whoever bought it now has quite the conversation piece for their garage (or living room).
The Snap-on Tool Trolley Shown Here
This Snap-on roll cab and matching upper box served as a set dressing inside the glass pavilion garage in the legendary ’80s film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The pavilion belonged to Ben and Fran Rose of Highland Park, Illinois – it’s almost certainly the most famous private garage in American film, and this tool chest was sitting in it as the Hollywood cameras were rolling.
The scene that this tool chest appears in is the one remembered vividly by anyone who’s seen the film. It’s well-known that the car in the film wasn’t a real Ferrari (genuine 250 GT SWB California Spiders were already far too valuable to risk) so the production used purpose-built fiberglass replicas on a modified chassis, one of which was sacrificed in a rather spectacular fashion for the garage stunt.
The crew replaced the pavilion’s floor-to-ceiling glass with Hollywood breakaway panels, laid a track across the floor, and used a winch cable to pull the car backward off its jack stands and out through the window, where it fell into the ravine below.
Cameras were positioned everywhere because there was only going to be one take, and they had to get it. When production wrapped, director John Hughes gave the Snap-on set to the garage owners as a gift.
The toolbox left the house in 1989, Ben Rose had thrown a rod in his 1937 Frazer Nash-BMW 328 at Road America and asked David Cooper to rebuild it. Cooper was just starting his restoration business and had no workshop, so Rose let him work in the glass pavilion.
It was a difficult place to restore a car – limited power, not a lot of space, no air compressor, and a steel roof that soaked up the heat. The squirrels outside the glass could be distracting too.
When Cooper opened his own shop in Chicago three months later, Rose gave him the toolbox as a gift.
This is the Snap-on tool trolley that was in that famous glass pavilion garage in the iconic 1980s movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Cooper kept it in daily use across his workshops from 1989 until 2025, and it was still in his shop when he wrote about the restoration for Sports Car Market in July of 2016. The current seller bought it direct from Cooper in 2025, and it comes with a notarized statement of provenance in Cooper’s own hand, along with the referenced SCM article.
The trolley rides on lockable casters, the drawers lock and are fitted with black liners, and the whole set is now offered at no reserve out of Des Moines, Iowa. You can visit the listing here if you’d like to read more about it or place a bid.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
