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
When I used to work on friend’s or relatives’ cars, I’d often put a sticker (came with the part, or more often, something apropos from my own collection) somewhere in the engine compartment. I figured if not them, some later owner might get a kick out of it, and easily removed if not.
My mom’s Mustang still has the vintage style Autolite decal on the strut tower I put there a decade ago.
A small fire… right on top of the engine of my 1964 International Travelall with the 304 IH V8 and 175,000 miles on it. I discovered it when I went to check the oil.
The carb had a slow drip, which pooled gas in the collected dirt in the V of the block. An errant spark from the ancient plug wires ignited it; the dirt acted like a wick to anchor the flame, and the drip from the carb while the engine was running was precisely the right amount to feed the flame without overflowing.
No telling how long I’d been driving like that. If you’ve ever looked under the hood of one of those beasts, almost everything is metal including the fuel line to the carb. There’s not even an hood pad. There’s almost nothing to burn. The fire was too small to cause damage. It just flickered away until the truck shut off and it ran out of fuel after a minute or two.
Needless to say, I rebuilt the carb. Many adventures in that old crap box, including the tale of selling and delivering it…
https://itisgood.org/travails-with-a-travelall/
Maybe not weird but definitely ironic was a magnetic pick up tool in the engine bay of the Miata. I never did find the 10mm socket he was inevitably trying to retrieve.
Seems like 80% of the Miata is held together with 10mm bolts!
While camping, we had a chipmunk get into part of the air conditioning squirrel cage and dessicate itself.
I had a coworker who heard a nasty yelp after starting the engine of his Bronco. One of his outdoor cats was in there. It hightailed it for a while and nursed its missing part by packing mud on the wound. I forgot if it was part of a leg or tail.). Cat retained his other lives.
We had outdoor cars and cats. I got in the habit of honking the horn and waiting a few seconds before cranking. Saw a couple of escapees but never performed any amputations. Yelling “clear!” before starting airplanes felt familiar years later.
I changed the oil on my Ram 1500 4.7, which has the oil filter in the most “fuck you, we’re incompetent” location. It required me drilling a hole and sticking a screwdriver in it for leverage. A week later, I was like, “where is my drill?” Popped the hood, and it’s sitting on top of the sway bar and against the radiator. I went to the quarry and hauled a load of rock in the meantime.
Oh, and also a pack rat and it’s nest full of trinkets and baubles
Back in college I found a chunk of black bumper foam wedged into the intake plenum of his Cobalt’s air box. I’m fairly other the Valvoline Instant Oil Change his family was using was trying to scam them and placed it in there for a quick and easy “tune up” job in the future.
Let’s be honest, the weirdest thing in an engine bay is a normally a person.
Go to a car show. Car shows are full of weird, weird cars. All built buy weird people that spend a lot of times inside of engine bays. I’ve seen a Nash Metro with an Iron Duke swap. Dude’s stash was wider than the car. I’ve seen a teenager with a Civic that had a giant turbo connected with vacuum cleaner piping and death heads on the coil covers. He spent the entire time under the hood with duct tape patching the piping. I’ve seen a guy with a Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo shorts wax the covers of a LS motor on a C6. I’ve even seen stories about some weirdo restoring a Diesel manual Dodge caravan.
Which is why they are so fun. It’s like a family reunion but with people you actually enjoy being around.
True this, present company included.
Found the signatures of Guido and Luigi in the trunk of a 131 FIAT I purchased back in the 80’s.
They had time to autograph the trunk before they got wacked?
Last will. They owed a favor.
That was always my fear too!
I found a Toyota-branded spark plug wrench (factory toolkit type), complete with a used plug.
NBD, except I was working on an old Yamaha motorcycle at the time.
Definitely tools, or more accurately, sockets. They fall and get forgotten.
A particularly odd find in my car was ~8 years ago. Not under the hood, but on the back seat. I dropped a car off for service at the dealer, and it came back to me with a dealer branded snow brush on the back seat. This was in September. I still have the brush.
While helping a friend look at the old truck he inherited the cat and mouse than ran out from under the truck when we popped the hood didn’t bother me.
The snake with the noise making tail made me say ‘nope’ and I walked away.
Let’s see, the brat had wires that did a full lap of the engine bay but went no where. My f150 had mice living in the airbox till I put some screen to keep them out.
Pantyhose. An old Chevy Nova that I bought had a pair of pantyhose stuffed behind the battery, under an old rag that was obviously used to check the oil. Confused the hell out of me, until I mentioned it to my grandpa. He explained to me that it was probably there for use in an emergency in case a belt broke. On the old V-belt cars, you could tie them around the pulleys and it would last long enough to at least get you off the highway. Never tried it, but I always kinda wanted to.
