Detailing Free Disgusting Car Parked in Woods: 1979 Triumph Spitfire

it's gonna be super fun hey guys I want to hop in real quick before the video starts and just give you a huge thank you I just surpassed 1 million subscribers now it's been a long time eight years lots and lots of videos and YouTube just sent me my 1 million subscriber plaque which is really meaningful and it's gonna be pretty cool on the wall so thank you to all of those who subscribe now if you aren't subscribed of course I want you to subscribe to my channel but more importantly subscribe to everybody's channel what I mean by that as as a creator on YouTube the more subscribers that you get the more opportunities you have to film cool things to then share with the subscriber so if you find someone entertaining or educating or helping you in some way please subscribe and sort of help out my fellow creators as always guys thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy the restoration of the Triumph Spitfire this is brian chute he's the head of the race department at speed sport tuning some of you may remember him from the ammo 964 engine rebuild video and jrz suspension installation episodes he works on Porsche race cars daily but doesn't have a toy for himself so he asked if I would take a look at this 1979 Triumph Spitfire in Vermillion red or what's left of one after sitting in the woods behind Speed sports newly-acquired building so when we rented this building over here the landlord said hey there's a car back here I want you guys to to do something with it because I it's been back there for a bunch of years and I don't know what's going on with it I don't want to deal with it anymore I didn't want to see it back they gave it to you so he gave us the car as part of the deal with the building so you know I want to take a look at it and figure out if it's actually worth doing anything - so I called you and see if we can clean up the interior maybe make it shiny again and see if it's worth actually putting so much - I guess we'll find out we'll find out as you can probably tell it was raining really hard and the car lived in a swampy area so I didn't have super high hopes for the interior but at first glance at the paint it looked okay especially when it's wet which it may not look that good when it's dry the tires were obviously flat and sunk into the wet ground and some of the falling branches actually dinged up the paint and the metal panels but it's certainly manageable at first glance to attempt moving the Triumph we first removed the cover revealing a roach doubt moldy and soaking wet interior which wasn't a surprise it does smell awful then we filled up the tires to see if they could hold just long enough to get us onto the pavement and into the trailer next we pushed the car out of the mud and towards the driveway but the tires were quickly losing air and now sunk in a puddle so Carlos got the tailor done race card speed sport uses at the track to pull race cars or move tires and zip around the pits once it was hooked up we dragged the triumph onto the road while Carlos was rearranging the tow hook a chute if he could open up the trunk as it's one of my favorite moments of any barn find to see what's left inside similar to the Mercedes trunk after 37 years and finding the original manuals mechanic books and the original sales receipt here we found some rusted parts and two original triumph magazine ads and one pitcher which ironically is probably more valuable than the car itself it's a champion the engine is a 1493 CC inline 4-cylinder producing a whopping 53 horsepower and blasting to 60 in just over 16 seconds the base price of a 1500 was roughly $5000 in 1979 before the very last spitfire rolled off the line in August of 1980 before the factory doors closed and looking at the battery it looks like this has been moved or driven within the last four or five years so he might have a chance of getting it running with the rain now picking up we wanted to get the car inside the trailer quickly but naturally the winch battery died and with the tires losing air quickly we couldn't exactly push it up the ramp so Carlos ran back to the race department and with a jump box in hand he came back got the winch moving and off to the shop we went after a very short and wet ride through Danbury we unloaded the smelly beast into the shop the next morning I removed the leaves to get a true picture of the paint while it was dry my goal today was to disassemble and assess the condition before making a game point aside from everything being wet moldy and/or smelling I found a few egg corns and one bone in the engine compartment which was somewhat ominous to say the least however at this point I hadn't found any definitive source for the smell so I just wet vac the area and dried it up with old towels but naturally as I was doing that a slice of rust went underneath my fingernail and I thought I was gonna hit the ceiling it was wildly painful then I turned around and I focused on the trunk which was kind of surprisingly clean despite the stronger smell so I just attributed that smell to the stagnant water in the mold so for the last step I removed the black plastic trim pieces but the convertible top bolts were preventing it from coming out I felt like the smell was somewhere between the trunk and somewhere behind the passenger seats in that area so to do that I had to remove all the plastic trim to get to the plastic trim I first had removed the convertible top with the convertible top out of the car dan was disassembling all the seat belts I unfolded the metal frame which was severely rusted and clamped shut once we both stepped on one side have been pulled together we managed to pry open