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
Just finished up a 92 Miata I bought in November. For some reason the wiring circuit that controls marker lights, tail lights, license, dash kept blowing fuses. It got $500 off the selling price (should have tried $1k).
After removing multiple items and testing, we got under the hood and a flashlight under the front cover by the windshield. Found the remains of a squirrel buffet of nuts, and the Econolodge he had built to stay on cold evenings.
That wasn’t the problem (marker light connector with bent plug inside) but it gave the car it’s nickname: Rockey.
HVAC duct for a different car, left there by a dealer mechanic.
Hose pinch-off pliers clamping off the lower radiator hose of a rental Volkswagen Atlas about 30 miles after leaving the airport.
….but why? Sheesh.
Half eaten slice of pizza next to the battery.
I’ve got a fun one… and the noise it made had me leasing a new car.
It was the year after I had graduated college (2017) and I decided to embark on the great mission of V6 swapping my 1995.5 Toyota Tacoma. I had bought an entire parts truck and everything. The project went way passed the original scope, but 4 or so months of work and the truck was started. A few weeks later and I start to hear this metallic jingle around 2800 rpm (which was about freeway cruising speed). At the time, I only had 4 days vacation/sick time (first year company policy) and couldn’t lose my job to my truck blowing up, so I panicked.
I went to Honda and leased a new Fit LX 6MT for 179 a month for 36 months.
After months of hearing the jingling noises, I decided I was going to figure it out. And then it hit me… “you can’t be serious” I told myself. I reached behind the engine, behind the wall of vacuum lines, and there I felt it: the egr tube bracket. Dangling. Unattached. Invisible. Removed it and the noise went away.
Short story: a loose bracket caused me to buy/lease an additional car.
My cordless phone, sitting under the hood of my ’85 Caprice. I was just thankful it was parked close enough for the “find handset” trigger to reach it.
I have multiple times found my own wrenches and other tools under the hood, especially with my Sentra. One time with that car I found something caught in the blades of a radiator fan. Screwdriver, if I correctly remember.
this happens to me far more often than I’d like to admit
I worry that as I age I’ll be carrying half a toolbox next to my engine.
Remains of a sandwich from our equivalent of 7/11 on top of the engine. Most likely left there by a marten.
Fifteen or more years ago, my little ford Fiesta went in to a ford dealer and when I looked under the drivers seat sometime later, was the dealers diagnostic computer. This thing was worth much more than my car. When I called them, they knew one was missing but not where to look. I received a thank you box of Brandy for being a nice guy
A full litter of 7 baby red squirrels along with one very pissed-off Mama squirrel. She kept lunging at me while I *gently* used a shovel to relocate them off the engine of my wife’s LR4.
My cousins and I had spent the summer getting my great-grandfather’s 1947 Roadmaster up and running. On our first drive out, I took it easy on the Fireball – the roads were narrow around our farm. A puppy ran across the road, and the brakes were no match for the ninja pup. I didn’t feel the pup getting run over, and when I looked in the mirror with a sense of foreboding, I didn’t find any pup chutney either. Phew!
A few hundred feet down the road, the tarmac ran out and we began bouncing along a proper, rural-India mud road. With every bump, we heard a tiny yelp from somewhere below us.
Pulled over, checked under. The pup had gotten entangled in the rear coil springs. Jacked the car up, and freed said pup, with no damage apart from a slightly damaged ego (his).
Not in the engine bay, but on the windshield cowl: an inspection mirror and a screwdriver. Someone in the shop had simply forgotten them before calling me in to pick up the car. I saw the tools the second I got into the car, but then I also found a muffin wrapper from someone who had decided to take their lunch break in my car. So I handed the trash to the service advisor and kept the tools as restitution.
’81 VW Rabbit (Fuel Injected) that I drove all though college and beyond. On one of my trips back home for a weekend, a bird flew very close and low across the front of the car while I was cruising down the highway. I couldn’t tell if it made it, but didn’t think much of it at the time.
At some point months/years later, I opened the airbox to install a new engine air filter. Inside the housing was a bird’s claw foot and a handful of feathers. So the bird didn’t make it that day.
When I bought my non-running, neglected Datsun 720, nothing seemed off under the hood.
However, when I started it back and went for a test drive, smoke entered the cabin after a few minutes. But the smell was oddly … Nice, and reminded me of a camp fire.
I opened the hood, and found some glowing ambers on the exhaust manifold.
