Can We Make a FORGOTTEN Muscle Car Run After 33 Years in Storage!?

ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of junkyard digs today we are standing by a random storage unit in the middle of the state of kansas for a very good reason it's this okay good it's the right one this here is a 1972 oldsmobile cutlass s four barrel air conditioned car vinyl roof everything this car has been off the road since 1987 and it is a one owner car until today it's been sitting right here in this storage unit for nearly 20 years we're gonna pull it out wash it up see if we can get it to run maybe and then load it on the trailer and head home because chances are it's not gonna ever drive itself home the way it's sitting right now so without further ado let's get this nugget drug out and see if we've struck gold [Applause] okay i am not irish so like i said this is a 72 oldsmobile cutlass ass one owner car with either 20 or 120 000 miles on it i bought this absolutely sight unseen sitting on my couch in iowa while this car is down here in a storage unit near topeka kansas true story from the looks of the pictures i got it's pretty solid this is actually the first time i'm seeing it right now and it is indeed pretty solid looking got this s yeah there's a little hole here bottom of the door looks good there's a vinyl top car which scares me but like the vinyl is good you know what i like about this car so far there's no signs of it being flooded or on fire don't say those words don't don't do behind you how about you knock on it judging by like the age of this building i wouldn't even think this building's been up for 20 years but judging by the amount of dust staying on top of the car yeah this thing has definitely been here for 20 years she's pretty damn clean though well okay now that i say it it needs a quarter panel oh it's gold with white interior and then a black dash that's odd smells like mothballs wow this thing is really nice under the hood we have a old mobile v8 it has a uh rochester quadricep four barrel i actually have another one these cars i have a 70 cutlass s with a 350 that came with a two barrel so that's interesting this one's a four barrel i wonder if it's not a 350. i wonder if it perchance might be bigger gm 301 350 four barrel so yeah it's a 354 barrel if that matches that this is a beautiful car i'm pretty excited about this thing um what concerns me is this thing it's been sitting for 30 years isn't gonna spin over do we work on it first or drag it out and let's first work on it first see if she's stuck oh yeah i'll get the breaker bar so buying a car aside on scene there was two things with this that scared me one it's been sitting forever i don't know if the motor's locked before i purchased it two it's a vinyl top and i couldn't tell if there was actually a roof left or not final top part looks like it's pretty okay because i don't see any rust in this valence which means the roof probably survived as well if it's truly been dry for the last 30 years but here's the big test [ __ ] here's what we can do we can take the um fan off that'll give us more room with this breaker bar and then we can soak the cylinders in atf and pb blaster and all that good goo see if she'll free up is this thing on kevin don't use this hello it's time for booger scope all right let's see if this is even worth our time let's pop the board scale down a cylinder here and see what we can see well those weren't tight at all it's going to be one of those mystery stuff engines where it's stuck but it's not stuff it's not rusty it looks fine apologies for the audio we're literally right next to a highway apparently and it's also a little so literally everything we don't want we're doing our best for those of you who asked what brand this is it's a test long boar scope i think you just get on amazon that i want to say they're about a hundred bucks really nice self-powered unit that records video and pictures and all that the cylinder walls look pristine there's no cross hatch left so i believe 120 000 but everything looks fine why does this not turn over let's check another cylinder let's head on inside and see what we can find holy crap down here [Music] oh this one's pistons all the way at the top okay well i think i see a bit of brown there oh no that's the wall right there and it looks amazing it's probably another case of stuff below the pistons where it's rusty but that thing looks really clean inside this car has evidence of having been really dry the last however many years let's pull the radiator and stuff out of the way so we can get to that crank bolt and then we'll pull the spark plugs and throw some goo down them see if we get this thing to spin over because i was a little discouraged at first but now that i've seen inside that motor more i don't know why it's not spinning and it could be something like a stuffed starter again who knows we'll look into everything [Music] mooc is going to work on getting the four nuts off the front of the water pump pulley so we get the fan off and get a little more room to get a breaker bar in there my curiosity has gotten the best of me first of all what the hell is this i don't know i want to see what's in the trunk of this car oh a couple of black 72 kansas license plates hell yeah i wish they were iowa plates the carpet's still in the trunk some parts some oil filters really good looking metal though from what i can see is that awesome you guys ever come across one of these cars do it a favor and clean that out right there on the trunk because that's what rots these when they're sitting out in the woods oh my [Applause] looks god she's actually got some patina to her a little bit of oxidization but damn this thing this thing's a survivor let me tell you i'm not first one of three four math is hard we were really tired we were packing for this trip to like three then we got off