UNDERGROUND 1955 Chevy and A Barn Find 409 Engine (Abandoned for 50 YEARS) - Hot Rod Hoarders Ep. 6

On this episode of hot rod hoarders we find a mysterious 409 W motor and we dig up the remains of a 55 Chevy drag car so this story goes back several years I remember as a kid passing this particular house and barn and my dad telling me every time we passed it that there's a 409 in that barn and you know of course we thought it'd be cool someday to stop and talk to the guy maybe end up buying the motor but someday never came and somebody actually got the engine before us but luckily my dad knows every car guy around and was able to talk to the guy and let him know that if he was to ever sell it we would be interested buying it. The guy responsible for this engine build was Don Roberts. He had a 55 Chevy drag car that he'd ran in B gas at local drag strips like Harriman drag strip Loudon I think he may have also ran and Brainerd Optimist drag strip as well. He eventually got his hands on this 409 over-the-counter block and pieced it together with a few random pieces like 63 model high-compression pistons it's got a 62 model crank it's just kind of put together out of a lot of different parts but it was all stuff that worked well together and made a lot of horsepower. After some time and passed the guy came by my dad's shop and let him know that he was ready to sell the motor and whatever parts came with it. So after we got the parts home and we kind of did a little inventory of everything and what we had was a short block which was a 409 we had some 348 cylinder heads we had a 348 factory aluminum intake we have a 348 oil pan a t10 four-speed transmission that had a a couple of ears broke off of it and just some other random parts like exhaust manifolds for 348 and of course my dad was a little bit apprehensive because this stuff's been sitting in the weather you know had a roof over it it was in the weather for 40 plus years so who knows if this thing was going to be good - it was gonna be usable if it was gonna be something we would be able to put back together or just talk about we didn't know so it was kind of a gamble but it turned out to be pretty amazing find. So these parts were rusty they've had moisture around them for years and years and the engine was stuck. After we poured a little oil down cylinders this thing broke free with very little effort. We knew that this thing is gonna be buildable this is something we could legitimately put back together and you know really save a piece of history. So we found out this was an over-the-counter block because it didn't have any numbers or letters on the front pad of block. Normally these would have suffix code which is a couple of letters you will have a series numbers which is a serial number and even if it's a replacement block that GM provided as a warranty or something like that it would have the letters CE and then a series of numbers after that and this thing has nothing it has no stamping whatsoever on the front block it does have a casting number on the back of the block which tells us it was built in 1963. So this engine was in such good shape and all the parts were perfect like this was like taking apart of low mileage engine because it didn't see a lot of street time it was mostly just a race engine. So we took it apart and decided that we wanted to build it and my idea was to incorporate a magazine because I do a lot of magazine projects on the side and so we built it for a super Chevy magazine they did a three part series on it and that kind of allowed us to go above and beyond what we normally would have done but what we did was assemble the stock short block with all those original parts. We put a Comp hydraulic roller camshaft in it Edelbrock top end kit which included aluminum heads aluminum dual quad intake - Edelbrock 500 CFM carburetors and you know we were able to put this thing together and get it running The most surreal moment was seeing this thing on the dyne and actually hearing it on the dyno and I really wish I had video of that but I don't. Alright, so why was this 409 engine sitting in the barn. Well that's where the story gets interesting because Don Roberts actually wrecked his 55 Chevy out on the street testing after he'd had Jim Smith install a straight axle in the front of a car. Luckily he wasn't injured and neither was his passenger but the car was destroyed so he took it back home he took it all apart put the engine and transmission in the barn and then he took a backhoe and he dug a hole and he buried the rest of this 55 Chevy. Eventually curiosity got the best of me so I reached out to the Robert's family and eventually set up a day where I could come down there and talk to a little bit about it and asked them if the story was true there's the car buried in the backyard and they said yeah it is it's back there if you want to go look for it. It's back there in the woods just look around and see if you can find anything sticking up out of the ground and we took off out into the woods and looked for probably 30 minutes before we found the corner of the cowl and the firewall sticking up out of the ground and basically Don buried this thing right next to the creek and I guess whenever the creek would rise and flood a little bit it would wash away a little bit of the dirt and so you could see a little bit of the car and what you could see was actually in really good shape they was still paint on it. You know it's a crazy idea to try to dig up an old car out of ground so we thought about it we decided that we were going to ask the family if it would be okay if we tried to dig this thing up. Since we had the engine that kind of make sense but if we had just a pile of an old 55 Chevy to go along with it we'd have a really cool conversation piece. So after we got up the nerve to ask them they gave us the go-ahead you know they probably thought we were crazy but it was something we just had to find out and I really I don't understand I don't remember why we did it so early in the morning but it was like five o'clock in the morning when we all met on the property there and unloaded everything and started. We had to cut trees down we had to push trees over we had to get a lot of stuff out of the way just to get back to the car and you know by the time we really got serious I mean the sun was just barely starting to come up. We started off pretty slow we're really careful with shovels we didn't want to get too carried away and destroy whatever was left of this car They cut the front of the frame off. There ain't no way that it would just be that long. So from there we started digging just trying to find any piece that shows that this was a 55 Chevy gasser. The big Olds rear end, the front axle under it or just anything that would really connect this car to that old engine. So eventually I'd say about an hour after getting started we realized that there wasn't a whole lot to see here, you know he had mashed the roof down and scooped dirt and Creek rock and all this sort of stuff over the top of it so you know it's not like we're gonna pull out a pristine 55 Chevy. We knew that going in but at the same time we did want something that kind of resembled a car and as we got a little bit further we realized that that wasn't gonna happen either. It really didn't make sense for us to try to pull this thing the rest the way out and ground. There just wasn't enough to show for it As bad as we hated to give up we covered the car back up and considered a lost cause. We did take the little piece of trim and we took the dash from it just as conversation pieces and I guess you could say souvenirs from our experience. I want to say a big thank you to the Robert's family for letting us go on our property and dig around and play in the dirt and also big thank you to Kyle Shadden. He's always our number one guy when it comes to getting us out of a bind with trying to get one of our vehicles home. And then a thank you to my dad for just being my number one motivator when it comes to these crazy ideas and you know he was just as excited about this as I was and I just you know I really wanted to share it here because if I was to tell people about this without showing video footage of it they probably wouldn't believe us just like I didn't necessarily believe that that car was buried in the first place. You know this is something that me and Kyle are going to be talking about for years. I mean we're going to tell our grandkids about that time that we went and dug a car out of the ground and you know same way with my dad he's probably already told 10,000 people about it because his shop is really pretty big hangout for everybody but you know it was it was worth it it was worth the experience it was worth the money renting the mini excavator. We had a good time, we laughed a lot we really enjoyed it If you like this sort of thing hit the subscribe button and you'll see all of our new videos with project updates drag racing coverage and all sorts of other fun stuff. Thank you for watching

Channel: Hot Rod Hoarder

Views: 387,891

Rating: 4.7825241 out of 5

Keywords: underground 1955 chevy, barn find 409 engine rebuild, abandoned for 50 years, car lying underground, unearthing a legend, hot rod hoarders, 409 w motor, 1955 chevy gasser, barn find, buried alive, buried classic car, buried car, 409 engine, barn finds, 409 chevy engine, mysterious 409 engine, 409 mystery motor, mystery motor, drag car, underground, 1955 chevy, crazy barn find, barn find hunter, blown64vette, abandoned cars, abandoned drag car, 55 chevy

Id: -zZVHxVOrgE

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019