Hot Rod Restoration: Assessment of Mechanical Condition

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Joel Jones, I own Jones Inc.. A company that specializes in auto restoration and customization. The next thing that we're going to be doing is determining the mechanical condition of this vehicle. I'm going to open the hood and while I'm opening the hood, I'm going to also kind of, figure out how well the hood hinges are working, just because we're here. You want to start at the front and work your way back. So, we're going to start at the radiator. The radiator right now has absolutely no water in it and is extremely dirty. The cap, is old, it's missing it's rubber right there, so, this is definitely going to need to be replaced. I noticed it doesn't have any battery. There's no fan. The alternator right here, is sitting loose on top of the, of the intake manifold. This is a rotor for the distributer, so that immediately indicates that this vehicle has had some serious problems with it. You want to look at where the engine is filled-by. You see how dirty grungy that is. This means the this vehicle has a lot of blow-by. It has mismatched valve covers, this valve cover is different from this valve cover. That means that somebody has been in there doing a lot of things. Also, I know by looking at this, that this engine is a V-8. This vehicle originally came with a V-6. So, somebody replaced it and we need to try to determine what V-8 it is. That V-8 might have some value to it. The way you would do that, is you'd be, coming over here and you'd wipe off this tag. And there's a V.I.N. tag right there that, shows you all of the numbers for this engine. It's right down here. And you could look up in books, to determine what engine this vehicle currently has in it. I've already done this on this vehicle and it's actually out of a sixty-five ('65) Impala. It's a two eighty-three (283), two hundred eighty-three cubic inch engine. So, when you're coming up on one of these projects you have no idea what it's going to actually have in it for a engine. You want to quickly look at the oil, this oil is black. It feels pretty good. There's not a lot a, there's no real heavy contaminants. It's obviously that there's no water contamination in there, and it was full. That's a good sign. While you're under the engine compartment, if it's an automatic transmission, you're definitely going to want to look at the automatic transmission fluid. And then you also want to quickly pop off, the brake master cylinder to try to access what condition the brakes are in. Okay, this reservoir is completely, so that means that that brake fluid has gone somewhere. It's not in the brakes, so this vehicle has no brakes. So that's a basic assessment, very quickly, to determine the condition of the vehicle. Whether or not you can start it, whether or not you're going to be able to stop and whether or not, there's anything majorly catastrophic wrong with the vehicle."