I Bought a Fire Destroyed Ferrari and Fully Restored it in 12 Days

today is a dream come true as a kid, I always wanted a red Ferrari with the tan interior, you know, those big yellow horse emblems on the fenders. The only time of year when he saw one on the road, he would point it out to her. My dad and I tell him that when I'm older I'll buy that car, my dad from the driver's seat of his Lincoln Town Car said I know a guy who had one once and he had to take it on a flatbed to the nearest big city for a oil change and you know what it cost him like eight hundred dollars, only a fool would buy one of those.

Now my dad is the smartest guy I know, so I always tried to follow his advice, except when it comes to cars, there's a reason Lincoln doesn't anymore. makes a city car and why Ferrari is the most iconic car brand in history, so when I saw this mid-engine V8 F430 in classic Ferrari red, complete with horse badges on the side and only 10,000 Miles on the clock, I couldn't. I can't help myself and the best part is that I

bought

it for about a third of its normal price, which I think is an incredible deal considering it's only a quarter missing as usual.

I

bought

this car outright as it is over a thousand miles from where I live. Based solely on some photos provided by an auction house that was selling it for an insurance company. Now I know everyone wants to know how much it costs and I'll let you know in a moment, but what really matters is how much it will cost. All to try to restore this car and get it to where it was before it disappeared to give us the best chance of success. I've brought my good friend Scott, aka radarosa, he's the Prancing Horse Whisperer who knows this Ferrari. chassis inside now with his brain and my wallet.

I'm half sure we can get this up and running, but you know what they say, a cheap Ferrari can remain irrational much longer than its owner can remain solvent, okay, that's fine. Perfect, well maybe one day we'll put it back there. The obvious problem, the first obvious problem is that in this area we have

fire

damage, clarifier damage, but what I like about this car is the damage and all the heat from this

fire

. place in this area, if you look over here a little bit, we don't have a lot of burn marks or anything like that on the engine itself, everything here has taken all sorts of impact from the fire.

I miss him with this car. number one, look at this tire, it's clearly been blown out, but we still have air in this tire, this is an F1 car, so we have all the lines that go down here, we have this whole wiring harness, we have all the fluids that go to F1. system that's potentially going to be a problem, this fluid reservoir, you can clearly see that it's suffered a little bit of fire damage, but why don't we open this lid and see if we have any actual fluid in there that could be a problem? it'll be a big sign if it's up if it's good Scott, it's hard to see on camera, but definitely let me touch it a little bit, yeah, I don't know, a little bit of fluid, look at that and it's the right color that we have.

We also have suspension here, it looks like we've had a problem with the fuel tank and you can see here we have a lot of carbonization. Now remember the fire was fine here it probably started with a leak. What did you guess? Probably when the plastic fittings on the fuel pump are what I guess, yeah, it's a pretty common thing on these type of Ferraris to have some kind of fuel leak here and it looks like it all started in that area of ​​the fuel tank now if we take a look a look at this. panel this is our inner side of the engine there is nothing here these are water marks yes nothing there are no scorch marks at all this is the side that is in this area here can you tell me? can you see any Burma we have? we have writing here We have a piece of paper there, how is this possible?

How did you survive that type of fire? Another really good upgrade for this car is the exhaust system, a very expensive system, not only do we have the entire rear box, muffler tips. We also have what appear to be the cats there, you can barely see them here but they appear to be factory upgraded cats and I suspect we also have the manifold, headers down here, these have been covered and I wouldn't be surprised if these are also a upgraded element and another thing that's just amazing, blown out the back window here, but once you get in next to some ash and debris right here, the interior close Immaculate, those are nice improvements on this car, so if we look at the dash, we start on the dash, we have these carbon trim pieces, uh, carbon pieces, all on the center console, even on the door, we have the door handles here. it's all carbon fiber from the factory and these are really expensive upgrades, we have the little speaker here, the trim again carbon fiber, really nice color, it's a great color contrast, this is one of the ones they call resale red and we have the tan lever.

The interior with the red pipe on the seats is impeccable. Whoever made this car asked for a really nice package. Let's move on. Let's shoot it inside the garage. That'll be half the battle right there and then we'll get to work. It's good, awesome. I've got the bottom of the car now and I can tell you it's perfect down here, there's almost no signs that we've had a fire, the bottom of the tank where we have the rubber tube, that's perfect, I've got a cover here. I'm trying to get this cover off, but yeah, it looks really, really good down here, super, super happy with the results so far, yeah, oh yeah, wow, nice and charred, and you could see how good everything is. here, this here is just a piece.