the frame revealing the source of the smell oh there you go this at one time looked like it was a squirrel now I have no idea if I died in there or it was killed and then brought in there by another animal but it doesn't really matter it was wet decaying and absolutely 100% the source of the smell later that night after work shooting a few buddies came over to help disassemble the luggage rack the transmission carpet and prepare the rusty floor for some protection and paint this goes without saying but obviously this is on a show car nor is a ton of money being dumped into a $500 car that was found in the woods that may or may not run in other words this is a labor of love so with that in mind I called my buddy Joe from Jamie Body Works to help me figure out how to slow the rate of rust on the floor without a huge budget now if you remember from a few years ago the boys at J & B are the ones who restored the mo 964 by removing a ton of rust and painting it with five layers of bentley black for perspective that took about six months to do this one is only gonna take about two days and then we got to move on after masking off the area joe applied rust Mord and allowed it to sit overnight now notice the bubbling and popping on the surface of the floor the next day while we were letting the rust Mort do its thing he wanted to get some touch-up me so I quickly polished the spot on the trunk to see what its gonna look like later on shoot remove the panel and then we headed over to a local parts store to get matching touch-up paint while we were there waiting for them to color match the panel we picked up some spray paint to clean up the faded us bumpers later we needed to wait a few hours to get the right paint so I headed back to the shop to attempt a mission impossible to save the wet moldy and somehow rusty carpets clearly the frame of the seat up and sitting and standing water for a long time in transferred the rust to the carpets which essentially destroyed the fabric so despite my efforts I suggested buying a new carpet kit now at this point it was time to remove the rust more which had done its job first I scooped up the chemical then applied water and wiped then used prep saw and wiped with blue prep wipes from J&B which took forever because the rust more kept seeping out of crevices everywhere then I scuffed with a red pad Andrey wiped with preps all again with the area cleaned and prepped I laid down a few coats of the plyo matte primer in the same process as the Tahoe from last week's total interior removal episode I started off with a few coats of white and then I finished up with a darker grey the next morning I washed the paint with a more frothy in the aerator now on old single stage paint like this you can usually get a good idea of what the finished surface is gonna look like when it's wet but watch how it dries and looks faded again that's why when I saw it a few days earlier in the pouring rain I had a good feeling that it would come back to life permanently if I removed the dead dried skin that was on the top revealing a surface reflection and depth similar to when it's wet notice the lines on the trunk from the luggage rack we'll come back to this a little bit later next I measured the paint to confirm my suspicions that this had been repainted at some point in its life sure enough the paint that gage red anywhere from 10 to 14 mils so I had a lot of room to play with assuming the integrity of the paint wasn't jeopardized from the long UV exposure the first attempt was with Meguiar's red foam pad and 210 polished to keep the residue from sticking to the surface of the paint and clogging the pad and after a few minutes it was very clear that the triumph paint was going to be revived in just a few hours with this technique if you're a hardcore detailing fanatic at this point you'll see that I'm not using compressed air so this building doesn't have any air just yet so I use the microfiber towel method which is less effective and more time-consuming but it still works so don't give up if you don't have it I'll spare you the rest of the paint polishing but I did finish removing all the dead paint and then used a three inch for the tight spots then I polished the entire car with a foam pad revealing a brand new surface all right guys I'm behind the camera now I wanted to take a little break clearly you can see the before-and-after is night and day it's crazy now if you look closely as a detailing nerd you can see that the gloss or the depth has really come back but the gloss isn't there that you know it's not really shiny shiny it's not reflective why it looks look at all that orange peel right there now that's an indication that the car has been repainted so if we back up a little bit and we think about it one I put the paint depth gauge on there and there is anywhere from 7 to 14 let's say mils on there and that to me immediately indicates hey it's been repainted not only has it been repainted it's been repainted probably and let's say a garage or some sort of thing meaning non body shop related the third little thing is if you come into the car you can see the interior let me boost up the light for you it's brown and then there's some brown back oh right there right there so again it indicated okay looks like somebody had a good time on the weekend and repainted the car they actually did a halfway decent job but if you look at that orange peel you can probably go in and wet sand all of that down I think there's enough clear coat to do that I'm not going to do that today but here's another example if I walk over to the 458 speciale yeah there's a little bit orange peel in there but you look at the depth and the gloss I mean I just polished that but