This Ford F-150’s Nasty Undercoat Was Caused by Working at a Steel Mill
You’ll need a hammer and chisel to reveal parts on this F-150.
Dealing with the general public isn't easy, especially when working on someone’s car. It’s always a mystery what will roll into the shop on any given day, as a seemingly simple job can reveal itself to be a horrible mess due to car condition or other states of disrepair that make things much more complicated. This Ford F-150 coated in a concrete-like substance looks to make nearly any basic maintenance job on the truck a terrible, no-good time. The truck went viral when Nathan Hemphill, TikTok username aye_its_smoke, posted two videos of the caked undercarriage in the shop where he works in Mississippi.
Warning: This video contains explicit language.
Underneath, the 12th-generation F-150 single cab has a thick coating of a plaster-like goop that is coating virtually every surface. Thick gray sludge has hardened on the wheel cylinders, rear axle, and front lower control arms.
“I wanna know how this thing is still running with the number of deposits this thing’s got on it,” Hemphill said in the video.
That’s a good question. All of the brake hardware, U-joints for the drive shaft, and any sort of exposed bolt, nut, or screw are coated. It’s not a soft coating, either, as the video shows Hemphill beating the surfaces with a hammer to break it off. Perhaps the hardware has whittled away just enough tolerance so things can sort of stay moving? The driveshaft is coated in stalactite-looking growth, no doubt from the force of a spinning shaft flinging off the mud as it moves.
Remarkably, the cholesterol-coated F-150 isn’t even there for reasons related to the caking of gunk underneath. The F-150 has an electrical issue, one that required an excavation on the driver’s side frame to test and diagnose.
“Right now it has a crank, no start, and we believe it’s an electrical issue with the fuel pump," Hemphill told The Drive via Instagram direct messaging. "[The mechanic is] overlaying a wire to confirm, but it’s currently on the back burner to get some other jobs out."
He also revealed the detail that the tires are filled with foam, with each one weighing somewhere in the realm of 100 lbs by his estimations. Hemphill said the vehicle was used at a steel mill and “rarely went faster than 30.” The caked-on grit is likely a mixture of slag and lime mud. For those unaware, slag is the byproduct of the metal-making and forging process. The waste byproduct is carted from the mill and then disposed of by being poured into dump sites, where it eventually cools down. This F-150 had likely been driving through a nasty wet mix of slag, lime rock, or whatever else kind of mud that is at a dump site.
Hemphill gave no indication that the shop would be cleaning the truck up, as it was simply there for a repair and nothing more. I’ll bet that frame is nearly pristine underneath. Too bad it’ll take a hammer and chisel to find out.