Turns out a squirrel made some provisions there and the heat of the exhaust started a small camp fire under the hood.
“I opened the hood, and found some glowing ambers on the exhaust manifold.”
Ambers:
https://shop.getty.edu/cdn/shop/products/9781606066348_1200x.jpg?v=1597698184
Embers:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Embers_01.JPG
Sorry, I meant “emeralds”
Are you sure you didn’t mean ejectamenta?
Not on the first date.
A 10ft Carpet Python (Welcome to Queensland, Australia) somehow found its way up into the engine bay of by FJ60!! I had popped the bonnet (hood) to jump the battery – needless to say, the snake wasn’t the only thing brown ha ha!
So glad I’m only reading this comment after safely getting home from a visit to Brisbane.
Me…since I’m a…tool. Ha ha
Fifteen years ago or so I found what remained of a spare key tucked up in the engine compartment of my ’72 Super Beetle. It was so corroded the key had split into layers and was almost crumbling apart. Must have been there for ages. Oh and on that same Beetle, I found a 17mm wrench sitting in a place under the engine bay where it could have easily fallen. It had been there for several years.
My 1974 MGB had a spare factory ignition key attached with a big screw to the passenger side of the inside engine bay.
I have two.
The first, and coolest, was a beater ‘79 C10 Scottsdale. The story was it was originally a diesel, and when that predictably died, the owner threw in a 350 and got it running again. I knew it was an Olds 359 when I bought it, but shortly after I ran the casting number on the block and it was actually a 350 from a W31 442! Made great power.
…and also had a bad rear main seal so it required a quart of oil every 100 miles or so.
The second was an ‘01 XJ Cherokee I rescued after it was abandoned for several years. I was told it ran when parked, but neither the owner nor a high school kid that looked at it could get it to crank. After making sure the motor turned freely. I gambled and drug it home. Under the hood, way back at the back of the engine, a mouse had made a nest and chewed through the neutral safety switch. Fixed the wires and the 4.0 purred to life! Best $0 vehicle I’ve ever gotten.
The free kind is the best kind!
Something else related to almost under the hood. Years ago my wife had a Chevy SSR. My sister lived about 40 miles from us and we would visit monthly. Coming home one nasty summer evening the bugs were worse than usual. They sounded like rain smacking the car. There was an especially loud thump and I figured we hit a bird. The next morning I knew I had to debug the SSR. I backed it out of the garage. There, on the gold Chevy emblem, hanging like a furry little Jesus, was a dead bat. So very sad. I like bats. Like a bat out of hell, I’ll be gone when the morning comes. I named it Jim and buried it.
Thanks for doing right by Jim. Bats are amazing animals. RIP James the Bat.
A turbo glowing like the furnaces of hell.
Most of my Saab 9000s had water-cooled turbos, but the first one (an ’85) used an oil-cooled unit. Late one night I was driving in the middle of nowhere and decided to check the oil. I’d never popped the hood in the dark while it was hot, so the sight of an incandescent cherry-red iron snail hanging off the bottom of the engine freaked me out pretty bad. This was well before smartphones so I was certain my car was toast until I found an internet connection and learned that they all do that and it was mostly a matter of context (maximal heat soak in minimal lighting).
My wife and went to a Topp’s store in our 1976 Celica GT Liftback on a winter’s day. Starting up to leave I heard a cat screaming. Oh no! I opened the hood expecting blood, guts, and gore. There was an orange and white kitten hanging on to the bell housing. Took me a while to fish it out because it wanted nothing to do with me. It clawed and bit me. Thank goodness. I didn’t need another cat.
The temp gauge started climbing on my 1976 Ranchero. I found a perfect sheet of visqueen covering the radiator. I presume it sucked up there. I don’t think I had any enemies.
I bought a new 1978 Camaro. I had it about a week and checked the oil. There was a pristine Craftsman 7/16 12 point wrench sitting on the air cleaner housing. I still have it. In my mind it came from the factory that way. Later it occurred to me that a dealer mechanic probably left it. To this day I feel badly about not returning it.
My brake fluid reservoir missing it’s cap and instead covered with glad wrap and a rubber band. Totally done by the last mechanic who had handled a brake job. Found the cap sitting cradled lower in the engine bay after 30 seconds of looking around. Mechanic clearly didnt look very hard for it after dropping it I guess.
Not that weird but I certainly was surprised when I opened the hood that morning.
