To Restore or Not: Keep Barn Finds Fresh?

You’d think by now that the era of barn finds would be over – that collectors and treasure hunters had already sifted through every barn, garage and chicken coop in the U.S. and turned up everything there was to find. But there are still discoveries being made. These two Plymouth Superbirds, for example, that turned up in a barn in Maine.

If you are lucky enough to find, purchase, and move one of these barnyard treasures, the question then becomes, what do you do next? You could spend a lot of time and money restoring the car to its original condition – like the folks at Porsche Classic did with this 1964 911, located in a car graveyard in Germany.

There has been a movement of late to keep these cars “barn fresh”, or in the condition in which they were found. This is a bit different than “preservation-class” cars that are unrestored, but otherwise in perfectly serviceable condition. These types of vehicles have had regular maintenance, few owners, and you can still hop in and drive them to the nearest auto show or auction house, where they continue to draw lots of attention at the former, and fetch high prices at the latter.

But there has been a surprising spike in demand (and auction prices) for vehicles that look as though they’ve recently been unearthed on an archaeological dig – rusty, dirt/dust-covered heaps that have been kept in less-than-optimal storage conditions and missed their last scheduled oil change decades ago.

To answer the question of whether to keep these barn finds original depends a lot on what you intend to do with the vehicle, and what your definition of “original” is.

Why restore? In many cases this is done for purely sentimental reasons. You want to recapture some part of the past (which you may or may not have lived through yourself) by bringing an old car back to life. There’s also the satisfaction of completing the restoration task – you can watch, piece by piece, as you turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

That’s great if you want a flashy vintage car to show off on summer weekends, or you plan to hit the auto show circuit. If, however, you think you can flip the car for a return-on-investment, you will probably be disappointed. Unless you happen to stumble across a particularly rare or valuable vehicle, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get your money back.

That’s one argument for keeping these vehicles original. If you do plan to turn around and sell the car, it’s much easier for buyers to see what they’re getting if the car is left in the state in which you happened to find it. There are also bragging rights. Every ding, dust pile and errant piece of straw sticking out of the dashboard helps tell the story of how you spotted the car peeking out from behind an old pigpen, or dug it out of a pile of hay and manure.

After all, the car is original only once. But how do you keep these cars “original”?  If it’s a “true” barn find and has been parked on the dirt for decades, half its weight may be dust, rust, mold, moss and animal waste. You could sell it off that way, but if you plan to do anything else with it you have to do a thorough evaluation and determine what on the vehicle is worth replacing and what isn’t.

That inspection may indicate that the car isn’t as original as you thought. People do weird things to their cars to keep them running, and before the vehicle found its way into the dusty vault where you found it, it may have been the subject of some spit-and-gumwrapper engineering. A case in point would be my first car, a 1972 Chevelle I bought for $800 in 1989 that had been outfitted with a too-small steering wheel from a Pontiac. It had also been converted from a three-speed on the column to an automatic on the floor using a 1980s-vintage shifter that was held down with old carpet and electrical tape, and which showered sparks on the interior every time I put it in reverse.

I don’t know what happened to that car, but if anyone ever finds it in a barn they are unlikely to be impressed by the modifications.

If you are determined to show the decrepit condition in which you found it, take lots and lots of pictures. In addition to helping to document the work you do, those photos will help potential buyers get an idea of what f shape the car was in. If you just want to tell a good story, you can turn those photos into a slide show and bore your relatives with them at Thanksgiving.

From there, the decisions you make will have to be based on a cost/benefit analysis. If you want to make the car drivable but still original, you’ll need to inspect the mechanicals and then determine how hard it will be to find original parts.

Look at the paint – what condition is it in, and how thick is it? Has it been repainted? In some cases, you can detail these cars rather than restore, but there are risks when it comes to working on the paint. A skilled detailer can lightly sand some of the rough paint spots down to the next matching layer so you can improve the look of the car without actually touching up the paint.

Interiors present another problem. If the car has been shut up securely enough, there may not be much work to do. (You will probably not ever shake that musty smell, though – the term “barn fresh” was likely thought up by someone who never spent much time in a barn.) If a family of raccoons has been living inside the car for a few generations, you might to wear a hazmat suit to sit behind the wheel. How far you go in replacing the interior will, again, determine what you do. If you want to show the car and have it classified “preservation class”, you should probably leave that ripped seat as-is.

The question of what to do with these un-restored cars once they are in the hands of a collector or hobbyist ultimately comes down to budgets, patience, comfort and (for most folks) how indulgent your family is about that heap taking up space in the garage. Ultimately, classic cars – except in the rarest of cases – aren’t meant to be museum pieces. They are made to be driven.