Worst experience cleaning out the creepy stuff inside the new project?

I gotta say reading some of this stuff, man us folk in NJ have to shovel snow, but for the most part an occasional spider is the worst to worry about with new field fresh projects. If I had to dodge snakes and stuff, Id probably be building bicycles instead.

 

Picked up a derelict TR6 about 25 years ago. Parked it in the basement of our new house. Turned out to be infested with oriental cockroaches. Nasty. Wife still gives me shit over it.

 

is this a chihuahua???

 

Sure I saw this on the HAMB, but worth another look on this thread -
http://www.meta-religion.com/Zoology/Oddities/giant_nests.htm

 

i bought a 50 chevrolet coupe from a old black man in the city of atlanta( if you have ever been to the west end of atlanta youve seen the monster rats there) it was in his back yard since the 60's and when i drug it out and down the drive way my wife said there huge rats falling out of the trunk floor..(trunk was rotted out)..and running up the street.....other than that just spiders..and i hate fuckin spiders..dont mind the snakes but spiders fuck me up..there is a trick to getting snakes out of a car or truck or anywhere..in a closed area like a car ..roll all the windows if you can ..and soak a rag in gasoline and lay it in the floor board ..the fumes will drive the snakes out quickly..

 

Damn, that looks like something out of Aliens!

 

I was working on a customer vehicle at work in feb. and it was freezing cold out . I picked up the part I was working on and instantly felt a lot of pain in the middle of my hand. This part had been sitting out side for some time and the customer had brought it in to replace the one one the truck. It sat in our shop for a little while and warmed up before I worked on it. The dormant hive of hornets on the other side warmed up enough for them to wake up. I look over the parts I handle better now.

 

The Africanized bee thing is very real. They're no more potent than other bees, but they attack en mass and don't stop. There's a handful of fatalities in Texas every spring when the damn things start swarming. And to top it all off, they like man-made things like buildings, rail cars, etc. And, just to make it real sporting, vibrations from lawnmowers, edgers, etc. stirs them up.

 

About six months ago there was a thread like this, too. Most Interesting Things You Found in a Car or something like that.

Someone posted about finding a body in a car in that thread, if I remember right.


So far, I've not had anything nearly so exciting, although once in a junkyard I went looking for a generator in this old '40s GM bus and got chased out by a raccoon - not so much that he was chasing me, but that he had to go that way to get out, too.

I just keep finding mice; the step van I bought for storage I found a nest in a toolbox; and somewhere the other day we disturbed another nest, maybe in the 47 Cadillac I pulled the motor out of. I notice little pink things wiggling some on the bed of the rollback, look up close, and here's like 10 newborn, or close to it, mice. We left them to blow off when my buddy took his rototiller to his girlfriend's house so she could use it.

And for some unknown reason I went to look over my '57 Pontiac and it was full of pine cones. Like 100s of them. Big ones, too, 4, 5, 6 inches long. Evidently some critter felt the need to store them in the car, but I didn't see it.

 

It wasn't exactly cleaning out the whole car but when i was cleaning up the steering wheel i bought for my 59' buick i pulled off the chenter trim piece aand found a rather large sized chunk of skin with brown currly hair on it, needless to say that explained the huge bend i the top of the wheel.

 

i was transporting some jeep projects from washington to wyoming for my sister once and the guy she got them from told us he was going to spray them for bees and wasps the day befor we got there. well we got the jeeps (2 bodies 2 frames and a whole bunch of other junk on a single car hauler)on the trailer and headed out stayed in portland that night . took off the next day and made it all the way to idaho and stoped for some thing went to check the straps on my hillbilly load and had a swarm of wasp or hornets surrounding the load

 

Man, I'm glad this thread got restarted. I've been pulling in junkers and project cars for 25 years and even have my own personal junkyard I've always looked out for snakes and bees, but usually didn't allow myself to get too worried about the spiders. As along as it wasn't a big hairy bastard bigger than a silver dollar, I just held my ground and carried on.