at five to drive here so stick with us on this one folks it's gonna be a wild ride yeah might as well bring this over thank you tang tools for sponsoring the shelf keeps us turning wrenches check them out tanktoolsusa.com for some excellent tools at affordable prices alternator well since we don't even know if this thing is going to run we're just going to cut the air conditioning belt but i got the others off you can see how long it's been sitting for they uh held their shape entirely [Applause] looking at it i think we should probably just remove all this fan shrouding too give it a little more room [Applause] and even the rubber like flap to seal every little bit of air to go through the fan are still here i don't think i've ever even seen those before like actually present this thing is a time capsule wow instead of being rusty under it it's like perfect paint look at that what the hell okay now we got way more room in here and our water pump [Applause] why is he like sticky nice ben okay makes me question a few things all right let's get the breaker bar on this and see if we can make any difference [Applause] oh see that it moved a little bit will this be the first stuffed motor we're ever actually able to get to run on junker digs ow my elbow [Applause] let's pull these spark plugs out and get some juice down those cylinders try to get everything freed up maybe while that's sitting we can pull the valve covers and see if we have valve train that's holding those up which is going to be a nightmare on that side because of that air conditioning condenser and you know it doesn't work either it's just in the way big and old and floppy before you guys ask we did check if there's oil on this and there is in fact oil in there it looks awkwardly like brand new does not smell new right spark plugs and goo go one bolt at a time this car is making me lose my mind but we'll have a route before we need to go home i'm a beautiful singer johnny cash would be proud i've got these four spark plugs out and i sprayed a bunch of pb blaster down there i uh i ran out of pv blaster so we got to make a trip in the town um but yeah this starts showing signs of life we might as well go get some other parts too because i didn't bring a side post battery because they're terrible i forgot gm runs those because they're so terrible so i'm just going to cut these off and make them regular posts the way god intended luke is taking the ac compressor off because that's going to be in her way no matter what we try to do so away she goes everybody just leave [Applause] this will be another air-conditioned cutlass i have with no working air conditioning which if you want to see videos of that car um the boss garages channel i'll link it right up here series they did of last year's power tour pretty damn good videos really well edited worth the watch go check them out okay yeah there's a uh there's an amount of mouse nest in here just let that go back to the environment be free [Music] in my line of work when you see an industrial sized can of pv blaster you purchase an industrial sized canopy blaster so i'm going to fill these up with this and then maybe top it off with a bit of atf and then we're going to get to work on pulling those valve covers and the distributor and whatever else is attached to an engine that spins that may be causing it to get held up dead mice yeah not gonna lie we cheated this time we got this nice sunshade and finally used it set it up is that asphalt's warm and there's obviously no airflow in here so also not gonna lie those 99 margaritas are starting to look real nice they are oh yummy look at that wow that's nasty so this is definitely a 120 000 mile car not a 21 000 mile car um she's a little a little gross inside not gonna lie had a lot of miles put on in 10 years so someone really liked it and drove the hell out of it and then i believe the guy passed away and they just parked it it's probably about time for an engine rebuild especially at 120 000 miles because that's it's a lot of miles on an old engine so three three three three i don't know three three three not too sure about that guy but while i'm in here i'll get this hose in here and get some pbe on all those valve guides because if they're not stuck they're still probably not happy i'm gonna get some pv blaster to uh travel down those push rods into the lifters maybe oh my side has the pcv valve that's why it's so poopy so that's why this one's so clean so a little bit of science here for you that i guess i've probably never really talked about pcb valves positive crate case ventilation they hook into the bottom of the carburetor specifically on this one right about there that big hose in the center of the screen they are basically a controlled vacuum leak that pulls the gases and stuff floating around in the bottom of the engine back into the engine to be recycled and re-burned they also help the piston ring seal the wall because they make a negative pressure in the bottom of the engine now the side with the pcv valve will usually be messier because clean air comes in through this tube through the breather to the filter into this tube down this side of the engine across then out this side so it's wafting all those oily fumes right up on this side which is why it looks like a burnt violet i just have one correction yeah it's pronounced carpentator oh the base of the carpet he'll build a new girl you gotta clean it with a corn cob okay so we are removing the distributor cap here and see if the sucker happens to be froze up and see if i can tell from above i don't have no idea we'll figure out that firing order stuff later i'm sure it's just one eight four three six five seven two because gm i'm sure it's actually eight six seven five three oh nine but you know all right well i'm not moving much but it does feel weird the whole time i'm moving there's a definite