the depth on the glosses is evident the irony is there's a less paint on here about maybe 40% a little about half the paint is on here then is on here so there's double the amount of paint but again if you don't do the finishing stuff like a body shop would do so in this case we'd have to wet sand it all down and have it look like a piece of glass there's there's enough paint to do that but I'm not gonna go too crazy because it is a bit fragile and as you can see I mean we have bigger issues to deal with but I thought that's something you guys might find interesting as I'm going through these barn finds single stage paint you find lots of interesting things in this case it's been repainted and has been painted red over brown next I prepped the areas for painting the bumpers I could have painted the bumpers before I polished the paint but I didn't lean on wet paint nor did I want to have polishing dust stick to the wet paint either with everything covered that needed to be covered I'd laid six thin coats of bumper black to minimize the blotchy and faded paint on the large us bumpers while that was drying I used my Iwata Studio Series airbrush and the fresh paint we got at the parts store to really touch up the bad dings and dents and scuffs again this is no show car but shoot is the man and I wanted to do the best I could in the time that I could devote on this project after work that night Shu came back in to fit his new seats because the old ones were not only disgusting but structurally rusted and unstable I think he paid about 500 bucks for the new pair online that looked pretty good but ironically as a race car mechanic he installs non factory seats in cars almost daily so he's very familiar with how to make something fit that isn't necessarily designed perfectly to fit in every car with a few tests fits and removing the original rails he's gonna hard mount the seats directly to the floor because the cabin is extremely tight and his legs won't fit under the steering wheel otherwise with the game plan set and the seat rake comfortable we installed the new carpet we found online for a hundred and twenty five dollars delivered which will require a bit of love and some scissor work to make it fit step one is to open the box and obviously pull out all the pieces and lay them down as if they were in the car next lay the carpet on plastic and apply interior adhesive in a crisscross pattern and allow it to dry for five minutes then repeat the steps on the metal floor and the frame as well once tacky massaged the carpet into its designated spot now as you can imagine with a hundred and twenty-five dollar carpet you're gonna need to trim and make some relief cuts as well as test fit each section before the adhesive is applied otherwise you won't be able to go back with the carpet glued in and looking better we realized the ebrake armrest cover is a little roached out but we'll play with this later for now we reinstalled the seats for another test fit the reason we installed the carpets first is because the thickness of the carpet or the fabric will cause the seat to be uneven or not flush so we needed to take this into account with a basic template chute made dots and drilled holes into the floor and then vacuumed up the shavings the space receives using will allow the seat to be secured directly to the floor with a specific and comfortable rake with the seat in the correct position chute laid the carpet down and then used a sharpie to mark the spot on the carpet from underneath the car and then quickly poked holes with a drill for simplicity we also needed to carve out a few spots in the tunnel carpet that overlapped with the bolts as well now once this was all in place the moment of truth would be tightening the bolts through the carpet and I'd be lying if I said it was easy because we managed to get this all done without really being able to see anything because the seat was so close to the floor we repeated the steps on the passenger side and gave it our best thalma and louie's when we were done at about 1 a.m. it's actually not too bad the final day I removed the last of the damaged vinyl in the rear and traced it out on the new black vinyl we had gotten at the store for about 40 bucks after a very basic tracing I cut out the material knowing that I would need to trim and pull it into shape after applying the interior adhesives now this isn't the finest work I've ever done but it will do the job to match the black carpet next I painted the rear plastic cover piece that separates the gas tank from the back of the driver seat which is 1979's finest engineering with the trunk piece and the ebrake cover drying I cleaned up the very leaky rubber and rims with frothy to remove the mud and the junk from the woods next I applied ammo skin paint seal to the surface to increase its depth shine and protection which we brought out the vibrant Vermillion red then quickly clean the disgusting windows of the scrub pad and a squeegee installed the daytime lenses and filled up the tires for the hundredth time to move it around the shop end of day six and I want to give you a little tour of the car at this point now a lot of your gonna ask hey why didn't you wet sand the paint they pull you and describe why now if you remember when I polished it afterwards it looked like somebody had a rattle can the entire car in fact they actually did a pretty good job now it's a wet sand that not a big deal I can do it but the idea of what sanding is to wet sand one area and have it match the rest of the car panel by panel makes sense I can't do that and here's why do you see this spot right here and I'm gonna show you a bunch of other examples see it's a little bit more Brown that Brown is