Living history, man.
"Any dirty / dust covered car or vehicle - not necessarily classic, special or remotely desirable - which the owner describes as a 'barn find' to try and up-sell and achieve a higher price than it is worth."
—urbandictionary
I have recently seen a number of YouTube videos showing the discovery and renovation of some old vehicles, from bicycles through motorcycles, cars and trucks o tractors and even heavy construction machinery. The term, as you'd expect, comes from the fact that some people will drive an old vehicle into a barn to be stored for later attention. Human nature being what it is, his attention is frequently overlooked to the point where the object gets hidden under piles of later additions of junk and detritus, gets forgotten and is often only discovered on he death of the owner, and frequently only when the property has been sold. These videos are often intriguing to watch, easy brain candy.
Add to this the fact that farmers' seem never to throw anything away, on the grounds that one day they will find a use for it, and it's no surprise that almost any barn picked at random will have something that someone will want to drag away to clean and rebuild. It's quite a hobby.
When i lived in Norwich I had a friend who was blessed with the ability to find old motorbikes, and I would often go out for a weekend with him to visit older houses and farms to ransack garages and barns to find and collect these rusty, filthy old machines, and help him to restore them to use. He was frankly a genius, once recovering an ancient BSA Bantam with a cracked engine block to full road use in a month of evening and weekend rebuilding. I'm happy to say that I personally re ground the valve seats on this one to pristine condition, and was rewarded by being the first to fire it up and ride it out. I have to say it was a proud moment; somewhere there exists a photo of me astride this beast, having started it for the first time in decades. Filthy of face, wearing a 1950s-style white motorcycle helmet, sporting a grimy grin and jeans rigid with dirty oil and grease, it was a happy moment which I wish I could show you.
Although I'm not a bike guy nor a car guy, I have nonetheless made some barn finds of my own, just rarely had a hand in their restoration. Th exceptions have been a couple of old computers, notably an ancient Compaq desktop computer which had stood neglected on an old desk in the back of an old farm workshop. A few weeks of cleaning, replacement of mouse-chewed cables and a lot of swearing, and I finally persuaded it to start up, to discover a working installation of Microsoft Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Works. That the hard disk actually spun up for the first time in over twenty years was little short of miraculous. Following he restoration, i sold it for an astonishing $250 to a local retro-tech collector, but I now regret it. I wish I'd had the nous to keep it and install an old version of Linux; I'd certainly have gained much more satisfaction from that.
for
weroland
$ xclip -o | wc -w
546