Private tour of Tom's barn find collection | Barn Find Hunter - Ep. 102

Welcome to another episode of Barn Fight Hunter. I just want to show you that this is called Auto Barn. It's a car storage facility, as I call it. There are people with more cars than brains. I just wrote another book on how to

find

barn

s. You'll be able to buy them later this year and it's how to

find

cars. One of the places I suggest in that book is to go to a storage facility. Now you think of a storage facility as metal building units that people sometimes put furniture into. They put cars in cans outside, well this is another type of storage building and you know, if someone had walked by here and said man I'd really like to buy that mgb, you just go to the front desk and say, "Hey ".

You know, you think that guy wants to sell on mgb or mgtd or the datsun 510 or whatever? I have a few cars scattered around here, but the rest are other tenants. When I was in the racing business, I had a lot of race cars like this that we took to shopping malls and car dealerships. This is an 85 monte carlo notch back winston cup car that daryl walter drove to a championship in 85 and this is the last island of stock cars. I used to have dozens of them and funny cars and all kinds of cars that were show cars that I didn't race.

I didn't race a fun car, so these are cars that we would take to dealerships and hopefully generate traffic for people to come and see new cars or buy Budweiser or whatever, so this is here so you know that this is one from my own

barn

finds out that this is one I own and I probably just need to get rid of it one of these days, but it was a real stock car that came out of Junior Johnson's stable and raced on the Nascar circuit for years . It's a short track. car here is a 510 that I have and I bought it from the original owner a woman who bought it in 1972 new for 1995 unfortunately I have the receipt instead of sitting in the empty garage that was here, she had us sitting on the Lawn here for 25 years , whatever, but you know, I bought it for $500 and she cried when they dropped it off because it was the car she bought right out of high school, it was a high school class, but my first 510 is this car. here and just left the paint shop.

I bought this for 250 in 1978 and it became my race car, my streetcar. I drove it to the track, ran it, and drove it home again. This is what Lime Rock Bridge Hampton should be like. Pocono places like that I sold it to a friend in 1982 26 years later they offered it to me for free just come and get it out of my yard it's rusting the ground so I'm building the 510 car I could never afford to build in the past fiberglass fenders glass, this is a Porsche color paint job. I have a set of Recaro seats that I'm going to reupholster.

I have all new taillights and bumpers and everything at home, so this. its going to start slowly coming back together and then this mgtd i feel so bad thats why i restored this car 85-86 when i moved to north carolina it was a car that looked like this and i made it a beautiful car and it took the best to show and I painted it myself and took the body off the frame and everything and then little by little when you don't use it you leave it in a warehouse I don't have it covered unfortunately I'm sure all the hydraulics need I probably just need to sell this because I don't It's doing no good, but it was a very fun car that I will miss, but someone else needs to have fun with it too.

Oh, I have to show you one more car. You will love this is my Mars Miner race car. I've had this since maybe 1988 or something like that bird poop. Okay, Morris Miners should never be a race car. In England they call it a nanny car. It's like you know what this is. a car that babysitters drive to pick up the kids from school or whatever, but I made a race car out of it and it's great to drive. There is a famous racing driver named Brian Redman who began his racing career racing his mother's Morris Minor truck.

He co-drove me in a race, so I still have a sticker there, but he has a full roll cage. You know, it's a complete race car, there's no engine or transmission in there right now, but we've had a lot. Fun in this car. I remember we did a two and a half hour enduro where you had to do two five-minute pit stops and we didn't need to do a second pit stop, but the rule said you had to be in the field for five. minutes twice so on the second pit stop we did a full wash with wax, armor details, all the tires cleaned the windshield, the whole process I had a whole team wash this car in the pit lane and we finished the race with the cleanest car on the track, so much. of good times you know as I walk by here remember oh that's my car too I want to share this with you also this is a car that I bought I think in 1979 for 400 because my mom was from Germany so the only The family cars we had when I was kid they were Volkswagens, they started out mostly beetles and square backs and all that, so I bought this when I was first married and it's a 1960 VW convertible and it's satin, sad because it was quite a crude shape.

