Car Assessment: Bringing a Car Out of Long-Term Storage

We've got a 1931 DeSoto that's, you know been stored away for 30 some years without being running. The car was repainted 40 years ago. But what we found is, you know, a lot of stuff can go wrong with the car just sitting still. And then your first plan of action whenever you have, whether you just bought a car from an estate or if, you know, you have your own car that's been just stored away for a lot of years is to assess the actual condition of the car. And look for those signs of, you know what's happened to the car in all the years that it hasn't been driven.

You know, right away and just taking a close look. Just take the front of this car I see a little drip where the water antifreeze has come down. left a little mark here on the splash guard. You know, and that says, "Well, maybe I might have a little bit of a problem with the radiator." Maybe I've got a leak somewhere up in here so I'll look for that. But one of the big things we want to do is make sure the car the engine turns over.

You know, that's the heart of the engine or the heart of the car is whether or not the engine actually runs. And the first step in getting it to run is just to get it to actually turn over. And the reason a lot of cars will, you know, if they sit for a long time they'll get stuck, the motor will get stuck, it's because where the engine is sits when it comes to rest some of the intake valves are still open. So moisture can get, you know, from the air into the engine and actually rust the inside of the cylinder walls. This buildup of rust now prevents that piston from going up and down in the cylinder.

if a car has been stored properly, you know, they'll fog the motor before they put it and you know, and what they do is take out the spark plugs. You know, they put some engine fogging oil into the cylinders to make sure that no rust builds up in there. But what is the case most of the time? Cars just gets stopped being driven and then they say, "This car was not properly stored." And even though it's mine, I can admit that, but you know, we all start with a plan. Fortunately this car, the 1931 DeSoto has a crank hole.

And we still have the original crank for this car. And what this allows us in the 1930s electric starters were still kind of new unit. And, you know, going back into the 20s it would the only way to start a car was to hand crank it. So while, you know, the electric starter gained quick acceptance cause people didn't want to get out and sit and crank the car over. They weren't comfortable with just an electric starter for years.

So actually up until even into the ninth early 50s a lot of cars still had a provision kind of tucked away in the grill where you could actually put a crank and start the car re-using an actual crank. Although over the years they stopped actually giving you a crank you had buy one separate. But with this car we have the original crank. We're going to first assess if we can actually get the motor turnover. You know what, you know, and while we know the battery dead, we know the ignition's off, we're not concerned about it actually starting.

There's a couple things you should know when you're actually get to ever have to crank start a car. And the first one is, you don't want to put your thumb, you don't want to wrap your thumb and your, you know, your fingers around the crank like this. Because what can happen, Well, it's while the crank is designed to if the engine fires up, it's supposed to pop out a little bit and disengaged from the blop. But if it backfires sometimes the crank hole catch and if you've got your thumb wrapped around that crank you'll dislocate, or even, you know, going to hurt your thumb a great deal by having it wrapped around. So you keep your thumb and your fingers wrapped around on the same side of the handle.

And then as you start to turn always keep your elbow bent. Again, if the engine did backfire it you don't want to have a straight arm because then you run the risk of, you know, dislocating you know, you either breaking a bone or dislocating your shoulder or your elbow. And we're going to start in. And there we got a complete revolution on the engine. Okay, the pistons have gone all the way down and come all the way back up.

So we know this engine is going to turn. Its not a high compression or high-performance motor, it's only running like six... Six and a half, six and a quarter to one compression which is really low compared to modern cars. But you've got to remember the fuel wasn't all that good back in those years. So they wanted that.

They wanted the engine to run on a wide range of quality of fuel. And we'll go one more time. And we're good. Okay, we know the engine turned over. We know that That, that part's good.

We don't have to do it. If the engine didn't, if the engine didn't turn over our next step would be to pull all the spark plugs and then drop some kind of penetrating oil. I like to use like a automatic transmission fluid mixed with some acetone but 50 50 blend. Pour that into the cylinders. Let it sit.

I've had cars where I've let them sit for, you know, a day, a week, a month. I've even had one where we let the engine sit for almost, you know, six months before we finally got it to actually turn over. Take your time. Be patient. And then the payoff is when you finally get it running again.

Okay, let's look at some of the other areas on this car and assess what's going on with those two. You need to assume that every fluid inside the car needs to be replaced. You know, the antifreeze, the gas, the brake fluid, oil, gear oil, differential oil, everything needs to be replaced because you know, all these fluids break down over time. And when we did kind of a preliminary assessment on this car, we also noted that there was, you know, very little antifreeze. Very little fluid at all in the radiator.

And our thought was, "Okay, where did it go?" And, you know, looking around of the things we spotted here is that this first plug here has been leaking. Actually rusting out at this point. And you can see the signs of it for, you know, the last 30 years sitting in the shop where it's like the drip down here on the engine block. And we've got like rust things here on the block from it dripping out of here down below. So that's one of the areas we suspect.

And you can see it running all the way down to the squash apron. Also then we looked at the water pump. And the water pump's actually got, you know, scale built up around. Looks like where it's actually dripped. And then it has evaporated many times over the years.

And this is an indication that this on these older water pumps, you know, it's not like a modern water pump where it's just all sealed unit. These have like a packing nut on the end and you actually need to service this regularly by installing new packing and then also tightening it up as you're actually driving the car. So we know we need to some cooling system upgrades. This car doesn't have a heater core. It doesn't have, you know, plumbed heat into the car.

It just the way a lot of 30s cars were. So the cooling system is pretty straightforward. It's the engine and the radiator. Next, we're going to look at the oil itself. And what we're going to find is that this stuff is just black.

And even though it had, you know, good oil in it when we put it away, this isn't uncommon. The reason that is, is oil breaks down not only from being driven by the number of miles, but also by time itself. You know, you have to remember it's been in cold storage. So, here in Minnesota the temperatures can, you know, vary a hundred plus degrees between the coldest and the hottest. So you expect that over time that oil both in the crank case as well as the transmission and the rear end is going to break down.

Which is the number one reason you shouldn't try to just you know, hook up a battery, fire it up. You know, pour some gas into the carb because all your lubricants have broke down and have lost a lot of their ability to actually protect the engine. Then next, you know, we are looking at, you know, our connections. Our battery cable connections look good here. We'll go in the car and we'll assess the condition of the battery.

You know, and I can guarantee you because it hasn't been on a maintainer, yet has had the battery sitting in it for that long, what we're going to have to do is not only replace the battery, probably a good idea to put new cables on it and clean up any corrosion around the battery itself. Okay, we've done an initial assessment of the car. We know that we're going to be doing some work under the hood here. We gonna be doing some work on the battery over here. We also got to go out back to drain the fuel tank, get some of that stuff done.

But before we actually, you know, to do any hardcore wrenching on the car, we want to make sure we get some of the dirt and dust off the car. You know, dust and dirt well, you know, in itself just sitting on the finish doesn't necessarily, you know, cause much harm. The fact of, you know, you can see even just you know, from pushing it in here and getting it all set up. You know, we've bumped into it several times and knocked off a bunch of the dirt. But it's important to know that that dirt acts like sandpaper.

So anytime we bump, or rub, or touch the car now it's going to actually leave marks on the paint itself. And you know, our number one goal when we started this was don't do any harm. So with that, we're going to get, you know, some of this dust off the fenders, the hood, the car hole and also a little bit around the door here. We'll get some of that cleaned up. As soon as that's done, we can start making some of the modifications get this thing back running again.