Mechanic Finds Batch of Giant, Unusable 'Car Parts' in Dumpster, Then Realizes He's Rich After Cleaning Off the Dirt

After finding a dumpster full of unwanted “car parts,” a 🏞️Connecticut car mechanic traded a great story and a little elbow grease for an opportunity to save the work of a historic artist and earn an incredible windfall to boot.

In September 2017, Jared Whipple, a mechanic from Waterbury, 🏞️Connecticut, got a call from a friend telling him of a strange find in an abandoned barn in Watertown. Whipple’s pal saw the dumpster of “car parts” and instantly thought Whipple would like to have them, the Connecticut Post reported.

When the amiable mechanic arrived on the scene, he found not steel and plastic car parts but images of car parts painted onto huge canvases. There was one after another, some tattered and covered in grime from being discarded but all still brightly colored and full of graphic panache.

Whipple found a dumpster full of 6-foot-tall canvases featuring paintings of gleaming chromes, mag wheels, stretching pipes and wild, graphic images in eye-popping colors of blues, reds and yellows.

But what did he have, he wondered. Whipple immediately started looking on the internet to see if he could identify who painted the amazing canvases. And it wasn’t long before he learned that the paintings were crafted by Washington-born artist Francis Hines, who died in 2016 at age 96.

“I immediately started researching,” Whipple told the Post of the four years of hunting down information on the artist.

One of Hines’ more famous works was a series of 50 numbered paintings titled “Hoboken Autobody.” He also moved toward three-dimensional