noise from somewhere in the engine block like like something doesn't want to move so we're going to take a moment play around with this see if we can figure out what that noise is and see if we get the sucker freedom we'll be back so i got the inspection cover off on the trans and i've got a pry bar on the flywheel teeth because my uh my crank bolt was getting too loose up front to where it was just flying back and forth from being tightened so much so moved on to this now i um i'm able to roll it backwards it's making some weird noises in the middle of the block so who knows but i'm going to keep trying to spin this back and see if we can get a little farther than we had before it feels like we are so i've got a lot more leverage here because of the gear action i'm by turning the flywheel gears with a screwdriver [Applause] oh hang on a little better oh hey i might have done it oh never mind [ __ ] that's another hard spot oh no yeah she's moving she's moving pretty good she's moving really smooth now oh it's also dropped oh jesus what the [ __ ] it's dumping oil down my arm where's this oil oh it's pv blaster i need a rag so i forgot cylinders are full of bb blaster that's it's rotating it's pushing it all out of the cylinder into my armpit like specifically my armpit but i think that may have done it where am i there was a real tough spot where she was sitting but once she started going she started going oh look at that i think there's still a few spots wherever those wings were sitting we got to get past that a few times so every time i come back in contact with it it'll get hard again but i might be able to break through man that uh that large pry bar on the flywheel seems to really do the trick which gotta hand it to gm and mopar the inspection covers are way better where you can actually do that can't do it on board i don't know what that uh screaming squeak noise is your horn apparently obviously what the heck there's a dragonfly in our thing [Applause] yeah see this is why the crank is not the ideal way to do this so it looks like i need to uh go back under the pry bar for a little longer there's a tight spot just work it through it keep on keeping on moving faster so i gotta move pulling on the pry bar well i'm rolling the teeth over i think we've done rotation by now if not we're getting close because it's pissing pv blaster all over my face out of pretty much every every hole so uh there you go [Music] that's all you keep going pull hard mounted up again all right i'm at the hose oh yeah i'll let you reset tricky spot right there yet yeah all right at the hose basically this went on for another 15 minutes until we were able to do about three total rotations yeah i think we've done at least a rotation a half of that two and there's not much for tight spots i mean there's a couple like the problematic spots are not just tight spots i can just about turn the motor over all the way from up here now so let's keep working this and eventually i'm going to get the starter involved to where we can zing it to where it sticks like that right there and then after it sticks roll it back hit it with speed again until it blows everything out [Applause] [Applause] okay there's the soft spot i'm gonna dump a little atf down the cylinders to actually be a lubricant in there instead of just a penetrant in the meantime while that's sitting i will put normal battery terminals on and we'll throw a battery in this and see what happens come here mr campbell let's go for adventure my brain is frying i'm losing my mic that was beautiful okay [Applause] please don't burn to the ground that would suck all around for once i haven't actually spent enough time inside just fine papers or anything like it i opened the door and went oh that's a cutlass white interior better not touch it but uh we're told it was parked in 87 which would be math is really hard right now you're born in 95 you're 25. hey that's a secret i'm 700 years old so this should be potentially the first time to see power in like 33 35 30 years you know somewhere in the 30s all right let's see if anything inside this sucker works buzzer wow [Applause] yeah 87 seems about right first thing i see okay [Applause] got an alternator light [Applause] the radio works okay the big question [Music] the horn works really well how about headlights and taillights we got taillights i don't know if i can press it far enough because it seems i love blinkers yep no freaking way okay let me close the door and not be in the nice white interior no giant dust bunnies so majestic okay so i'm gonna go inside and tap the starter i expect to do half a crank and then stop so here we go ready ready that was worse than anticipated bless you [ __ ] everywhere triple homicide all over the walls it was 20 years [Applause] roll the motor back back [Applause] we'll hit it again it's good to hit a good strong starter though ready ready there it is that went way better than i was hoping more [Applause] oh there she be all right let's fill these cylinders again for the night pack up go get some more sleep and like 46 showers let these soak overnight come back get around tomorrow my armpit burns so bad maybe you don't put pee pee blaster in it gallons of it maybe you don't do that i'm whoops i'm whoops well it's day two here at the cutlet survival we got some sleep finally we're running on eight hours of sleep instead of two this thing sat overnight with some pb blaster in the cylinders so we're hoping it's a little freed up today uh we bought a broom and some more rags and stuff to clean up the floor when we're done and we're hoping to have this running by the end today and then tomorrow work on tires and maybe even breaks and then see if we can in fact try to drive this home still looking like a slim chance seeing that that was a totally seized motor i'm sure it's gonna give us a lot of problems once we