(funky rock music)
- We are driving right now on another rainy day
in a modern vehicle because the Woodie
doesn't need to be exposed to any more rain than necessary.
We're going to visit a guy who's invited us
to see the cars he's got in a field behind his shop.
A lot of those cars were parked there 30, 40 years ago,
and they've kinda deteriorated down to a point
where I call them sculpture.
He's got another building filled with cars,
interesting cars that I hope he'll invite us to see,
but no guarantees, so, we'll find out together.
(funky rock music)
Now, I'll let you know that I don't live
terribly far from here, in North Carolina,
and how did I meet this guy?
Well I met him at a car show.
Charlotte Motor Speedway puts on
a big car show twice a year called AutoFair.
And, you know, you go to AutoFair for years,
and you start seeing people,
and you start recognizing people,
and I know, you know, I just met him probably
10, 12 years ago, so we became friendly,
and I said, and he told me, "You know,"
he said, "I know you like to look for old cars.
"I got some old cars you'd wanna come and look at."
Lots of the cars here are not repairable.
He's allowed us to come back here and film some of the cars,
and some of them are pretty darn interesting cars, so,
let's take a look what we have.
(funky rock music)
'63 Ford, fastback, 390.
So it's a 390 Thunderbird motor, four barrel carburetor.
You know, we've seen lots of these on Barn Find Hunter.
'63 is a good looking car, nice car to restore.
(car hood thuds)
(funky rock music)
See there's a K5 Blazer,
which are becoming pretty sought-after these days.
Looks like it'd be a clean body, it's two-wheel drive,
which is unusual.
But now, you know, somebody might want this car
because you could easily lower it.
A four-wheel drive car,
you couldn't slam it down to the ground.
Seems to be in good shape, good body.
Yeah this car looks to be pretty clean and complete,
right down to the hubcaps.
But you can see a little cancer
down here in the quarter panel.
And right here, the floor and the rocker panel,
that needs some work.
It looks to be that this car was painted black.
The original green you can see on the floor there,
it was kind of a metallic olive green.
But, you know, Blazers kind of followed Broncos,
and now it seems like international scouts
are following them as well.
Everybody wants the old original SUVs.
(car door slams)
So like many of the cars we see back there, we'll visit,
they were bought cheap and parked here, and,
for parts or for future projects,
but they've just kinda sat, and they weren't very desirable,
such as this, I mean here's a Blazer.
They weren't too desirable too many years ago,
especially a two-wheel drive Blazer.
But now, you know, this is a pretty darn desirable car.
And it was parked here, and
I don't know how long it's been here
and how long it's gonna be here.
But, you know, these cars are hidden all over the
United States, and all it takes is going behind a shop,
like this one, and maybe you'll find something
similar to what we've found this morning.
A two door.
(car door clicks open)
It says 10,000 miles, so I'd imagine it's 110,000 miles.
You can see the original color.
I remember when they made these cars new.
It's a three door.
Two front doors, and on the passenger side, a third door.
None on this side, I'm not sure if that's rare or not.
So here we have a Suburban, a four-wheel drive Suburban.
What year it is, maybe '72, '74, I'm no expert on 'em.
Accessory wheels, 350.
It's a Custom 20, so I guess the 20 was the
heavier duty suspension.
You know this is gonna be one of those places
where there's just too many cars to spend time on each one,
so we're just gonna have to walk through it,
look at them as a group.
Now here's a 396, now it's a four-door Impala,
and that'd be a sweet motor to take out
and put in something with a better body, for sure.
Corvair.
Couple of Corvairs, convertible, hard top.
So that's an early Corvair, a late Corvair,
another early Corvair, '36 Ford.
There's a '56 Crown Victoria.
No, I'm sorry, it's not a Crown Victoria,
it's a '55 Victoria.
So I think this is a 427 Impala.
So here's an interesting car.
You can see where the emblem was mounted right here.
Checkered flags.
It's an Impala, you know, what year is it?
Probably '67
or so.
This was a factory 427 car.
I don't know if it's still got a motor in it or not.
(grunts)
Yes it does.
A huge old big block.
So, you know, this car is not worth restoring,
but if you could
purchase a car like this,
and then get yourself a, you know,
a Chevelle, another Impala,
a Nova, ooh that'd be killer.
(birds chirping)
You'd pop it in there and you'd have quite a powerful car.