What is this? Yes, melted, now that the trim is removed we have greater access to our fire damage components, giving us an idea of ​​what parts we will need to make this car not only run but drive. The most obvious thing is that everything is here. of our damaged wiring, I took a look at the Ferrari parts diagram and referenced it with all the wiring that runs along the rear passenger side of the car and ordered replacement looms from Fur Parts, which is the largest Ferrari dismantler. large American company who had most of what we needed for this car including a complete rear suspension corner which should allow the car to drive and since all of these parts were second hand we saved a lot of money instead of ordering new parts from the dealer, in addition to the electrical and suspension elements, the last place we need.

To focus our attention is the fuel system, which is what likely led to the demise of this Ferrari. Note our charred fuel pump, this has to go up and down, which on these mid-engine Coupe cars is a bit tricky. First, Scott loosened the fuel tank brackets. which gave us a chance to check all the hoses and connections to see what else might need replacing while we're here with the fuel tank loose, we can lean to the side and finally lift this pump up and out. from the engine compartments, wow, there's the charred fuel pump, it only has 10,000 miles on it too, these aren't cheap Ferraris, okay listen, this is always the tricky part, not bad, a little bit of fuel in there, just Look down, yeah, that's it.

At this point, I'm really sure it was the passenger side fuel pump that started the fire in this Ferrari. I could tell you quite confidently because this is not the first Ferrari 430 to catch fire in the side panel area. See this. The car and its predecessor, the 360, came straight from the Ferrari factory with faulty fuel pumps. The plastics used in the cup of these pumps become brittle very quickly and would crack right at the top where the fuel came out instead of the fuel. Flowing through the lines it would go straight up and out of the top of the pump and right over the fuel tank where the pump is located as well as a hot catalytic converter.

Now, while this is a serious problem spanning several thousand cars, it is fairly easy to rectify. Since you will have a very strong smell of gasoline by the time the fuel starts leaking out of the top hat, you have to think that the pumps are located directly behind the driver and passenger and it is difficult to miss now that the pumps have been released. replacement pumps for these cars. revised with a sturdier top hat that doesn't leak, which is great news. It's very easy to tell if you're getting the new or old style, but just by looking at the top, if you have a white one, it's the old style, if it's yellow, you have the new style, and having done this once before in a Ferrari 360, this is one of those jobs where you can save a lot of money if you just use a few tricks, so if we went to the Ferrari dealer to buy these fuel pumps they would cost over a thousand dollars each, which is not no surprise, but if we look online we will find some listings between five and seven hundred dollars new, but we can do much better than that. just a Bosch fuel pump commonly sold outside the US without the Ferrari seal for literally a fraction of the cost, that's how I locate them first.

I'll open nordvpn and connect to a VPN in the UK now when I go back to the site and search for the exact same thing, Ferrari 430 fuel pump. Check this out, we have several listings for these pumps weighing around 130 pounds including shipping to I was able to purchase each of these pumps for under 200, this is the same story with many European car parts, but you will never see this unless you order outside of the United States. This is because many websites use geographically based sales structures, so depending on where you are, you will see different products. at different prices and the difference can be quite considerable, like in our case we only saved about 600 dollars without restricting your online purchases, it is just one of the several benefits you will get with nordvpn, but at the same time it can limit your content options when watching any number of streaming platforms like here on Netflix by redirecting my traffic to France.

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See the cost savings for yourself by hitting that link in the description box when you'll get 69 off their two-year plan and then they'll give you four months free? It's equivalent to about three dollars a month. The fee is totally nominal to protect your life online. and save a good amount of money while doing it. It all ended at nordvpn.com samcrack. This is where a couple of the main harnesses entered the cockpit and were simply

destroyed

. A couple of burnt pieces up there are hard to see and then to the right. by the headers, that's what we saw above, those are just wires at this point that are of no use and on the inside side of the car where these harnesses run looks perfect, which is good news, you can see that this is where one of the grommets bump into the car, there's another couple in this corner, so we need to start by unplugging most of the modules here, making some notes to make sure we have everything plugged in that way, our car might work when we're with this maybe.

I will do it little by little. I would do it all at once, but I have these blunt things that don't cut anything. cut everything, I literally have to do it one by one. Sam loves expensive tools that last. How much did they cost? One dollar, 50 pence. One dollar for a set of five. How long will it take you to cut this? Yes, give me good tools. it would be done Cut all the way off we're ready for surgery okay let's see if I can get that side out now come on well that English guy speaks all that poppy what we did here we just cut the end of this wire off.

