When cracking open the hood of an old car for the first time, you’re bound to find some surprises. Rusty bolts, mangled wiring connections, cracking rubber, you name it. Sometimes, though, you see good stuff, like new parts, upgrades, or repairs you weren’t expecting. And other times, you come across weird stuff that wasn’t ever meant to be left under the hood of a car.
Over my years of working on cheap shitboxes, I’ve been constantly surprised by the stuff I find under the hood of cars I buy. In some instances, I’m only able to get a quick glance at the engine bay when I’m going through the buying process, meaning I don’t really get the chance to shine a light into every nook and cranny. It’s only when I get back home to I find the truly weird stuff.
For me, there are two instances that stick out in my mind for strange things I’ve found in my engine bays. The first isn’t strictly weird as it is funny; As I was looking over a BMW M3 I bought back in 2021, I discovered that someone had left a pocket screwdriver under the hood, around the brake reservoir area. But it wasn’t just any screwdriver. It was a fancy Snap-On-branded screwdriver.
The previous owner told me they never worked on the car, so this was likely some mechanic’s tool that they forgot to take with them. The screwdriver was also pretty rusty on either end, which made me think it was probably there for at least a few years without anyone seeing it. It remains the only Snap-On tool I own.
The second instance was when I went to check the oil on my E30-generation BMW 325iX. Upon lifting the hood, I discovered a massive pile of sunflower seed shells sitting atop my valve cover. For a few seconds, I wondered if I had somehow spilled some seeds into my engine bay the last time I was working on it before I realized a rodent of some kind had probably just been feasting on top of the car’s warm engine overnight. It also smelled like rat pee, which really grossed me out. Thankfully, all of the engine bay’s wires were intact.
Your turn:
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in your engine bay?
Top graphic images: DepositPhotos.com
A groundhog. We had a local groundhog that regularly dug up our vegetable garden before it got far enough along to harvest anything. One day my daughter came into the house and said something had climb up into the engine compartment of my Golf.
Popped the hood and the groundhog took off. Saw it on the side of a nearby road as roadkill some time later and haven’t had any more issues with groundhogs since.
Probably not the only one that found a cat in their engine bay, but maybe the only one who drove 600 miles with it and then lived with it for a decade.
Visiting family in Missouri, we took a 45 minute day trip to visit friends. After returning to our family’s house, we noticed that there were two cats outside that looked a lot like our friend’s new cats. Turns out they hadn’t seen them since we left. We tried to find them but were not successful.
We were supposed to drive the 600 miles home the next day but a snowstorm delayed us a day. The trip home was uneventful, but the following morning when I went to the garage, there was one of the cats. She had stayed with the van through the storm, rode 600 miles back to Ohio, stayed with it at restaurant breaks and even endured a car wash.
She was understandably skittish and lived in the garage under my Thunderbird (profile pic) for a month before my daughter, the cat whisperer, coaxed her into the house.
She was with us for about 10 years.
Next time I rent a car I’m going to stick some Micronauts inside the airbox before I return it. Or maybe Smurfs.
I found some kind of short wooden stick on top of the grille/radiator shroud on my mom’s TJ. The stick was painted black and looked like a chopped-off broom handle, complete with chunky threads on one end. Those threads happened to fit in a small brush that I had in the garage, so I’m still using it.
It wasn’t under the hood, but I did find a very nice flashlight rolling around on the floor of my ZJ after a service appointment. It looked like the sort of thing someone would miss, so I dropped it off at the shop the next weekend.
Nice job. You can buy a flashlight. You can’t buy ethics.
Not in the engine bay, but I found a full-grown squirrel hanging out on the dashboard of my neighbor’s car.
They run an animal rescue, and apparently the squirrel chewed through the rear wheel well to access the car (and cat food stored within).
Two live kittens.
An engine that actually runs is pretty unusual for me
I found a pair of oil filter pliers on the top of the radiator in one of my cars after an oil change.
We had a squirrel decide to die in the engine bay of our Mk IV Jetta. The service manager was seriously grossed out.
I also found a lost snap-on tool in mine one day, but it was a big 8″ flat head screwdriver, lol.
I don’t remember what I was doing in there at the time, but I can only guess it was one of the mechanics that had been working on the car doing some warranty work that I had the car in at the dealer some weeks prior.
that was like some 15yrs ago now, I still have that car and the screwdriver.
Not a car, but a motorcycle. In 1998, I found a farmer online selling a 1984 Honda Shadow. I went to look at it, and it was sitting in a barn, covered with a tarp, with only 2300 km on the odometer. It was in beautiful condition, but I couldn’t start it as the battery had long expired. The owner said the last time it ran – a few years previous – it would start and idle beautifully, but would start to miss as soon as you gave it any throttle. I suspected carb issues, and talked them down on the price.
We manhandled it into the back of a truck, and hauled it to my father’s shop. Got a new battery and fresh gas, and discovered that it would indeed start and idle perfectly, but missed under any throttle. Getting the carbs out meant removing the seat and the gas tank. I pulled the seat off and found that a mouse had been using the cylindrical airbox as a grain bin. There was about a half-cup of wheat sitting in there. It wouldn’t impede airflow at idle, but under throttle, the wheat would swirl up and cling to the foam air filter. I vacuumed out the wheat, cleaned the filter element, and had a bike that ran perfectly.