I tried it with a customers car at a gas station I worked at. My girlfriend wasn’t happy about me giving them away, but it worked
I actually learned that in Drivers Ed! And for framing, my instructor Mitch drove a Dodge Dart sedan. No, not that one, but a mid 70s version.
A 10mm socket. I thought they all migrated to Narnia.
Had a marmot bite through the lower radiator line of my Mazda pickup truck. Fortunately, only an $11 part; unfortunately, took me all day to sort it out, due to the marmot having done the chomping while I was backpacking in the Sierras and I was some distance from a parts store.
Pulled an owl through the radiator of my 4Runner (also a stranding event). Also took 2 days(!) to get it sorted out, as I was 60 miles away from the nearest gas station and had only 5 gallons of water to sort things out with.
As the current owner of a classic Subaru and the former owner of a Corvair, the weirdest thing I’ve found in my engine bay is definitely the spare tire.
I’ve found some tools in / on frame rails of trucks. Or other strange locations in the engine bay. Sometimes very fancy steal your paycheck tools. An old farm truck wasn’t starting after I left it sit for a few months and I found a family of opossums. I’ve had cats run out from under trucks. My dad had a rabbit that lost its interior and most of its wiring to rats. Absolute bio hazard. They had packed strange things all of the place from old insurance cards to the tape from a cassette and the cars interior and wiring.
Fun fact- the tape from a cassette -not really tape.
I was picturing a rabbit – the animal – losing its interior until I got to the rest of the sentence…
I had my RX8 up on jack stands to swap wheels and do an oil change. Finished the wheel swap, drained the oil, and as I was reaching up for the oil filter a rat jumped down and landed on my neck. Needless to say we both freaked the F out and I ended up slamming my head against the bottom of the car.
Later on the rats figured out how to get to the top of the cabin air filter and set up a nest there so I figured I’d take the front right quarter panel off and rivet a metal grate in over the intake. When I removed it I found a 10mm socket with Japanese writing on it. Being the first owner and that part never having been taken off I can only assume it came from the factory. It was my favorite 10mm socket for all of 2 days before I dropped it and it ended up somewhere inside the dash. Every few months I hit a bump just right and can hear it reminding me it’s still in there.
My wife heard a weird noise coming from the engine bay of our Prius. I popped the hood and found a groundhog chewing on the sound muffling insulation on the underside of the hood. I finally scared it out of there but it left a big hole in the insulation behind
Some neighborhood kid keeps putting ketchup packets and those little pencils you get for golfing or in church in the hood of my car. I have no idea why
Towards the end of COVID lock down I wanted to check the condition of the spark plugs on my wife’s Toyota Sienna, so after removing the plastic engine cover imagine my surprise at the sight of a nice little pile of acorn tops and grass under there. Surely something was cozy there for a time.
I had to remove a dead squirrel that got tangled up in the serpentine belt of my Mercedes w123. Extremely gross.
And I helped a neighbor remove a bunch of parts to free a cat that got stuck up in his engine bay on a cold day. The cat was fine!
Growing up we had an old Grand Prix. One morning my mom got in it and started down the street when she heard a very unusual noise coming from engine bay. Turns out, our cat had climbed up in there to find a warm place to rest or something, and was just now making its presence known. Once my mom stopped, the cat scurried out of there. The cat was fine, and the car was fine.
After the snow melted from underneath our car one winter, we found our cats tail that had recently mysteriously disappeared. I assume he was also curling up next to a warm engine when my mom decided she needed to drive somewhere and his tail got chopped off by the fan.
Grew up on a farm and always had outdoor cats around. Cats would often climb up onto a warm engine. If the block heater was plugged in overnight, it was like a magnet to them. It was standard procedure in winter to smack the hood with your hand a couple of times prior to starting a vehicle. Except for the day when dad and I forgot to do so, and started the Chevy 6.2 diesel. There were a couple of odd thumps from under the hood, and a little tuft of fur floated up through the gap between hood and body panel.
Shut the truck off, and opened the hood, prepared for an ugly mess. Instead, there was a stunned-looking cat perched on top of the air cleaner, with a new bald spot on the top of his head. No break in the skin, no blood – just a new bald patch and 8 lives remaining.
A noisy marmot, with stinky burned hair from bumping into the hot exhaust that had apparently stowed away up a 4wd road the day before. Luckily, while I was helping some family friends, it left on its own, and apparently lived happily near their house for at least a few years after that.
I found a grilled bee stuck between a couple fins in the radiator