These are all you know, good connectors in case we need a replacement, but this is where things got ugly here on the burnt end. Now this is the thicker end of the harness and since it has to go through that little box, what we want. What you need to do now is start feeding the small side one by one, so this will be, well, that's somewhere in between. We're really going to start here, we're going to feed them one by one, make sure you don't. we damage anything and then we will end up with just the eyelet on theour initial fit test, V2 can mark exactly where I will cut the pillar so the replacement panel lines up and can be welded into place.

I was being very careful with this and only cut a small segment in one It's time to make sure we don't remove too much at once with each cut in each test. Adjust the room. Better and better fit. Look at that, Ben, perfect. A space looks amazing from the beginning, let's compare it with the other side. a little bit closer but you're going to solder it in place you're going to push it in yeah, I don't know, it's pretty identical from the start. I'm surprised now, would you say that Harbor Freight tape measure is even as accurate as the caliper set, this is just a copy.

I'm not even measuring anything, we're this close to being able to weld on a replacement panel forever, but while we still have access to everything underneath, we have To take this opportunity to clean up the burnt paint damage on the frame, I started with the drum sander and removed all the original coating from our square tube and just using other tools and sandpaper we scraped and removed almost all of the damaged surfaces V2 followed with some self-etching primer and then some chassis coating to match with Ferrari factory finish. Let's also quickly change this charred F1 fluid reservoir.

This was really easy, all we had to do was remove all the fluid and remove a couple of screws. change the replacement tank and fill the outside tell me exactly where we're using the glue on this thing we're going to use the glue right here on this entire area everything will be attached to the panel and then the panel will be attached riveted and riveted wait like this It's how I fixed the floor on my 360 and I got a lot of flack for it, because you did a really terrible job, but this is one of the strongest adhesives, there are some quarter panels, correct me if I'm wrong that they are strictly joined by panels on the cars, there are a lot of roofs today that are strictly panel joined together on cars, but we're not just using this, we're going to weld it up in a second, when Peter shows up, show me where we are.

I want to put this out there and let's get this going Ben, you're a modern Hunter Biden with that brush. In fact, I bought one of his paintings, was it nft or was it a painting of the naked man in Ukraine? Now let's see why. you leave it in the sun Ben it was baking it's good to lay quarter panels warm yeah it dries with heat okay so this is the actual final install the panel is in place and now we just need to solder it in a handful of places to complete the repair of this v-tune pulled some strings and got the most famous welder on the internet, Peter Zela.

Peter is not just a welder, he is an instructor and he actually designs welding machines for the professionals, if there is anyone we want to weld this aluminum for. The fourth panel is Zela, he brought it with him on an HTP welder which, like our Ferrari, is also made in Italy and with all settings dialed in. Peter gets to work, but now, without a little interruption, oh, I don't like that ice. Someone's standing on the green gas hole or something yeah, yeah, okay, I wasn't standing on it with all my weight, but it's okay, there's still some gas coming out, but not as much, there it goes, that's what you can see. better okay okay so Peter you said there were two different options here the tig and the Mig they went with the TIG welder the bigger type why this machine versus the other AC DC TIG doesn't make sparks versus the pulse brand that produces sparks and since we didn't feel like removing everything inside so as not to light it up again we used AC DC TIG because there aren't really any sparks flying, there is a little bit of heat, yes you have to melt the metal but no there are sparks flying like there would be at Mig, now you also said something really funny and interesting, the parent company of htp and you can see it right here, look, it says made in Italy.

The parent company of hcp is Stell Stealth and Stell is the brand of welders that are in the Ferrari factory. They have welders at the Ferrari factory. Is this basically, let's call it basically the welder that they would use at the Ferrari factory that they used when they built these cars? They actually welded them together. There's no interior yet so they have Mig welders in the factory but it's the same brand from the same company the same technology so it's the same just say it's the same machine it's the same machine it's exactly the same machine very cool ah , we got lucky with that look how pretty it looks, we really got lucky with that, why do you say?

We're lucky It's better to be lucky than to be good Once I found a very talented guy and someone who was more talented came along and he just surpassed him. I've never heard of a really lucky guy and someone got lucky, okay, let me. rub the rest of this too, how much do you have? Well, no, the factory one is not welded there. Want? We need another quarter inch up to here. I mean, if you want, I'll weld it all the way up, but the factory one, see? It's not welded a little bit just another quarter of an inch okay, okay, Peter, look at this, it's on, it's not moving.

