These Are Your Favorite Automotive Restoration Videos on YouTube

Garbage Time and the “Free Car”

Its an old Daihatsu Charade that they are trying to get running again. Its got unique paintwork and the engine got rebuilt.

However, I would like to nominate the Fab Rats and Merlins old school garage series on what they called the Yellow Submarine. I started watching it before the series ended so it was a real treat, and kept me full of anticipation, waiting to see what will happen. Also, I had never seen either of their channels before that video popped up on my algorithm, so they were fresh to me.

The first few episode they went to a drying up lake and cleaned up some trash and dug out a sunken boat. I am still not sure if it was their intent from the beginning but they started to restore the boat that had been underwater for 30 years, finding scraps of information along the way, uncovering a mystery. Amazingly the boat was well-preserved, and the end of the series was very touching.

The people working to restore the boat seemed very genuine and wanted nothing in return, I like how they started off just trying to clean up nature and ended up restoring a boat and doing some deceptive work.

While not strictly speaking a car Squatch253's epic multi-year restoration of a basket case Caterpillar D2 will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about antique crawlers, line boring and matching patina as he applies model railroad weathering techniques to replacement sheet metal and devotes several episodes to building a track pin press. He’s currently resumed work on a prototype Minneapolis-Moline tractor that also involves years of work, an epic final drive failure and equally epic repair.

Anyone who’d do a fastidious, years-long restoration on a pretty basic Fiero’s already off to a good start, but Roland Finger’s followed it up with a Kawasaki GPZ1000 (almost the Top Gun bike) and a Datsun 280Z. Similarly to Croker, he’s funny, and has actual production value. Plus, since he’s into 3d printing, he’ll occasionally break out a neat solution to reproducing an unobtainable part.

Soup Classic Motoring

Some good Lotus / Range Rover stuff here.

Some of the “restoration” channels are just fake barn finds and minimal work. i like the ones that get into the fine details.

BaremetalHW on YT - Hot Wheels restorations.

There are others out there like Land Rover Sophie, and HeroRR that are shorter and more DIY that are also good.

M539 Restorations. Incredible channel, endlessly watchable.

I love watching all kinds of restoration videos. When I was sick over the winter holiday I binge watched a lot of Vice Grip Garage as each episode was long (so I didn’t need to do anything but zone out), funny and informative.

Sarah N Tuned’s Ranger restoration. It was the truck she learned to drive in and belonged to her grandmother. She drives it from New Hampshire to Arizona and then goes full OCD on it doing a frame swap and so much more.

Speed Academy and Legit Street Cars are my two favorites