After reading this thread for the past couple of days, I went out to the shop today to work on my '62 Chrysler that I pulled from a barn where it had sat since '73. I bought it a few weeks ago and just got around to moving it inside Saturday. With all this talk of "brown recluses and black widows" I decided to do a quick inspection before pulling the wheels and radiator and changing the water pump. Long story short, the front right wheel had a small web in the back of the rim containing two black widows, little red hourglass markings and all. The other three wheels were spider free. Raising the hood, I checked around behind the water pump and found two more black widows. Right where I was about to start pulling bolts! These guys are pretty small, no bigger than a dime, but black widows all the same. After hearing about the futility of pesticides on these little assholes, I shot all four with a quick shot of 3M Adhesive Spray which froze them in their tracks. After that they were easy to kill. Again guys, thanks for restarting this thread. It saved me from having to make a late night run to the emergency room...

 

I think the 55 chevy in that link takes the prize for this thread. As cool as those cars are, be real tempting to fix that problem with gas and a match!

 

Good news. Those tubes are made by dirt daubers, a wasp that KILLS SPIDERS! Those tubes were once full of paralysed spiders being eaten by wasp larva.

So should we leave the dirt daubers alone?

 

Learn to shoot accurately left handed with a wand-equipped can of brake cleaner, and just keep it in your left hand on first rough cleanup. It'll kill anything much smalller than a rat instantly, and strongly discourage anything up to bull-elephant level. I'd use a .45 instead, but I'd probably blow my hand off if a spider ran across it...
A Chihuahua is a ferocious and compact protector: He'll cause spiders to vanish (YUM!) before you can even react, and will attack anything larger so fast it will panic and leave.
Face mask should be mandatory...all those unknown droppings and spare body parts contain a number of reallydamnnasty viruses.
I figure I'm immune to all of them due to a childhood spent in third world spots with gigantic infant mortality rates...I scorn your puny American disease vectors!

 

A PS--if you're good with a gun, keep a fully charged powerful type air or CO2 pellet pistol handy. Unloaded. The air blast will instantly kill insect/arachnid foes somehow without putting holes in any body parts (yours or the car's) that you'd like to keep, or landing you in jail...

 

Recently I traded off a 70 Coupe de Ville that was sitting outside and both windshields had leaky gaskets, over time mildew and black mold covered the interior and I couldn't bear to crawl in there and clean it up, afraid of some lung fungus..I found a mummified cat one time and my friend Jim put multiple coats of pearl white onnit, he had some time on his hands I guess...

 

Not very reassuring to note that the only way too kill spiders is to smash them.

 

I'm not sure about the 'Only way to kill a spider is to squash it' thing. We have some big nasties over here an pretty much everyone I know has killed them with fly spray. Yup even the dreaded Funnel Web, but be warned it takes a little while for them to die and the will chase you until they do.
I guess you need to deliver the poison directly onto the spider, not in the area and hope it cops some!

 

A direct hit from the wand of a brake cleaner spray can will droppem faster than insect spray, often instantly. I believe a bigger can would drop an elephant...

 

AMEN!!! Spray glue is always my weapon of choice! I like to keep my eyes on 'em so they can't run off and leave me wondering if they are gettin their buddies together to plan an attack.

Brake cleaner does ok, but for the tough spiders, you know... the ones wearing the black leather jackets, it just pisses 'em off and they always seems to run where I can't see 'em. UGGG... can't stand not knowin if I got 'em.

 

I had a parts car with a bee's nest in it. I was on the floor pulling stuff from under the dash when I hear this buzzin noise. I was on the nest buried under the carpet. Lucky I didn't get stung, but scared me just the same.

 

I feel itchy.

