(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.