So it seems to have,
oh I guess it was a stick, I guess it was a four-speed car.
It's got a hole in the floor.
You know, what a shame.
It was parked back here probably with the right intentions
of one day restoring it.
(car hood creaks)
Wow.
There's a car back in the back corner,
when I walked through here last week with the owner,
he pointed out a car, and what a shame.
What a shame, but I want to share it with you.
And there's really nothing left of it.
So this is kinda hidden.
I mean, there's a kind of main street.
Turn the camera around this way.
There's kind of a main street just beyond those trees.
But you would never know these cars are here.
You know, like I pass here,
and I probably wouldn't know that these cars are here,
except that the owner invited me back here.
But there's a side road here.
And this side road, if you were to take side roads,
like I advise you to do,
you know, that's how you find the old cars,
not on main roads, but on side roads.
This car was probably,
at one time, the most valuable car in this whole field.
And now it's just a worthless piece of junk.
But this car is a '63 Ford.
This was a 427, this was a factory,
427, four-speed car.
And when he got it, he got it for next to nothing.
When he bought it, it was like, you know,
cheap car, cheap car.
At that time it was not worth restoring, but it was worth,
is selling the engine and transmission out of it.
So he sold the engine, sold the transmission,
sold body parts to it,
and the inner fender panel that's over there,
that would say R on the serial number,
well somebody bought that,
probably transferred that onto another '63,
and they built their own R-Code car, but,
you know, this car, restored today,
would be such a valuable car,
and now it's not worth $10, what a shame.
But that just shows that, you know,
cars that are not valuable at one point in your life,
can become valuable later on.
(funky rock music)
All right so we can go up and do that Pantera.
(funky rock music)
We've been lucky on Barn Find Hunter
to have found a couple of Panteras,
which is, you know, that's kind of a dream.
We found one in New Hampshire,
that was torn apart,
but in pretty solid shape, and needed to be restored.
We found one in North Carolina,
which was, it probably at least needed a paint job.
And now this one.
This is an early Pantera, it's got the small bumpers.
The later ones had big rubber bumpers on 'em.
They were made by DeTomaso, in Italy,
and they were built in conjunction with Ford Motor Company.
So this was to be the latter day Cobra,
if you could imagine that.
An imported car, a European car, with American drive train,
has a 351 cubic inch, Cleveland Engine, mounted midship,
mounted in the middle of the car, transaxle's here,
and then there's a little bit of storage space
for luggage back here.
(car hood bangs open)
Look at that.
Oh, look at that turbocharge sittin' there, ha!
So at some point, somebody had considered turbocharging.
There's a turbocharger,
and a Gale Banks adapter on the intake manifold.
Look at that, and look at those headers.
So I guess those are turbo headers,
and that turbocharger would bolt right on there, I guess.
(car part rattles)
It's stuck on there.
But these cars came with like a,
a panel that fit in here nicely.
It was a carpeted panel,
so you could actually put luggage down here,
and it kept it away from all the engine mechanics,
and grime and stuff.
So this was another place you could store luggage
if you were taking a trip.
(car hood bangs shut)
Pantera's an all steel car,
and if you think about the mentality back in the '70s,
nobody worried about rust, we were worried about horsepower.
These cars weren't galvanized,
they weren't particularly treated
in any special way to prevent rust,
and as a result, Panteras became rust buckets,
unless they were cared for very carefully.
The rear suspension on a Pantera,
they've been known to rust out bad enough
that the car has become undrivable.
See I can't, it's a little bit too dark back here
to see the suspension and the frame rails that go back here,
but they can develop rust.
But the disturbing part about this car
is that there's a seam right across here,
and I'm not sure if that was a body seam
or it was once parked under a place that dripped water,
but there are literally holes in the metal,
the metal roof going right across here,
that I can look down through holes, what a sin.
What a shame.
So that indicates to me, that this car has
problems worse than this.
Around the windshield you can see that there's rust,
at the base of the windshield,
which tells me, there's more on the top.
So really the only way to consider buying a car like this
is to buy it and take every single piece off this car,
everything, everything, every piece of trim,
mechanical component, the interior, the gauges, the dash,
and then dip the car, and get it rust-proofed,
and then start welding from there.
Because this car's gonna require fabrication, for sure.
(car door rattles open)
There we go.
Well that's a Rube Goldberg thing.