But I put new fenders on it, I put new floors on it, I put a new one on it. This is a Mercedes-Benz soft top called a heart canvas that I had made for it. If you look inside, these seats are original. The door panels are original. It's nice. toilet a pretty nice car it has porsche wheels what i'm trying to do is make it look like someone maybe in the 60's couldn't afford a porsche speedster but wanted the whole experience of having a porsche speedster so they made their volkswagen into a porsche speedster , so it has porsche speedster speedster headlight grilles on the headlights and the really interesting part is back here, this thing has 36 horsepower, so really low power, but I put a Judson supercharger on it, kind of a modification of time you took. carburetor off the supercharger where the carburetor was you bolt the carburetor to the side of the supercharger and you put a separate pulley here to drive the belt uh it's got a glass bottle back there that you fill with Marvel Mister oil and that oil is a supercharger it's got a air filter and that increases the horsepower from 36 to about 50 horsepower and then all of a sudden this car has the performance of a Porsche, sounds good, looks good, has great power, gets good performance from gas so this is a really cool car but I'm not looking forward to getting rid of this one right now I really get it I mean it's been a part of my life for over 40 years and if you look at the color of this and the color of the datsun 510 is the same color i fell in love with the color i decided i didn't want to have orange points anymore i want to have blue points so that's part of the wonderful world of barn finds from my uh tom cotter here's another morris miner like a race car that I was building that I never finished maybe I didn't finish it, I don't know, but I cut the roof off, it was a sedan, I put this original roll cage on, I took off the fender headlights and made a headrest out of it, I raised the rear trunk, I love the rear fenders, raised the hood, got a very early morse minor grille, it's called a low beam grille, so the headlights used to be up here for us, get this right. moved here so this is the most fun volkswagen gti in the world.

My wife and I bought this new in 1986 and drove it for 200,000 miles. Still a really solid car. The body is solid. The painting is. It's still excellent, the interior could use some work and the engine could use a rebuild. I think here's a, I promise you this is the last Datsun 510 you'll see on Barn Fine Hunter for a while. The one above, I showed you. It cost 500, I bought it from the original owner, it cost eighty dollars. You know, a guy had it in his garage and I walked by. It was very far from the road.

He said you could see that call from the road. I said yes and he said yes. I'm not going to do anything with that muzzle, sell it, he said, make me an offer. I told him I don't know eighty dollars. He says okay, it's yours, so this one is weird. It's a 1980 to 68 model. It has a long speedometer like this one. with a needle that goes like an old one, you know, like an older beer that might have been in the '50s or something, it's got accessories in here that other cars don't have, so I'm not going to fix it, I probably just want to sell it but you know for 80 how to get over that and finally this is a 1964 mercury comet convertible that uh it's a project but it's all been acid this is the body has been dipped in acid is the body is perfect and all the parts are here the members from the suspension and steering it has everything except an engine and a transmission so if anyone is interested in a project car it's a really good car look it up go Google 64 Mercury Comet and you'll see what it looks like there are parts additional. that comes with the electric car, you can see it right down to the metal, so from here we'll go to my friend Keith Irwin's shop, which is a few miles away.

You met Keith in a couple of episodes, but the most memorable. was the episode where Keith helped me move the Cobra and Ferrari from his old garage, where they had been for 42 years, to another garage and they were finally sold. Keith is my go to guy for all things mechanical and he works on a lot of my cars and he has a very active restoration shop and I also have some shitty cars behind his building so I'll show you what I have there, so let's take a walk, so this is the dark side of Tom. cotter not only do I preach to you that you know you can, you can have cars like this, I have them myself and this car is truly an amazing car with an amazing story.

I'll tell you why this car started out as a 1946 Ford. Woody Wagon Woody Wagons at 46, I bet they cost, I guess 1250 new, if you can believe it, well this car, this Woody Wagon had the most expensive option you could get in a Woody at the time from Ford, has a Marmon Harrington four. All wheel drive conversion, you would pay 1250 for the car, you would pay another twelve hundred and fifty dollars to have Marvin Harrington do this four wheel drive conversion. They were based in Indianapolis, so this Woody is no longer a Woody, but I'll tell you that.

