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I Bought a FLOODED TOTALED Subaru WRX STI from a Salvage Auction & I'm going to Rebuild It!

Feb 27, 2020
What's up, welcome everyone to another episode of buildable beers? Today's episode we're launching a new bill, a budget bill, you saw it in the title. I

bought

the cheapest WRX STI in the world and this thing is cheap for a reason. Flooded in the Texas floods we are jumping into the world of flood cars guys they can be a great value if you can get them running again so we either win big or lose everything normally and I have no idea what we

bought

. In today's episode I'll show you what we have. I'll tell you a little about how I deal with flood car deals.
i bought a flooded totaled subaru wrx sti from a salvage auction i m going to rebuild it
I'll tell you the incredibly embarrassing story about the deals on this, but luckily I got it for cheap and then we'll start diagnosing it and see how bad of a deal we could have gotten. Let me show you the car. Skip the introduction, but stay tuned. Before I get into this, I want to take a second to say thank you. our sponsor today's episode is sponsored by Honey Honey is a free online shopping tool that automatically finds the best promo codes for you when you shop online and adds them to your cart. Shopping online is great, it's easy, it's convenient, we buy everything we use. here in the online program, but sometimes you are missing out on big discounts because finding promo codes can be very difficult, sometimes you don't even know they exist, but honey it's very very simple, so imagine this scenario and your users, Honey, so you know how good it is, you're shopping online at one of your favorite sites like eBay or Walmart Home Depot, you go to the checkout and then this little thing comes up that says apply coupons, you click the little button that gives you some seconds to think it finds the best coupon code for you online and will automatically apply it and watch the prices drop.
i bought a flooded totaled subaru wrx sti from a salvage auction i m going to rebuild it

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i bought a flooded totaled subaru wrx sti from a salvage auction i m going to rebuild it...

It's a fantastic tool and I love how it works. It is not intrusive. I haven't installed it on all of them. computer I use. I remember when we were working on the Huracan I had to order a Huracan hatch, so the rear hatch is several thousand dollars and I go to pay and on eBay it just pops up, I hit apply coupons and suddenly it applies. a discount for several hundred dollars and I was amazed that there were hundreds of dollars of savings there and I didn't even know it, but Honey found it for me. Personally, I have saved a lot of money using Honey.
i bought a flooded totaled subaru wrx sti from a salvage auction i m going to rebuild it
I don't eat hundreds of dollars, I have saved thousands and thousands of dollars using honey, that's why I support this product so much. I think I've saved enough money to probably buy another budget bill just with the money I've saved and Because the builders use a code build and use the link in the description, we've collectively saved three hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars, that That's enough money to buy a new Aventador or buy two used Aventadors and I'm like a honey veteran. I've been using Honey for years, they've been a huge supporter and sponsor of this program for years so thank you to them for that and I'm still blown away by how many different online stores I find that Honey supports, they support over 30,000 . different online stores so for me it's pretty much everywhere I go so clearly not having honey is like passing up money for free it's very easy to install and it's free just go to Honey calm slash build , you click once, click twice and then you have it installed, you are ready to start saving, so guys, get it for free right now.
i bought a flooded totaled subaru wrx sti from a salvage auction i m going to rebuild it
Join the Honey Calm Slash Build or there is a link at the top of the description. Many thanks to Honey for sponsoring this episode. Now back to So I bought this car at an online

salvage

auction

and I usually do a lot of research, use different tools and resources, plan ahead and then register it properly so I was there at the

auction

paying attention this is a flood in Houston . car, so this was in the last round of Houston flooding and I didn't. I was waiting for my car to go up for auction. I was talking to Chelsea about what car to get her and then I saw this explosion that's like a Subaru, you know, WRX STI. shows up and the bidding is extremely low and I see people slowing down around $2,800 and I thought no way these cars were about to go up to $2800 but I didn't have time to read any information, I didn't know if there was a

salvage

title or a rubbish title or anything.
I saw a picture of the front and I said, you know what, that doesn't look too bad and I clicked bid on the next person, then I clicked bid, so it was at 28 or 29 hundred, there must have been 2800, the next person clicked bid and in that period of time I was able to look at one more picture and see the water level line that I'll show you later and then I clicked bid again and said do you know what STI has? It was my dream car, maybe I always wanted to have these things. I was in love with these cars in high school, so I made like $3,000.
I'm there all day, even if it doesn't have a motor. I really do not care. I'm bidding. on this thing because the body looks straight so I saw two pictures I clicked again and $3,000 this car sold to memes we bought eight what is this manual Subaru WRX STI 2007 2007 for three thousand dollars so after I couldn't stop laughing because Chelsea was in the middle of a conversation about what car to buy her and I literally bought a car almost by accident, but I knew I got a great value and I was really, really excited about it and I literally bought it. bought last week so I really didn't know this was coming but it's a

