"Barn Find" Caution

[Timewaster]

It seems that as "barn find" is now one the favorite bullshit for the classified ad writer that ther is something to be remembered.

 

Barn = Farmer*

 

Farmer* = Spend nothing, bodge with bailing twine and bits of second hand scrap found lying around the yard, keep it going as long as you possibly can and only discard anything when it is so utterly buggered that there is no amount of bailing twine that can save it.

 

When most of this stuff was "stored" it was back when you had to pay the scrap man to take stuff away, so it was pushed into a field or a barn to rot away.

 

*other stereotypes are available, but this is based on my experience of agricultural types.

 

A few years ago, when I had an old mini, my mate said the was one on his uncles farm that had been his grans. Beyond saving as it was rotten when it was abandoned but he said there might be some spares.

 

I wish I had taken photos of what I found. It was in a giant bush.

We cut, hacked and stamped our way in just enough to recognise it as a mini.

I shouted to him that there were no doors. "Look on the ground" he said.

He was right. There they were!

[saucedoctor]

True, that. I pass a mark 1 Cavalier on my way to Ballylumford, which has been used to fill a hole in a hedge. Been there 20 years, easy. Well, I assume it's still there, there's no hole in the hedge! The same yard has a few other old chod that's been lying in the same place for years, outside. Mk2 Cav and I think a MK2 Transit. Not the sort of place to take photos, though - one might end up with a load of buckshot in the arse.

[Squire_Dawson]

With most things in popular culture, it is a US import term. The moniker used to relate to some chod as described above, viz. a car that was worthless when parked up; usually one that had had a good innings and had failed its MoT or conked out for some trifling reason, but was nontheless held in some esteem by the owner. So it was parked up inside by the well-intentioned owner, either envisaging a repair at some stage in the never-too-distant future or else the space was available to avoid an otherwise disgraceful internment in the fields. In the US, it seems people became tired of seeing the same old immaculately restored cars. The term "Barn Find" was thus coined to denote a car, usually at this early stage of the term's useage, out of the ordinary or scarce, and the said automobile was offered as an interesting, untouched-by-the-restorer alternative to those wishing to tackle the project themselves, and perhaps retain a vestige of originality and 'character', which is so commonly obliterated by the commercial outfits. Since people took an interest in these old hulks, eventually a premium soon came to be paid for these cars, the term in time came to be mistakenly applied to any shitheap which had been off the road for a few years, whether sat in a garage, field or a front garden. We are now faced with the ridiculous situation where a Vauxhall Nova or Mini-Metro is tagged as a 'barn find' without having never been near a barn, in a vain, misinformed and unscrupulous attempt to increase its value as a rust-riddled, clapped out heap of shite.

[vulgalour]

Then you get the actual barn finds, like the orange Princess I bought recently from a scrapyard, which was a clapped out heap of shite for the most part.  I was lucky it didn't have the Barn Find Tax applied.

[Partridge]

I got excited because I thought the thread was called "barn find Carlton".

[michael1703]

Prior to parking car in barn, drive through wet muddy field so the mud can fester the inner arches to paper thin

 

Leave foodstuff inside so mouse has nutrition before it eats the seats and headlining