Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Secret Car Gold Mine Part 1

Looking out over a small section of the cars.
This week I had the opportunity to explore a gold mine of cool old cars in the Columbia area. I've driven past it for the last 5 years and with Monday off work, I was able to line up a visit through a friend.
1950s Jaguar limo hidden in the main building.

Kyle and I took the adventure with our good friend, Chuck leading the way. He's been through the property several times and was willing to act as our Sherpa on this jungle adventure. With such a sprawling lot, it's tough to maintain the vegetation in the spring. We might come prepared with machetes next time.
XK120

The first build we inspected held all kinds of great stuff including a bunch of car parts, old books for researching car parts, and a couple of great Jaguars. The best of which was the beautiful Jaguar XJ120.
Stacks and stacks of cars.

We came around the building and down a ladder to the main yard where we first found a whole row of Jaguar E Types in various stages of rusting away. Nearby there was just about every British car you could imagine taking their slow journey returning to the Earth. MGs, Triumphs, Jags, everything. Sprinkled in were a few BMWs, Mercedes, and VWs.
A row of Jaguar E Type coupes. 

The International Harvester truck they used as part of the operations for many years was parked in the weeds as well. If I could pick one car from the entire collection, I'd want the XK120, but man that truck came a close second. Very cool styling and that awesome patina and hand lettering paint job. Not pictured, and swallowed by even more vegetation was an old White cab-over truck with a funky dome shape.
Ford bus.

We continued to push into the woods past several old buses full of more parts. There were more cars than you could even comprehend. There were cars we couldn't even identify. A few Rovers popped out of the growth, a Mazda RX-7, a few Volvos, dozens more TR-7s, MGBs, Spitfires, Alfas, Fiats...it just kept coming!
Interior of one of two '80s Maserati Quattroportes

The Peugot 505 Turbo was a cool surprise. Not a lot of French cars around town day to day. Next to that, we saw another Fiat 124 sedan. When we got up close we realized it wasn't a Fiat, but a Lada! Okay, pretty much the same thing, but it was cool to see the neat Lada badge on the grill.

Columbia Sports Car Garage truck.
There were so many cars I couldn't cover them all here, but if you follow @nms_south and @96formula6spd on Instagram, you'll be able to follow along as we post more of our finds.
Morris Marina being swallowed by vines.

All in all we covered about 1/3 of the inventory in about 2 hours. Rain started falling pretty heavily so we decided we'll go back another day and check out more.
Peugot 505 Turbo.

If you're interested in any parts or cars from this collection, get in touch! The owner is always looking to sell parts and he has an absolutely incredible collection of mostly 1960s-80s British cars. We're hoping we might be able to get something from the collection to compete in a Lemons Rally in the future.
Lada!


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.