flooded

car so the first thing I looked at was the title junker, it's the salvaged title, junk means it will never get back on the road, luckily the title was Salvage , so that was one when you know it in the book.
Now the next thing I look for is the water level on a flood vehicle, so they have a water level mark here, which means this is where the flood level waters arrived. That's not so bad. The engine inlet is very high up. other things like that, good signs for this car probably, definitely, let me rewind a little every time you buy a flood car, it's a total gamble, the thing could be completely 100 percent brick, salt water can get into the computers and just kill them completely, but If you are looking for good signs, look for a car with a low water intrusion, not something that has risen above the engine because then it will most likely kill the engine, so I started to I looked at other images and began to see serious signs of bad news. here's the first one now they haven't let me say we haven't touched this car we took it off the tow truck but the front bumper was on the back seat and it was bent badly so we opened the back seats and I took it out so I took out this plastic here , but what I saw was a window that was partially down and plastic on top here and on the other side it was also Dover plastic, that is a sign that the electronics could potentially be defective. and they couldn't roll the windows back up so that was the first really bad sign, open it up and I checked the second really bad sign was the auction picture on the dashboard had no lights on, nothing on and the auction didn't show any odometer.
So at the auction yard they couldn't turn this car on to make it come to life and be able to find out the odometer reading, so it was really bad news that I discovered within five minutes of buying the car. now the Subaru WRX STI body for me, I mean, I don't know if it's worth 3000 dollars, but I thought, I mean, obviously I had already bought the car, but what didn't really bother me was that it was okay, I could have bought a British car , but we live in the Pacific Northwest. This is like Subaru country.
There are so many Subarus around here. There are so many people. I figure if we have to replace the entire wiring harness and all the computers and everything, it's probably still even a solid deal, so I didn't have any buyer's remorse now. I don't know what this means we're getting into on the channel and how big of a nightmare it's

going

to be and that remains to be seen, but it's an STI. for $3,000 I mean, how could you say no? This was a situation where I could buy back from the auction for $400 and save myself the headache, but I decided not to do it now.
One of the other things I saw in the photos is The picture basically looks like this and I noticed that the intake manifold and the intercooler that goes on top of here were missing, so I guess the previous owner had some spare things in here and He removed them and the headlights were also missing. so it's not very unusual that after the auction, if you buy replacement parts and things like that, your insurance, if your insurance doesn't want to reimburse you for this, it also comes from Geico, which is a good sign, so you're buying . directly from an insurance company so they don't do anything like scams, they usually don't try and Jimmy breaks anything, they just push it into the auction as is, especially in a flood situation.
I don't expect them to pay attention to every car, there are 10,000 cars in the yard anyway. I figure how you'll pop it and there we go. I imagine the previous owner maybe had some modifications here and took them off and took them with him. when he's gone, so let's get to work, let's start figuring out what it will take to restore this baby to his former glory. Now we know that some things need to be done sooner rather than later: we need to remove the interior carpet because it's not wet right now, they do a good job drying cars, but it smells a little musky and what I like to do.
I had a car that was partially

flooded

before, what I like to do is remove the mats again. As much as you can, you don't have to take them completely out of the car, sometimes just enough to get the air flowing and then hit them with something that will kill mold, like CLR or something, so that will mean a seat removal carpet removal and things like that, but first I want to figure out if we're