The story is that this Woody was bought new by a family in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, they owned a ski area but couldn't afford a chairlift to take people to the top of the mountain, so they bought this Ford with four wheel drive and they would take people to the top of the mountain, they would ski down, they would take them back to the top of the mountain on skis and this was basically the chairlift, they would take you down the dirt roads, the wooden body rotted now this the front end is a car, this is the front of a car, but from here back it's a truck, so they took a Ford truck cab and welded it onto the front hood here of the Woody, they narrowed the roof to that you can see a bondo line in the In the middle they narrowed it and put a truck body in there and then the skiers sat in the back of the truck and instead of traveling in a forest they now just rode in the back from the truck, so this thing worked hard. lifetime let me tell you about martin martin harrington uh they built a lot of four wheel drive conversions for small sized Ford trucks but mostly full size Ford trucks.

There are 19 known Marmon Harrington cars in the world, 19 of which all the rest were rotten, I scrapped whatever I've had, three of them, so out of 19 in the world, this is the third, so the platform of The truck and frame are pretty rotten so I bought that kind of stuff. It doesn't look so good now, but it never looked good, so this is a similar year Ford that I bought in California. Now there's no wood here, but you know that on a Woody you can make a new wood body, so I was going to do that. take the four-wheel drive components and move them to this, but you know what?

Then I lost interest in the whole deal, so it's for sale and you know how much one sold for recently. I hope you're sitting like a Marmon Harrington. Woody sold in January at an auction, I think it was a modest one, in Florida, for 346,000. That's how valuable those cars are because they are so rare. I'd like to get 18 grand for both things, so you know if Someone is watching this show and you're adventurous and talented. This has the potential to make you a lot of money. I bought it because it made sense for me financially, so I hope it makes sense for you too with the finds in the barn.

What was old is new again. Ramble Marlin that you've seen if you've seen every episode of Barn Find Hunter, you've seen this car before we found this during an episode where we were mostly in South Carolina, but a guy said, you know, right across from the state border in Georgia. I have a lot of other cars, so we followed them about just a mile into Georgia, right next to theinterstate, and this car was one of many cars you might remember, a '54 corvette under a shed, a bunch of big Chevelles of all kinds. things but I really fell in love with this car it's a ramble marlin with I think it's a v8 engine I think it's 287 cubic inches and it has a factory four speed transmission I said man that's unusual and it worked I said to the guy you know what ?

After we stopped filming, I thought about it, I thought, I said, I think I'd like to buy that car from you and when I got it home, I was looking at what I just bought, he delivered it to my house and I'm lying down here looking at the chassis in the body and I could see the headliner from inside the fender. I said "Oh, that's not right." There is so much rust here on the firewall that there was a hole. I could actually see the headliner hmm what did I buy here? So I called my friend Keith.

Now we are in his store. He said, well, yeah, that's going to take some work. I said, "You know what I probably need to get out of this car," he said. I'd like to have it, I said, I'll tell you what you know, my Datsun 510, if you paint my 510, I'll give you this car and that's what we traded, so Keith is going to restore this car because it's so original and weld holes in the firewall. it's not a problem for him oh here it is come here Keith so Keith is a guy his restoration shop turns barn finds into show winners and he wanted to tell you a little bit about this car.

It's called avant-garde, so take it, this is a unique little car, right here, it's a 1956 avant-garde triumph. I found the cars in South Carolina, at the salvage yard, they only made 20 of these A-wheel drive cars. the left, this is actually one of them, so we were going to try to fix it, put it back together, we just don't have time for it, but here it is, it's going to be on sale for a short time, you're really selling this. I'm, what are you asking? for a thousand dollars to take it and it has a clean title what kind of engine it has no engine or transmission it originally came with the same engine as my 49 trump it had the two liter the 2.0 so a thousand dollars is fine are you paying attention to this? uh, in the barn, find the land, this is a unique car, you won't see another one if you search for this car on the Internet, uh, my car is the one that appears, uh, this one, this one, how many are left in the world, I wonder.

I have no idea, okay, Keith, well, thanks for, thanks for stopping by, I'm so glad you all came. Thanks, I have to get to work, thanks, bye, maybe you'll see these cars again sometime, maybe sometime, uh, we will. Maybe I'll do an update if Keith decides to do one of two approaches. He tries this or whatever anyway. I hope you enjoyed this little event you had in North Carolina, happy to hunt you down.