Bringing a Car Out of Long-Term Storage

Whether you have a project car that's been sitting in a backyard, or been sitting in a barn for years, or if you've just bought a car from an estate, or you know, some other situation where the car has not driven for years, you know, there's some certain steps you should take to make sure, you know, when you actually bring this car back to life, that you don't actually cause any damage along the way. And you know, the worst thing you can do is just throw a new battery in a car that's been sitting in a barn for 20 years, and then pump a bunch a gas in there, gas into it, thinking you know, you're doing a good thing to it, because, you know, there's a lot of things that have gone on, as I always say, you know, more can go wrong with a car sitting still then when you're driving it regularly. And you know, that's kinda the case with our project here today. You know, we've got a 1931 DeSoto, I bought this car nearly four years ago and restarted it right away, took me six months, and it wasn't really a big, ground up, kinda restoration, it was a clean original car, you know, the original lacquer paint, it was falling off and all that, so we repainted the car, put on new tires, you know, put in new battery and stuff like that, but and got it running and we drove this car like mad for like four or five years, and then it started, we'd get, you know, we started getting other cars, and the car got driven less and less and then finally about 30 years ago, we parked it in the shed, and you know, the intention wasn't that we were parking it for long-term storage at that point. It was just that, you know, we had other cars going, it just didn't get brought out, it was starting to have a few problems, you know, it was smoking a little bit, and we knew that, you know, the engine was getting a little tired.

But you know, so it ended up sitting. And when it sat, you know, it got easy to ignore it and then the next thing you know, it's used for storage, stuff, extra stuff in the shop, we'd just kinda throw it inside or on top of it, and so it started to get a little abused. You know, it's, of course you can see it's got plenty of dust on it, it's been sitting in the shop for a long time, sitting in the back shop. And one of the things we thought of was, you know, what we need to do is show guys what to do to bring this car back to life, and the rule number one should be is, do no harm. You don't wanna, you know, do any damage to anything else as you bring this car back to life, but you do wanna make sure when you do get it running that you know, nothing, you know, you don't have any electrical issues, or fuel issues, or cooling issues, that are gonna cause, like, you know, catastrophic damage to the whole system.

So, with that, let's you know, we'll begin by, you know, assessing some of the things with the car, you know, some areas where we know we're gonna have to do some work. It had fuel in the tank, that hasn't, you know, been changed, even though we did stabilize it, it hasn't been changed in 30 years. We have antifreeze even though here in Minnesota we always keep the antifreeze you know, close to 50/50. It's good to have 50 below, or whatever, but there's still a lot of little things throughout the whole car that we need to look at and address before we even start to fire it up.