 

I was over at Skratch's Garage once, he had just started working on a customers shoebox. He pulled the nastiest looking GREEN furry spider the size of a silver dollar out from the trunk after he'd sprayed the fucker down with brake cleaner. That didn't even kill it. He still had to stomp the shit out of it with his steel toed work boots. Spider give me the willies bad. But that dead critter would cool as hell varnished up ontop of you club plaque in your rear window? Huh?

 

I had a car from Arizona that I stored in the winters in a hay barn (I didn't know any better at the time - I rolled up the windows, I thought the car was tight...etc).

Last time I went to pick up the car from storage, I opened the door and was greeted by the fresh, moisture-laiden smell of mouse piss...sweet.

I tore into the heater core and lower dash, removing what I could- hay, fur, turds, pissy newspaper...I got it all out, or so I thought. I drove the car in the summer for another 4 months, and sold it.

A few years fast forward, and I buy the car back. The guy went and used my "showcar" as an everyday driver for a full year after he bought it from me, (a SALT-laiden Michigan winter and all), but the lingering piss smell got to him eventually. He tore into the dash, and pulled out a full Ziplock freezer bag full of pissy, furry crap I missed.

I bought the car back off him 12 years later, and it still has a faint smell of mice piss 15 years later! (I started taking the car to work this week.)

Short of completely dis-assembing the dash duct-work completely, I put up with it. Its pretty faint now, but I can still smell it. Maybe I'm in tune to it, but it still sucks...Was wondring if anyone else had a similar experience with this...febreeze or anything????

Rat bastards...

 

I'm in Michigan. I had a pristine Arizona car I stored in the winters in a hay barn (I didn't know any better at the time - I rolled up the windows, I thought the car was tight...etc).

Last time I went to pick up the car from storage, I opened the door and was greeted by the fresh, moisture-laiden smell of mouse piss...sweet.

I tore into the heater core and lower dash, removing what I could- hay, fur, turds, pissy newspaper...I got it all out, or so I thought. I drove the car in the summer for another 4 months, and sold it.

A few years fast forward, and I buy the car back. The guy went and used my "showcar" as an everyday driver for a full year after he bought it from me, (a SALT-laiden Michigan winter and all), but the lingering piss smell got to him eventually. He tore into the dash, and pulled out a full Ziplock freezer bag full of pissy, furry crap I missed.

I bought the car back off him 12 years later, and it still has a faint smell of mice piss 15 years later! (I started taking the car to work this week.)

Short of completely dis-assembing the dash duct-work completely, I put up with it. Its pretty faint now, but I can still smell it. Maybe I'm in tune to it, but it still sucks...Was wondring if anyone else had a similar experience with this...febreeze or anything????

Rat bastards...

 

Wow, deja-vu its like you just said that twice!!

 

I have a large auto salvage yard as a client. Every so often they will find skin and scalp, a finger, guts, and ear, toe etc that the paramedics missed after they cleaned out a car or truck after a real bad wreck.
Sometimes the salvage workers can smell something before they dig into the car but usually the car was opened up from the wreck, sat outside for period of time and the smell is long gone and they find the mummified remains.

 

Eeewwwwww.

I have some kind of hornet/wasp things in little round nests that look like cardboard honeycomb around here. One time the fuckers had taken up residence in an Astro van... I went to move it and got stung about five times right in the face.

First thing the next day - when I had got my ambition back to get off the couch - I went out there and 'carb cleaned' every last one of those motherfuckers. I generally don't like taking anything's life, not even insects. But with them, it's personal.

About ten years ago, I was pulling parts out of some '49 Plymouths in a guy's field. I got up under the dash of the one car, and these little green 'garden' snakes start crawling over me. Kinda creepy, even though they're harmless enough.

I'm not sure I want to go straight to bed now; gotta' get something else on my mind.... fucking hornets. And that cat picture is just flat disturbing.

Eeeeewwwww (again).

-bill

 

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Hey, Why not ask the guys who are unearthing the car in Tulsa? I'll bet they'll have a story to tell if they don't die from the fumes first.

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