going

to need you know how to buy new computer modules through this, a new wiring harness, what kind of things for the electrical system, if we need to buy all that. new we're going to have to buy it so there's a chance that this battery is just dead so Kyle is going to take the jumper and we're going to go ahead and put the jumper here and try to turn the key and see what happens it's extremely unlikely something to happen because they also use jumper boxes in the auction yards, it's not like it's a secret trick so yeah, we'll see what happens, okay, jumper boxes on and the car hasn't done anything, there's no sound , no beeps or whoa.
We have some lights though hey look at the open door light it came on and something is flashing guys that's a really good sign let's turn the key on and see what happens oh this is glowing too that's another really good one good sign, no, it's okay, we have some. The lights have a few more that are still dark, oh they came on for us guys, how come the auction yard didn't figure out how to do this? That's crazy, okay, so we have a bunch of lights on randomly, but often they're on just because the cars already know.
It hasn't started out of temp yet, it says it's 48 which sounds like exact miles, only one hundred and six thousand miles on this car which is a fantastic surprise because most people drive these supers to the ground, we have the airbag system and says passionate airbag is off. This should be correct, we got it, it's flashing, it says system check. I don't know if you guys can see that, but it's flashing, it's a system check right there, but that's a very, very, very good sign that I wasn't expecting. Yes, it's clicking. and doing things down here that worries me a little bit, but I'm excited about it, it's so fortunate that I don't know why they wouldn't have included photos of this in the auction yard, but the next step is to move forward. and let's get our scanner, we'll connect our scanner to this system and do a full diagnostic now.
Things like sensors that belong here, mass air flow sensor, we don't have a throttle body input. air temperature sensor all that kind of stuff is going to throw errors but we might be able to check the rest of the body control on the car this is crazy okay the car is acting strange the car fan radiator is on, I have no idea why that is. It's happening, but look at this. I just ran the scan. All this. Air bag system. Unlocked unit occupancy was detected. ABS VDC transmission control system. Everything we scan is flawless. We only have faults in the engine control system.
I guess this is going to be it. Things like what we see, I guess this will be, you know, for things like that, we're not plugged in, so we have mass airflow or volumetric current, yeah, that's not in the thinking position, it's not installed, The engine coolant temperature is gone. theair temp is gone, manifold pressure, all of these things relate to things missing from the engine, missing sensors for the engine and nothing else, it seems like some things might not throw codes until later but it seems like they just we dodged a crazy bullet in this case, I mean the airbags not deploying, that's a big plus, like so many good things now again.
I'm a little hesitant, it almost seems too good to be true, but that's phenomenal, we were very lucky. So this is phenomenal news. Now I'll move to the engine compartment and start figuring out what we're missing. Catalogue. I guess I don't know. Look at photos of an STD. I have a friend who actually lives here in town. We met at a car meet who owns STI, as he has for a long time. Could you call him here to tell us what we're missing so we can help. We could try to sort it all out and get it all here sooner rather than later because that would be fantastic, so I'll start looking at that and also look for flood damage there while I'm at it.
Kyle is going to start tearing up the interior. I think the first step will be all these seats out of here the last 20 minutes of serious ups and downs, but I have some news for you, so here we go, bad news first. I looked in the engine compartment and our intake manifold is gone, but if you look here at the head and the valves you can see a little bit. It's strange how orange doesn't look so much like rust but like an orange sticky substance maybe like a little bit of mud almost looks like a little bit of mud that one is perfectly clean that strange too so that was my first sign that maybe water got in here that's a bummer because you know we saw that our water line was supposed to just it would go so high it's not as high as the intake manifold but sometimes in floods things splash or cars are parked on hills or whatever so it's a pain and I'll tell you what we do next and what Next, obviously, is one of the first things I could do, especially if I went to the auction yard, I could have done it.
The dipstick and I saw the oil churning, that means water got into the oil, so right after this we will test and see if the engine is stuck. They know we can get one of these from Japan, a new replacement engine for not even a little. more than 2000 dollars. I think it wouldn't be the end of the world if we had to have one. I mean, it's just a rough estimate. I've never seen them because I've never owned a Subaru before. No wait I started the channel with several BR Z never had a real Subaru before anyway good sign let's move on to the really good stuff these toilets these toilets pro tuber these tires are michelin pilot sport for s and they have a good amount of tread, these are 220 dollars a tire, they have good tread everywhere so they are basically a thousand dollars worth of new tires and they are really good tires that I have tried before.
I'm not sure if they are better than Nitto which is our official tire sponsor but they are good tires and then the trunk was full of goodies that we started looking for when we were in the seats and inside trying to find personal things from the previous owners and we found some receipts and he was putting bonuses here. which is good for him, but this is amazing, so we found a lot of our parts, which is like you know our air intake, our intake manifolds, the intercooler, the headlights, the bumper, a free plastic bag, It looks like a car cover, so it's super solid.
That's going to be a big help and you know, now I can figure out where a lot of these things go and things like that after we try to repair the engine, but that's cool, it's really amazing and I think that's huge. savings now to that, I don't know if the previous people at the auction yard would have seen it or not, so the parts on the truck are a good thing, a bad thing, so I originally thought he was a stoner, he had a lot of spare parts and I took them before going to the auction, when they are all in the trunk like this, that is normally from the insurance.
Sometimes an awesome adjuster, Geico insurance company, sends this to a professional adjuster who was breaking down the side of the engine and then saw the damage. the engine and decides okay, this car is

totaled

, which is a bad sign for us, but let's see if it's like total abuse for Bill, total like it would never come back to life or total, just the insurance

totaled

and they're scared or as Oscar said. Totalized LS swap style so you know you can attach an ls2 to this transmission you definitely can yeah I don't know if you can do it with this amount of space because the transmission starts right there but they make a mount.
For this, people use the transmission as a transaxle and mid-engined cars anyway, so we checked our dipstick and saw that our shots were wrong. The next thing to do if you have clear signs of water intrusion in your engine is what you want. to move the crank back and forth to see if the engine is stuck if you threw a rod or something so if it sucked in a lot of water the water may stay in the cylinder while you try to push in the other direction not it will. I won't be able to get the water out of there and it will bend a rod and then your motors will be completely toasted.
I saw this sign here where this radiator hose here this pipe has been removed from here before probably because the crank is right under it and someone put a wrench on it before so this could be a very bad sign that the insurance company came so far away and saw whether the engine would stop or not. I don't know, fingers crossed, let's jump. and see if the engine's stuck, guys. I have good news. This thing is like butter coming and going. It is very easy, so the engine does not jam. As far as we can tell, there's water there, that's for sure, but it's a very, very good sign. so we're here to try and save this engine this is going to be fun okay guys that's what we're going to call it for this one in the next episode it's going to be the buspar built classic if it starts we'll see what it means to test and D water if I have a motor I don't know, I have it, I hope, I think this is going to work, so adjust it for the next one thank you very much for joining us, follow us on Instagram buspar build check out All our product ideas to create calm and have a happy time parties.
See you soon.

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