Look at that phone baby.
And if this car was last on the road in '78,
it'd make sense because there's a mobile phone in this car,
that'll give you an idea of what mobile phones were like
35 years ago, they were huge contraptions.
It's like the phone that you had at home on the wall,
you'd answer, only it was mounted in a car.
There's dials, and gauges,
and buttons, and a cord,
and below that's an eight-track tape deck.
So, this is definitely of that era.
Under the hood here,
we got a power brake booster,
windshield washer bottle, and a battery,
and a little bit of luggage, you could put a duffle bag,
or maybe two small duffle bags back there,
and in the front here, and then,
there's a little place in the back,
behind the transaxle, or over the top of the transaxle,
where you could store luggage as well,
but not really a GT car.
Not something you'd get in in New York
and drive to LA with very easily.
So, a car like this, it's a debate.
If we think about the car that we saw in New Hampshire,
pretty solid car, rebuilt engine, rebuilt transmission,
but it had to be assembled and needed a paint job.
It needed a fair amount of work,
but it sold for $18,000 at auction, soon after.
Using that as a guide, what's this car worth?
Well it doesn't have the rebuilt engine or transmission,
and it needs a lot of body work.
So if that required $18,000, it probably needed another,
I don't know, $10,000 for a paint job,
and maybe some more for an upholstery job.
So for 18,000, probably for,
somewhere in the mid to high 30s,
they could've had that car on the road,
because a lot of the mechanical work had been done.
This car however,
doesn't have those positive aspects going for it.
What's this car worth?
Well if they're in mint condition,
mint condition, they're probably a $100,000 car.
They never really climbed in value the way,
probably anybody expected,
to follow the Cobras up into the million dollar range.
A car like this, I don't think I'd pay
more than $10,000 for it, because if you bought this car
for 10 grand, and you weren't handy,
if you needed somebody to do the work for you,
you have to start writing a lot of big checks,
and those big checks could add up to 50, $60,000,
at 55 to $75 an hour, plus the parts you'd need.
You could exceed the value of this car
in the restoration cost, so that's the challenge.
You know so, therefore it's sitting here.
(claps hands together)
Probably the owner of this car
doesn't know what to do with it either.
It's not worth fixing,
but it's certainly not worth junking,
so it's another piece of interesting automotive sculpture.
Well if you remember a little while ago,
we walked through a wet field.
Way in the corner of that field,
I showed you what was left of
an old white 1963
Ford R-Code.
Wasn't much left to it,
but if you remember, R-Code was a 427.
Well it's kinda cluttered with stuff here,
and it's probably been off the road for a long time,
but this is an R-Code, 1963 Galaxy, two-door hard top,
the fastback roof, four-speed transmission,
it's got a vinyl top, and it's burgundy right now,
it's got white interior, a nice combination.
It may not have started life as a burgundy car,
it may have been a white car.
But what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna take some of this stuff off the car here,
and open the hood
and show you what a monster 427 looks like,
that you were able to buy as an option
on this car when it was new.
(car hood bangs)
And then there's a secondary lock right there.
(car hood creaks open)
And there's the monster.
I'll put my phone on here for light.
You can take a look, see what it looks like.
So, 427, it's the same looking emblem as on the fenders.
This is a two-four barrel car.
Cast iron, tubular type headers, but they're cast iron.
And this is the kinda car that Holman and Moody,
and other teams, like the Wood Brothers,
back in the '60s would've gotten from Ford Motor Company,
stripped out the interior,
put in a, not a very structural roll cage,
and really gone racing.
I mean these were stock cars,
and this was a, kind of a stock car special.
They're really a piece of automotive history,
and racing history at the same time.
So, what's a car like this worth?
In fair condition, which is probably what this is,
the Hagerty value is, a car like this is $41,000,
in good condition, 57,400.
If it were excellent, or a number two condition, 72,500.
And con core is 91,500, $91,500.
So, you know, this car could, you know,
paint needs work, interior needs work.
So it's probably a car that Hagerty would value at $41,000.
If this gentleman decided to sell this car for $41,000,
he'd have people beating down the door to buy it.
Now look at all these Corvettes.
I mean, you know, this guy has been
restoring Corvettes for decades.
What's an old Corvette worth?
You know, nothing.
There might be chassis that are worth fixing up,
and maybe the occasional body part.
Really a shame.