My name is Tom Cotter,
and I'm the host of the Barn Find Hunter.
You know, a barn find, it's defined as
a forgotten, ignored, and neglected car,
whether it be in a barn or a field,
a carport, a garage, a warehouse.
And I don't like to have leads.
I like to develop leads on the ground,
go drive down the road,
kind of get a feel for the town.
What I look for is not necessarily
the hardware, the car.
It's the story that that hardware develops into.
We're riding around looking for cars
in kind of a commercial area in Midland, Texas.
And there's a field full of mostly Fords.
The owner, Tom Cross,
who owns a swimming-pool business,
that's his private little empire of cars.
He goes and drags them home,
and they've been there for 20, 30 years.
And we just started to walk through,
look at them, and I saw that car.
And then we kept walking away,
and I came back to that car,
and we walked further and further
and looked at this car, this car,
and I came back to that car.
And that's how we found that wagon.
I got compound, I got rags,
and I start buffing out this fender.
And I said, "This car doesn't want to die."
Dust is a big deal out there.
Wind blows endlessly.
So, the good news is there's very little humidity,
so cars don't rust away.
But even if a car is completely closed up,
the windows are closed,
dirt's going to go in there.
After 30 years, lots of dirt goes in there.
It was the body that got me,
because it was in such good shape.
Not perfect, but the original paint.
It didn't look like it had ever been hit
or retouched or anything like that.
Taking off all that old red
oxidized paint with a buffer,
and you get this red gunk all over you.
It did not let me down.
That little patch led to a fender,
led to the whole car.
We put together a work team
of McPherson College students
from McPherson, Kansas, that restoration school,
and we went over the winter.
We worked on it over a quarter of a year.
Tom Cross and all his friends got involved,
gave us engine, transmission, rear end.
His friends rebuilt it.
He had a local hot-rod club donate parts
and time towards the project,
because it was going to a worthy cause.
So we had, really,
it was like building a car from the ground up.
If you can imagine building a hot rod,
you start with a body and a chassis,
and then you've got to add all the components.
We had to do that, because even though there was
a front end there, it had drum brakes.
It needed tie rod ends and ball joints.
So we rebuilt the front end
and put disk brakes on it.
The wiring, the brake lines,
the fuel system, fuel tank, the glass,
I mean, everything had to be at least looked at
if not restored or replaced.
They put disk brakes on it.
We built the 390.
They rebuilt the transmission.
We put Mexican blankets as the seat covers.
And I got to polish the entire car,
not just the one fender.
They put cool wheels on it, cool tires.
It was a much bigger project than I realized
that day when I first polished
a little bit of the fender,
but little by little, it came together.
And a year later, we drove it
from Midland, Texas, to McPherson, Kansas,
and presented it to the school
as a parts-chasing vehicle.
And it's still there today.
And interestingly,
the things we didn't quite finish the way we wanted to,
students at the school have totally reupholstered it,
new headliners, door panels, seat covers,
to factory specs as part of a graduation project.
So, you know, from cradle to grave,
we were kind of in charge of that car,
and it was one of the most
rewarding episodes I can remember.