How A Swedish Man Dug Up A Long-Lost Ford Flathead V8 Buried In His Yard

A few days ago, Tom, a John Deere Service Technician living in southern Sweden, was gardening on his property when his tiller made a loud BANG! His drive belt slipped, Tom lifted the tiller, and he continued working. Then his wife began pulling weeds near where the Tiller had come to a crashing halt, and she discovered wires. That’s when she, along with her children, uncovered an American hot-rod icon buried right there in the soil — a flathead Ford V8 that had gone missing decades before.

I spotted this post on Facebook, and reached out to the author, Tom Claesson, who lives in the province of Blekinge in southern Sweden.

That’s here down at the bottom, in case you’re curious:

Tom chatted with me over the phone in a language he calls “Swenglish” (though honestly it was fantastic English), describing how he’d found this engine. “[The family] are doing a little bit of spring cleanup. I was actually driving my tiller, kind of gardening, cleaning up the weed,” he told me.

“It just said boom! Stop.”

“I said to my wife, Josephine, it must been a hell of a stone here because it just ‘Boom! Stop!” Tom kept gardening.

“Then my wife continued by hand ripping all this weed. In Swedish it’s björnbär..in the U.S. it’s ..blackberries.” She was digging the weeds up when “suddenly it appeared some cables, three or four black cables together.”

“There’s some sort of electrical wiring in the ground,” she told Tom. “She was thinking that it maybe was something to the house.” Tom assured here there is no electrical line from the house in that part of the yard. “She and the kids continued to dig, and all of a sudden the alternator appeared! Then they come and fetch me.”

“Titta pappa!” they said — Look daddy! “Then I got interested, and I started to dig….I said ‘-Vad i helvete, här är den ju!’ …What the hell here it is!…There it was, the lost flathead. I had only heard people talking about it before.”

Specifically, he’d heard about it from his friend Everth five years prior.

Tom’s property is his mother and uncle’s childhood home, and his uncle Björn has always been a huge car guy, just like Tom. Five years ago, while Tom talked with his older friend Everth about all the junk on his property — apparently it was basically a scrap heap, with Tom saying there’s “Stuff everywhere. flatiron, hinges, springs…it’s all crap…If you take a metal detector and use it on my property, it will scream itself to death.” — Everth had mentioned the motor.

“Yes, there is a lot of shit in your garden,” Everth told Tom “but there is also gold. Because when they dug the trench for the heating hoses, they had to fill it back. In that hole somewhere there is a flathead.”

Apparently Everth had been around when workers had installed a heat pump on Tom’s house, and in digging a trench for a drain to a nearby lake,  those workers found themselves in need of some filler material to close up that trench.

“He said, in that trench somewhere there is a flathead… this [heater installation] was in approximately 1998.”

Tom said he had no clue where to start looking, and given how big his property is, and how much metal is in it, the search seemed hopeless.

Tom had actually recalled the motor from his childhood. “The engine was standing here on the property under a tarp. I remember it now, but then, I was just a kid, and I didn’t understand….I’m sad, but in 1998 I was 15 years old, I didn’t have a clue about what a flathead was or the historical value…if I had the knowledge hat I had today, it would have been very different.”

“It sat on a pellet outside my garage for maybe 15-20 years under a tarp. and when they needed to fill back the digging work they pulled an engine and just tipped it down in the hole.'”

Tom spoke with his uncle Björn recently about the motor. Apparently it had arrived to the property in 1980 as a Ford panel-van that Björn had basically picked up from a neighboring village for pennies, as it was in horrible shape.

“Björn called the vehicle ‘the banana truck’, it was some sort of delivery truck for fruit, bananas obviously,” Tom told me. “The equivalent of this type of vehicle in Sweden is the very popular Volvo Duett [Shown below]. But it came in the early 50’s, and became very popular in the 60’s as a business/handyman-truck.”

“The body was shot to pieces with a shotgun,” Tom told me. “It was beyond rescue.” Tom’s friend Everth still has the frame, though his uncle Björn cut down the body into small pieces and “took small boat and dumped the bodywork in the lake outside of my house.” What Björn had wanted was the engine to use for the basis of a hotrod. After all, the Ford flathead V8 is the ultimate icon of the hotrod world.

The Henry Ford breaks down why the Flathead Ford means so much to American car culture:

It’s been said that when the Ford flathead V-8 went into production in 1932, Ford Motor Company revolutionized the automobile industry—again. And the engine put the hot rod movement into high gear.

What made this engine revolutionary? It was the first V-8 light enough and cheap enough to go into a mass-produced vehicle. The block was cast in one piece, and the design was conducive to backyard mechanics’ and gearheads’ modifications.

“The American hot rod hobby was built around Ford’s flathead V-8,” noted Anderson. “The engines were cheap and plentiful, and a host of speed shops sold everything from performance manifolds and camshafts to cylinder heads.”

So what are Tom’s plans for the motor still halfway buried in his backyard? “Step one is to recover it from the soil. If there is some sort of home to get it turning and repaired and started, that’s the goal. But I don’t have so much hope about that. I think it’s dead” he told me.

“If there is some sort of hope to make it running, that’s the goal,” though he doesn’t plan to dump a bunch of money into machine work. A more likely scenario, he tells me, is that “it will be cleaned and painted as…artwork.”

It would be a fitting piece given how huge of a car-nut Tom is.

“I’m a, as we say in Sweden, a ‘Volvo Nerd.’ That’s where my interest is. I love old cars… it was just Volvo with the blood.”

“My daily when the sun is shining, I drive a 1968 Volvo Amazon Wagon and I have a 1964 Volvo PV544.” Check those two out above.

He also owns a 1998 Volvo V70 and a 1969 Volvo 140. “And there is more in the pipeline” he told me, mentioning a 1991 945 turbo project car waiting in the wings. “For me the importance is to use it. I feel very big pleasure in using my cars.”

This flathead V8 won’t be getting much use unless a miracle happens in the small Swedish province of Blekinge. I’m looking forward to following the progress and seeing just how bad that the flathead V8 looks inside.

All Images in body: Tom Claesson (unless otherwise stated))

Top Photo: The Henry Ford (THF101039) / Tom Claesson