get it going but you never know so with that being said let's go ahead and put a battery back in it see if it cranks any better today and make a big mess again [Laughter] that's good all right ready yes here can you crank it i want to see how fast it's spinning what i'm worried about is by the time we get plugs in it it'll be uh too slow to start not super fast we're gonna need a lot of battery for this one but uh hopefully after a couple heat cycles that starts to free up and maybe it gets better what do you what you're doing our shade is leaving us it's going to fly away it did scoot a little bit do you want to see this giant spider i found yeah i tripped on it [Applause] oh now you can see we got a quadricep four barrel here so she cranks let's see if we have spark i mean the ignition syst the electrical system this car is so good i might just have to like replace the points and be like ta-da we're done so these work by interrupting the ground to the coil which means they should be sparking right now and then if you look right here they're not nope if i if i ground it out it does so it's got power to it the points probably just need replaced or sanded i think i have some emery cloth over there but uh we'll clean these up then we move forward seeing if we can get a sparkly to fire off advanced mechanisms not froze up everything moves just fine this car is really really well stored it's like it was just parked but covered in poop and stuff there's our points cleaned up a little bit let's see if that made a difference i bet this sucker works okay our points are clean our ignition is hot let's test the coil for power well our coil's hot let's see what happens when i reach in there and open the points all i'm doing here is putting one end of my test light on the negative post and the one end on the pods of post the coil i'm going to reach it with a screwdriver and open the points and as you can see they work not only that we can see a little flash right before they go out this brighter that's the coil discharging so what this does while those points are connected right now it gives a ground and a positive to the coil which produces electricity inside this coil it builds up a charge when you remove that ground and interrupt it really fast like you saw that break flash for a second it discharges all the power stored up in that coil out the core in the center which is this post right here that comes out the center which is the spark plug wire that goes to the center of the cap now we can actually test that coil while we're here too you can test just the coil by putting 12 volts to the positive and ground to the negative and interrupting that ground by just brushing it on something and it will shoot a spark out of this you can do this on a bench you can do this in your bedroom you can do it wherever to test it it's very simple circuitry don't hold on to this that's 10 000 volts it's not going to kill you not going to hurt you it's just get a tickle really bad i'm going to do this by keeping the points in play i'm literally gonna interrupt that sparks name is brushing a wire against the ground by opening those points [Applause] see it right there [Applause] that means our coil is good and our points are good and we should totally have spark when this thing turns over i guess at this point we put the spark plugs back in and throw some card cleaner down and see if it fires already ah it seems like way too early for that but let's do it so mook's putting in her last spark plugs i've got three of mine and then on cylinder number one i have a compressor a compression tester hooked up because why not tester the box come in at one so she's going to tighten hers down and then we'll see if this thing has compression there's two things i'm worried about a it doesn't have compression because it's you know serious and the rings are all stuck in two and two it has such good compression that it can't crank anymore and then d um bonking bonking kevin jumped into water underwater is very cold today that's what ice does to it thank you to watch this in here ma'am the bonco holder and hope that it cranks over and if it does hope it gets to like you know 90 100 climb to almost 80. it went once and then it stopped well it jumped to like just below 60 and then also there was a loud squeak right away must have brought the squeaky hammer let's try again where's all the smoke from well it still turns over not very well but it still turns over let's um put the spark plugs in and see if it lights off it's gonna be a struggle i can already tell let's do it all right we've got the spider going in this spider's got webs all over them this should maybe fire off for a second maybe so i'm not worried about there being no valve covers and this way i can see if it's moving oil give it something to eat a burrito that's plenty but there's a lot of oil in there so here goes nothing first start attempting 33 years man okay so we took our cap off our point said we're kind of sitting funny or something they quit sparking we're gonna try this again brake cleaner seems to be uh drying it out a little bit to where now one of our cylinders is squeaking probably wants a little more oil but we'll see what this does this motor obviously is can get rebuilt so i'm not too worried about maybe hurting it because it's pretty hurt already [Music] so there it made a little noise which is pretty impressive i'm going to throw a little more down through run the throttle and luke is gonna do the um the key for us go ahead [Music] try that go again your firing's ready go again [Music] fire it's on fire a little bit not gonna lie either our firing order is wrong or our timing's way off let's do it give it one more we're just bonfire go [Music] ahead you're very good stop oh maybe i should tighten our battery terminal okay i've redone some stuff on our negative wire should help with