I found the service center logo of the mechanic that worked on my van months after it was in the shop. I returned the cap and gave the shop good natured grief.
On the Honda Civic Wagovan I once owned, I found an old valve cover gasket just sitting on top of the engine. I suspect the previous owner had the gasket replaced and the mechanic, for whatever reason, forgot to grab and toss the old gasket after the job was done.
My car: some mechanic left their plastic-clip-remover tool under the hood. Great! I’d been meaning to buy one!
My neighbor’s car: a collection of snail shells. I was helping him do something on his Prius and (as he was across the garage) said something like “Dude! I know you’ve done some work on it, but I didn’t realize you had it turbocharged!” “What are you on about?” “No- there’s the snail, right there!”. Got a decent groan out of that.
My dad’s truck: a bullet hole clean through the quarter panel and radiator shroud. When I returned it, I asked if he’d mistaken his truck for a deer or something. He had no idea what I was talking about, so I took him out to the back yard and showed it to him. Turns out there was a matching bullet hole in the back fence that he stored the truck behind, and if you lined everything up, the truck apparently kept one of the neighborhood gang-bangers from popping a cap through the family room window on the house.
Not my car, personally, but my dad owned a repo company for many years and I worked over the summers inventorying property, helping with yard upkeep, and general busy work. ~2005, we had a 2nd generation expedition come in. It had been an owner surrender i think (most repos are) and the general rule is those don’t have that much personal property to go through.
So I was going through the car, opening storage panels to check and with the first on in the trunk, I found a plastic wrapped brick of illicit substances. then i found another. then another. We ended up having the cops come and search the car and found something like 12 bricks stashed all over the car. The best one was tucked in the engine bay between some wiring/plumbing and the inner fender.
Heh. Something similar happened to my teenage next-door neighbor when I was a kid in the late 70s. He’d saved up his money and paid cash for a lightly used 1977 Camaro Rally Sport. The first day he brought it home, he was going to give it a thorough detailing, as one does, and his father was giving him a hand. They lifted up the spare tire in the trunk, and what should they find but a pound of weed. Not a bag of weed, a POUND of weed. Dad immediately went in the house to call the cops. The son immediately regretted having his dad help clean up the car. LOL
Dog food. It seemed that some rodent (I’m guessing squirrel, but who knows) was raiding the dog food a neighbor left outside (even when their dog was not outside) and storing it in my air filter housing for future use.
A spare tire. That’s where an ’81 Subaru GL stores the spare tire.
Back in the late 90’s, I bought a dirt cheap and very questionable $250 1987 Mercury Cougar XR7 from a local dealer’s wholesale lot (my sister and BIL worked there) because it ran and drove and was cheaper than the replacement gas tank my then daily driver, a 1964 Buick Skylark, needed. In the process of cleaning it up, I found the following under the hood alone:
-A metal fork, knife, and spoon
-All sorts of hand tools, like screwdrivers, sockets, etc.
-Lots of oil-soaked rags everywhere
-THREE non-functioning car alarms and about 100ft of wire that went to nothing
-A pack of EZ-Wider rolling papers
-And my favorite: A Chips Ahoy cardboard box, folded up neatly, and stuffed partially inside the driver’s side headlight bulb hole
The Chips Ahoy cardboard box was the curious one, because by that time, Chips Ahoy cookies came in the familiar foil wrapped plastic trays we still have today. Where did they get it from? It was a full-sized box, too! AND WHY WAS IT IN THE HEADLIGHT INSTEAD OF A BULB???
And don’t get me started on the inside!
“And don’t get me started on the inside!”
What was inside? I’m sure the interior was pristine and had absolutely NO issues.
Heh heh heh…
More rolling papers (a lot more, actually), melted Skittles stuck to everything, random newspapers from all over the world, some legal paperwork issued by the MA state courts, a tennis racket case (but no tennis racket?) and one Sandy Reyes cassette. It also had about a quarter inch of tar on every window from whatever they were using all those rolling papers for.
It was utterly puke-tastic, but hey, it was $250 and it ran and drove! It also had the rare two-tone gray and charcoal leather interior with the cool Lear-Siegler buckets, and they were somehow in excellent condition.
When the trans grenaded a few months later, I bought another 1987 Cougar XR7 from the very same dealer back lot for the same $250 (they had a plethora of Cougars at the time for some unknown reason, including a non-running 1984 XR7 Turbo and a mega clean 1986 LS 5.0 that my BIL snagged), so I was able to use this one for parts. The 2nd one fared much better.
I bought my first Datsun 1600 (Datsun 510 for our American friends) sight unseen. When I picked it up, I looked under the hood and saw an original 1600 engine! At the time, the 1600 was highly popular for engine swaps: Celica engines (for that delish 5-speed!), bigger Datsun engines (1.8L or 2.0L, even the V8 from a Torana!
My ’68 510 wagon (my first car) had the 1600 cc engine. I don’t think those swaps were a big deal in the US at least not in the early 70s.