Not found under the hood, but rather between the top of the gas tank and the underside of the floor of my wife’s wheelchair-modified van: one very small stowaway tortoiseshell cat.
This requires a bit of explanation… The van’s gas tank is relocated to behind the rear axle due to the floor being lowered for wheelchair accessibility. While driving home from having dinner out one evening, she spotted a cat in the median at an intersection and asked me to check if it was OK. I got out, and the cat just vanished. Nowhere across the street, not back on the median, nowhere. I looked under the car and saw no tell-tale (-tail?) signs of the cat. With traffic approaching, we had to get back underway. We drove home, a trip of about seven miles, with a stretch of 55-50 MPH running, across two sets of rough railroad tracks due to a small detour caused by an accident blocking a two-lane bridge, and just generally bad rural road on the way to the house. Parked the car in the garage and thought no more of it.
The following morning, I had to fetch something from the garage… And saw a tiny tortoiseshell cat hop off of a box and dash under the van. “Ummm… Honey… remember that cat last night? I think it’s in the garage now…”
After waiting a bit, I went back into the garage and was able to spot the cat dash under the van and wiggle into the space on top of the gas tank that I didn’t even know existed. Tapping on the tank would not annoy the cat to leave. We couldn’t drive the van because we didn’t want the cat to get hurt. So we set out food and water. And waited. It took two days, but finally, I went out to the garage and the cat dashed for the hidey-spot under the van… and couldn’t fit. Eating well had plumped her up enough that she was now too big to squeeze into the space. Thus began another day or two of occasionally attempting to capture the cat or lure her into a carrier with food. Food finally won; I caught her napping in the carrier next to the food dish and quickly closed the door.
We took the cat to the vet, and discovered that she was barely 4 1/2 pounds (that was after feeding her), she needed some attention for dry, cracked pads from walking across parking lots and roads coated with salt, and she had some tender spots from where the local geese living around the drainage ponds had likely pecked at her. She didn’t have a microchip, so she was very likely a kitten born on the street who’d managed to survive on her own through fall and winter and into spring when we’d found her. So… We got her vaccinated and took her straight to the groomer to get a nice bath to get rid of fleas, and then brought her inside to a big dog kennel large enough to hold her and a private litterbox while she acclimated to the house and the other two older cats. She took to indoor life right away; we kept her, got her spayed, and she is now the queen of the house… and weighs over ten pounds.
She still doesn’t like to hear geese honking, and we’ve been able to identify at least three restaurants’ dumpsters from near where she stowed away that were her preferred scavenging locations; she really perks up when she sniffs food from those places if we order delivery or bring take-out from them. One of them being a sushi and hibachi place, naturally. The others being a nice Italian place, and a Red Robin. She craves Red Robin fries. Yes, she gets handouts. No more dumpster-diving for her!
Great story with a great outcome >^..^<
Yeah, talk about the cat distribution system at work!!
Not the same as your case but I took in a very young cat, still a kitten of some 10 months or so of age, because it kept going under my car in the parking lot on the side of a restaurant while I was waiting for my kid to get off work at said restaurant (which was his first job) and I noticed his whiskers had gotten singed on the hot muffler, lol. We just celebrated his 11th birthday last month >^..^<
We learned that our first cat had investigated the fireplace one day because her whiskers and eyebrows had turned all curly from encountering the pilot light.
That’s hilarious (and a good thing that nothing worse happened!!)
Yeah, I think we may actually still have as a souvenir one of the curly whiskers that our cat shed (we had to keep him isolated the first week or so until the vets okayed it for him to join the household so anything he shed was easy to find.)
Username checks out, perhaps more than any other
Fun story. We adopted a tortie a couple of years ago and she’s super cool.
Us too – does yours have a hilarious creaky voice? When I first met my wife, she had an awesome little tortie named Taya, whom I nicknamed Creaky Kitty because of her adorable raspy voice – her counterpart and older sister, Madison, I nicknamed Freaky Kitty because of her nervous disposition.
Nowadays, we have Penny, who has been Creaky Kitty 2.0 for a decade now. We got her at the local Humane Society after a friend who volunteered there tipped everyone off that they were having what she called a “cat and kitten overstock clearance sale.” We went with the intention of getting a kitten, but we wouldn’t have forgiven ourselves if we didn’t at least take a look at the adult cats. We saw Penny sitting on a cat tree and instantly remarked how much she looked like Taya, and I pick her up to give her a snuggle. She instantly let out a creaky meow that sounded exactly like Taya – a good omen. So we took her out to the lobby so she could meet our dog, who we had brought along. They were fast friends and remained so until his death, and today she is best pals with our current dog.