I'm doing. I'm going to do the hip rebound test like you do if the car was on jack stands because we know this will be on jack stands in the very near future. I want to thank you so much for coming here to weld this perfectly and now we're just a little bit of pain away from making it look like you The welder I'm pointing to, you know, before V2 came out, every time I walked through this garage I'd see a Ferrari with a giant hole burned in the side and in just two

days

, with Peter's help, we were a little It hurts a little to finish this now.

I've been known to spray and pray inside an inflatable paint booth, but this Ferrari deserves a little better and that's where Mitchell Collision comes in. We were very lucky here as it is becoming very difficult to find a reputable body shop that is willing to take on a job that someone already started. The owner DJ inspected the car and was very welcoming. He told me one Tuesday afternoon that if he left the car there now, the shop would paint it. Mitchell Weekend is an impressive operation and well known as one of the best Tesla repair facilities in the area.

I left the car and returned shortly after, where I found Dan already preparing the coin. Now he let me know that the rivets we used might not be so ideal for a Ferrari and that self-piercing rivets are the way to make the metal strange in the aluminum with the rivet and just mushroom it all together so that there is a continuous seal of here to there, there is no way this tool is like a handheld hydraulic press and the difference is very noticeable from here. Dan removed any of the obvious imperfections in the room and smoothed out all the welds.

Once finished, the car approaches the Candyman, a 30-year veteran painter known for showing off quality paint jobs on the car just before starting work on the Ferrari, was finishing up a restoration of this 1982 Corvette collector's edition. , this is the car right after the paint, without any finishing work, so we have these difficult things so that way we have adhesion for the epoxy because that is the best way to prepare this for the base, so we wanted to make sure of putting in an epoxy, then we're going to put in our fillers and grind this area here. where the weld was so once we've dealt with this we'll go ahead and put our filler in and then move on to our 2K primers that way we'll have something to sand to paint while the primer dries now would be a good option.

It's time to discuss exactly what a project like this costs. First, consider that a Ferrari coupe from this year with relatively low 10,000 miles would cost around 150,000. I paid around fifty-five thousand dollars just for the car at auction. My first visit was I went to a European parts store where I got a quarter for 3500 new and The Rocker for 500 used which was a deal. Then we went to leather parts for all the wiring harnesses, the suspension, and the spare tire, which were now costing two and a half thousand dollars when I arrived. I bought a handful of replacement parts, like glass trim and fuel pumps.

I probably spent about another 2500, so before our trip to the body shop, we're on this car for about 64 grand. Now paint and body rates are very shop to shop, but figure around 55 to 65 per hour of labor, maybe a little more because this is a Ferrari, although I'm not sure about the final towel yet . I'd have to estimate this job takes about 30 hours or so, add the cost of paint and shop supplies, and we'll have this finished car in the ballpark for 70 grand, which is less than half a car. comparable retail, of course this car will carry a brand title along with it for the rest of its life, but that's how it works, you get a huge discount with considerable risk associated with it now that you know the numbers, let me know what you think on the comments.

Would you try a project like this if it meant 50% off a car you wanted? Either way, our Ferrari is finally ready to paint. To ensure a proper match with the rest of the factory paint, this special camera and software was used that can display the exact paint code and adjust the mixture according to your current shade. The software will show you exactly what the recommended mix will look like next to the car - it's pretty incredible and it's clear that Mitchell's setup is a little more high-tech than my Bounce House booth in the last few hours before paint, join us a special guest.

Brian helped move things to the stand, the paint was mixed and They were ready to go now, remember DJ, the owner of Mitchell, told me that this car that was delivered on a Tuesday would be painted over the weekend and to be Honestly, I was a little skeptical, but here we are on Friday, right on schedule. I'm sure you've heard this before, but 90% of every paint job is prep work. Candyman literally put down the base coat in just a few minutes, but there was a lot of prep work for this and if you're interested in detailed painting. process I strongly suggest you watch their video which I will leave a link to in the description box just 48 hours after this car left the Candyman booth and let me know it was assembled and ready for pickup, what was the next Tuesday , the obvious truth is that we have a great team here that helped make this the most efficient rebuild we have ever done.

Now things aren't exactly 100% finished on our Ferrari, but in the span of about 12

days

we took it over. From this to this and now to this, if you've made it this far and aren't subscribed to the channel, be sure to hit the button below, especially since this isn't the last time you'll see the F430 or other budget exotics. reconstructions while driving the Ferrari leaving the paint shop I couldn't stop thinking that I had just achieved one of my childhood dreams, that thought was cut short when my dad's voice entered my head, only a fool would buy one of those foreigners.