that grounding issue let's try it again go ahead go ahead [Music] doesn't sound very good on the bottom head go ahead [Music] there we go still no smoke out there that's really weird especially since we put so much oil in it all right go again there we go i'm just smoking now yep all right one more i still don't see much for oil up here you don't have to have an oil gauge in there do you i don't think you do you have an oil light okay tell me if your oil light goes off when it fires up go ahead try again one more time all right well i find myself back under here oh boy looks like you got the littlest bit of heat and got stuck again i don't know move this doesn't feel happy oh no come on cutlass no i think she's done no like it turns a little bit but if it it got a tiny bit of heat into it by running for like two minutes and then stuck so there's no hope to ever make this run i don't know how people do these revivals where they have seized cars and they get them running because we're oh for three and this is the closest we've ever got this thing is dorked it's sputtered a bit i mean i could spend three weeks like oiling this but we have like two days that's it until we have to go back home for the whole trip yeah we're a day through so i don't know if we're gonna get this one going oh god i think it's even worse now not a happy camper i can still spin it but not much and it is tight oh all right it might crank now i don't know let's try to run it on gas this time that's a good idea look at this beautiful tire oh [ __ ] perfect and then there's kevin okay let's try the gas this time might be a little more a little bit prettier definitely a word don't google it all right let's see if she pranks go ahead again no there's no hope there's no point in trying it's dead something probably literally failed inside i'm able to spin it far enough backwards we might be able to take a run at it and break through okay go for it crank it drag it very [Music] all right good let me see if i can fill the bowls here that was the longest ring okay that's going to be beyond floated go ahead [Music] why what oh that didn't sound good very good [Music] hang on they actually idled let me fill the bowls again i don't i don't think that's that's funny for quite some time for just the amount of gas that's in the bowl is that running off the tank you got an oil pressure light no this might be running off old gas trying to give it a little wrap nope that might be running on old gas no way hang on try it again that's running on 30 year old gasps a little oil over here not much okay well it's proven to me who wants to live that thing just ran on 30 year old gas i wonder if someone had to put gas in it at some point in the middle of its life of city and try to get it to run or something because better that's just how good old gas is compared to today's gas but i did not put that much fuel in the bowls that means the fuel pump works the tank works all the plumbing works the flow bowls work the carburetor the only thing that doesn't work is the accelerator kevin it's a carbon tater car the carbon tater works the only thing that doesn't work is the accelerator pump that's insane that was a seized motor this is freaking nuts holy cow okay let's let this air out because it's really smoky what we do next great fires margaritas let's take a trip into town let's get an oil pressure gauge some oil and oil filter uh valve cover gaskets and whatever we would need and maybe a carb rebuild kit i did bring a holley we could stick on but that thing works so maybe i just pop the top off and replace the plungers for the accelerator pump and she'll be good to go but let's hang around till this thing cools off and quit smoking so we know it doesn't catch on fire and burn this place down and then see what we can do to make this run better and be sealed up and oil itself and all those good things that's insane i have oh that's crazy no bugs it's stuck it was seized again and now it idles on 30 year old gas i'm not shooting you guys i did not make this up this car has sat here since 19 who knows what we need to dig through and find some papers but they told me it sat here for 20 years and judging by the amount of dust all over this car and what we saw from the back i absolutely believe it i can't make this [ __ ] up guys this is not fake that really happened this is absolutely real and nothing you've ever seen on the screen of junkyard digs has been faked in the history of the channel besides your accents at least scene i'd say that's a good conclusion for episode one i just saw a really big spider so there we went from seeds to running successfully for the first time on this channel with that being said we're gonna end part one here to see us attempt to drive this sucker either to the nearest o'reillys around the block or maybe a few hundred miles home to iowa make sure you check out the rest of this series we'll see you next week right here on junkyard diggs thank you to mook for all the help make sure you subscribe to her channel junkyard move which is right up here subscribe to all my friends thunderhead289 dylan the cool classic mustangs 429 cars and cameras bosch garage vice grip garage the whole gang and dr bob dr paul who's that we'll see you next time on joe carr diggs peace boogers get the boogers go i'm not getting the poker scope you are no fun give me the booger scope it's what the people want how about booger nope booger scope i'll say nose too you

Channel: Junkyard Digs

Views: 970,990

Rating: 4.8939924 out of 5

Keywords: junkyard, digs, first, start, in, years, old, cold, revival, road, trip, revive, roadkill, muscle, car, olds, oldsmobile, cutlass, 1972, 1970, 1971, forgotten, abandoned, neglected, storage, unit, storred, time, capsule, 33, 30, 30+, many

Id: miwoiAmWW58

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tcpip4lyfe]

The girl is weird.