just like the interior color the car was brown as we found out and then later painted red so that means the paint is a little bit thin there so as a detailer I'm saying hey I can make that perfectly flat showroom perfect car concours whatever you want to call it looks like a mirror but I have to match it with that door so I run the risk of actually blowing through the paint in pursuit of matching the hood so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense you got to use you know your head a little bit and decide hey is this worth the effort to me I don't think so plus the owner shoot my buddy is like oh my gosh the car looks amazing don't worry about it we have to spend all our time on the engine so don't worry about the paint here's a perfect example back here this is where the luggage rack was now I'm gonna keep going back and forth here you'll see lines see that white that clear line and then next to it is dark and there's a clear line and then next to it's a little bit dark so those clear works a little bit lighter is where over there the luggage rack thing was was blocking the Sun never the Sun is our enemy here so we was blocking the Sun and it was protecting the paint it looks a little bit better and if you move over to the side where it was not protecting you know or blocking the Sun it's a little bit more Brown meaning it just wore away the paint again this is rattle-can so it's not it's not as strong as OEM here's another example right on this shoulder again I don't know if you can see that's a little bit Brown right there and then over here right there it's kind of a weird triangle ish right around there the paint seems to be very thin again in the pursuit of trying to make this a perfect concours which i think of the day we pulled this out of the woods so this is already like a thousand times better I think I might jeopardize the paint which would defeat the purpose for this guy he just wants to go for a drive and enjoy the cars this isn't gonna go to it you know you know the Pebble Beach or something put the back there I am just I just painted and we want to put that in just to kind of clean it up to not see the trunk area and then afterwards the only thing left is to to let Brian do his magic and get this engine working and hopefully go for a ride when she'd arrived that night he installed the back plastic part and the side plastic trim pieces we had also covered in the $40 roll of vinyl from jo-ann fabrics as well as the armrest pieces we prepared and painted now this whole project was a lot of fun but it's sort of anticlimactic if we can't get the car started that's why we worked at night thinking it would need a lot of troubleshooting to get it running and that we can drive it the next day during the daytime smells like coolant it's just old sludge probably the cooling system he definitely needs to be changed changed out anytime you're dealing with anything that's been sitting for a long period of time the first really good thing you want to do is just you know fluids any visual inspection you see these rockers in here are pretty dry well that's pretty good it's actually a little overfilled it's probably just from sitting after all the basic inspection steps chute pulled the spark plug to see if it had run in the past few years or so so what I'm seeing here is just a lot of soot which is just that black part so is just unburned fuel so it would be it would have run to get to that condition it's not wet what would be in that there's oil or water or anything in the combustion chamber see a little bit oil here that's kind of normal just from buildup from the combustion chamber awfully dark so dark means fuel rich but it probably has run at some point obviously the battery had died long time ago so we attached the jumper and then I got in the car to crank it for the very first time I guess it's gonna start okay okay so so much for that I'm just probably blasting you're right well she runs I doubt you could see the spark I could barely see it I don't think that was a great ground but there definitely was a little bit there so it's like 10 o'clock at night and we're running which is completely amazing and insane I don't even know how that worked but we got it to run actually wasn't that hard but the problem is as I turn behind me it's nighttime outside and it's raining and we don't have a roof so we're out to wait for tomorrow to go for a ride on this card works soon this is really exciting the next morning we filled up the tires yet again installed the polished luggage rack and hopped in the car to go for a short ride now we knew we weren't gonna go very far because the car had almost no brakes and the tires were totally shot all of which would be fixed later and shoot old Mirage but it was fun to see even if it was only 50 feet or so what it would feel like once the triumph is back on the road once again well you made it you finished the video if you liked it please subscribe by fing the ammo shield right over there now if you like disaster cleaning type videos I posted another one up there I have a ton on my channel so click the link and enjoy

Channel: AMMO NYC

Views: 6,519,364

Keywords: Larry Kosilla Detailing, AMMO Detailing Products, AMMO Detailing, How to remove a scratch, AMMOnyc, triumph spitfire, barn find hunter, barn find restoration, Detailing the dirtiest car ever, Free car found in the woods, how to buy cheap cars online, how to install new carpet in a car, how to install car seats in older cars, how to restore faded paint on car, car detailing interior, abandoned car, restore faded paint on car, red car paint faded restore, car detailing, detailing

Id: wQ-3fUJlNuc

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019