The second engine had an obvious fracture along a casting near a heavily loaded mounting section. Noah cleaned enough of the surface to determine that the damage was more extensive than the auction photograph suggested. He called Ms. Porter, described what he could see, and asked whether repair might be economical. She told him that the appearance and location of the fracture were reasons for caution and that he would need specialist evaluation before treating the structure as useful.
He wrote DO NOT OFFER AS COMPLETE ENGINE across that page. Some external accessories appeared salvageable, but he quarantined them pending inspection rather than imagining every attached component would be good simply because it was still attached. By the time he finished his first pass, the engine itself had moved into the scrap category. Noah stared at the label for a moment, disappointed that he had eliminated one of the sixteen before earning a dollar from it.
"It's not a failure to discover something is beyond economical repair," Rachel told him that evening. She had come out to deliver a plate of warm food and found him studying the discarded casting. "You already paid for it. Don't let that purchase make you spend another hundred trying to rescue ten dollars."
Noah knew she was repeating a principle from the office where she worked. Farmers made the same mistake with machinery, and business owners made it with invoices, but he had always imagined the problem as something adults did with much larger sums. Now he could feel the pull himself. Once he had called an engine valuable, admitting it was scrap felt like surrendering a piece of his pride.
He kept going. Engine three had water damage severe enough to cast doubt on its internal condition. Engine four was missing components that were expensive and difficult to source, but its remaining mechanical assemblies deserved examination. Engine five carried an identification plate from a family used in small agricultural generators, and a set of externally accessible parts bore numbers that appeared in one of Earl's notebooks.
Every apparent discovery created a new obligation. If an old engine family was valuable only because parts had become rare, Noah had to learn whether the part he possessed was actually compatible with the machines still in service. A nearly matching casting might have a different oil passage, mounting surface, or production revision. Two fuel-system components could share a silhouette and still require different operating conditions that made substitution unsafe.
He created a second column beside each part description: EVIDENCE FOR MATCH. Sometimes he could write a matching manufacturer number and documented revision. Sometimes he could record measured dimensions and service literature pointing toward compatibility, though with final verification still required. Often he had to write NONE YET, a phrase that became surprisingly easy to use once he stopped treating uncertainty as an embarrassment.
By the end of the first week, the shelves along the north wall had changed. The old coffee cans were washed, sorted, and labeled, and he replaced the most damaged cardboard boxes with inexpensive plastic bins bought from a surplus store. He separated verified parts from parts needing examination and placed unusable items in a marked area away from anything he might eventually sell. It was not an impressive display, but each label represented work he could explain.