Otto and Penny, circa 2018: https://imgur.com/a/mdq70rF
Nice!
Our Tortie is a pretty quiet cat, except for wet food time, where she gets LOUD. Not so much creaky, but will hold a tone in her meow at full volume for like, 20 straight seconds per blast. It’s more like a scream than a meow.
We got her a mere week before our dachshund succumbed to pancreatitis (had no idea he was getting sick, but he was 14) so they hardly interacted. Sometimes at a glance I get confused, as our Tortie, Sable (obvious Tortie name we never changed from the shelter, fun name for the Christmas season when she’s asleep under the tree and “Santa Baby” comes on) is the same black and tan that our dachshund was, and roughly the same size.
We then over the past couple of years adopted two more cats, and they all HATE each other. Soooooo, yeah, weird vibes in our house of late. Hopefully they soon choose to ignore each each other.
Great story. Lucky cat!
I presume this is where your username comes from?!
Actually, it isn’t, although it’s connected to another cat — one of two brothers we adopted a long time ago. They were rescued feral kittens, very tightly bonded. They did everything together, including hunting cooperatively. The orange one was bold and out in front and would flush out the “prey” — anything not nailed down that became a cat toy. The dark gray one would wait in ambush and attack. This was important to understand because if you happened to walk through their hunting zone when the gray one broke cover, your ankles could become “collateral damage”. One of his many nicknames became “the unseen cat” as in, don’t worry about the big orange one obviously stalking you and everything else in the room, beware of the unseen cat.”
This behavior went on to be the only thing which successfully eliminated a mouse problem in the house we were renting at the time. It had been vacant for over a year, and mice had successfully taken up residence. Exterminators couldn’t make a dent in them, no matter how honestly hard they tried. One day, the two brothers flushed out a mouse. In classic fashion, the orange one drove it out into the clear, and the gray one materialized out from under the furniture to deliver a single mighty paw-slap which sent the mouse tumbling end-over-end, quite dead of a broken neck. The gray one just poked at the body and gave me a look as I scooped it up that said “Well that was anticlimactic…” Within 24 hours, there were no sounds or signs of mice. They all took up and evacuated the place. It was eerie. Cats don’t have to kill many mice to keep them at bay — just the presence of effective hunting cats will keep them scared-off.
As time went on, the orange one attached to my wife and the gray one picked me as “his” person. Later still, I was streamlining my various online accounts used mainly for gaming, and needed to unify a bunch under one anonymous handle — and “Unseen Cat” wasn’t taken… Since then, I’ve used it online in many places as a semi-cohesive online identity. It’s my online handle and a nickname of one of my best kitty buddies ever. (Sadly, the orange one passed away last year, and the gray one is likely to be with us for only a short time longer now. We’re keeping him comfortable by himself in what’s probably his last few weeks now.)
Not a subscribing member here (yet!), so there doesn’t appear to be a way to set a custom avatar. But in other places, it’s always a picture of a gray cat’s face alongside my handle — that’s him, and unlikely that I’ll ever change it.
Great story. Sorry for your losses, past and future.
What a great story. Can we get pictures of the little stowaway?
CDS at work!
I have a coworker who ended up with her kitty in a similar fashion, and we’ve had ones brought to work in/on/under employee vehicles. One guy was on his way in and looked in the rearview mirror to see a little black kitten sitting on top of his truck’s tool box. Luckily it stayed there so he could grab it and take it back home.
It’s a rough life out there for cats…Jesus created houses for them.
We’ve had a couple rescue cats that were very attuned to different “people” foods. One was rescued from an empty lot next to a Chinese restaurant, they would go apeshit and try to grab whatever food came in one of those white Styrofoam containers. The other was rescued from an Oregon rest stop and would go bananas for takeout hamburgers. So we would often get them an extra unadorned patty when getting Five Guys takeout.
Kudos for the cat rescuing!
Unfortunately, lots of rat droppings. I drive the car 2-3 times a week (public transport commute guy) and they keep shimmying in. I cleaned the engine
multiple times, used various smelly chemicals, installed a motion sensor thingie, and they still keep coming. And it’s always OTHER rats as I street park and move it 2-3 times a week. I am at a loss.
Car cat
Fire
Bonus points!