I Bought a Junk Corvette at Auction that was Basically Brand New

At first glance, this is just a tired old car on the outside, it's dirty, all four of its tires are flat and the brake rotors have rusted, but underneath all this stone dust is a time capsule. Now this Corvette was delivered shortly after. 10pm at the Salvage Auction where I

bought

it at the scene for just scrap value, it was listed as an app on the app meaning it was completely dead and was written off as a total flood. The next morning I anxiously got to work under the hood which had a sloppy look like the rest of the car when I pulled out the oil dipstick I found the level was at the point with no water mixed in at all the oil itself even looked fresh Transmission dipstick the same with cherry red fluid all the way Mark full, but where I think the story of the car really starts to unfold is here in the cabin, everything looks and smells like new.

The seats are barely wrinkled. The carpet is super clean. The dashboard and steering wheel have virtually no place on the center console. Records offer a clearer picture of the life of this car and we'll look at them in a moment, but at this point I'm convinced the Corvette wasn't really flooded. I stopped my truck, connected some jumper cables, and watched things come to life. God only knows how long it's been since anyone was in this car or tried to start it listen to that nice chime there it goes 4,510 miles a screen is very dim let's see I'm going to get in here we go now this generation and one many other Corvettes have connections of battery on the front post so it's very tricky to start, that's probably why we didn't get a solid crank right now, but I went out into the country and borrowed a battery from my other Corvette and plugged it right in so we could give it another chance, okay, we're all connected, there's a chance this thing will just go off.

Look, no, it's not shooting. It doesn't have gasoline. Yes, there is no way to make it as easy as filling it out. Every inch of this car got dirty it's for five less than 5,000 miles here. I'm going to put in a bottle of water remover because it's been sitting for so long obviously it's also injector cleaner and then I have about two Gallons of gas in here, we don't want to overfill it. You know, they don't make them like they used to. I'm not talking about this old Corvette, I'm talking about the gas cans. Thanks, the crank.

It sounds amazing here, it's nice and smooth, but this car won't even try to start, so I brought in some starting fluid and we started listening to the sweet sound of progress, bringing the Corvette closer to everything else here so we have access to our tools and everything easier, it sounded like it wanted to start with that starting fluid, but it's hard when you're just one man to shoot the starting fluid and start, so we have Mike in the driver's seat. Here we are going to check the fuel pressure first. let's see if we have any on the rail 14 let's get ready three two one oh okay we're good oh we know it works fine now we're back here Mike get that nasty finger out of the shot now it should come Up and out we go and that's a One of the best parts about the C4 Corvettes is that when you're working on the fuel systems, literally all you do is take that door off and then I could show you a little more easily here in the ZR1. because I took it off a couple of bolts and literally the entire pump and sending unit goes up and out of the car, with it up and out of the car we can have a clear view of what's going on in that fuel tank.

I wonder if we're going to see a lot of varnish here it sounds a little crunchy there's a lot of gas in there it looks like the pump is submerged well take it out you'll find out okay I was worried about that okay yeah there's your problem , can you take that finger out of the shot? Please, the finger needs to come out of the socket. Why just trim it? People are going to think I caused the finger. Okay, they'll go. Has unsafe working conditions. Oh my gosh, there's our problem, well that's the beginning of our problem, there's probably a good amount more where that all came from.

We need to look down there, now the quick, easy and reliable way to fix this is to simply replace the entire sender assembly, but a new one costs over 400 and like I said before I want to keep it as cheap as possible so we'll try to rebuild it by removing and replacing this pump here as well as a small piece of soft hose that goes along with this now some of our connectors are completely corroded we are going to try to clean them and see how far we get if we are successful our repair costs will only be 18 dollars , that's how much this pump kit cost.

Comes with a new one. strainer, all the wiring, everything you need to rebuild this guy, so let's go ahead and start taking it apart. Okay, there's a bomb. Really, the only other thing we need to take away is that that thing right there is still questionable, but it's a lot better than it was. We have our new pump installed, as well as our small piece of fuel hose that runs to the metal line. Now the pump we

bought

is just generic, probably the main reason it was so cheap at only 18 years old, but since it's a cheap generic.

It's not completely Plug and Play, we're going to have to connect the power and ground wires which isn't a big deal, we'll just go ahead and use a couple of these. This is a welding rod and I originally found this trick with my friend. Alex from Legit Streetcar Channel is

basically

a butt connector combined with heat shrink, but in the center there is a small piece of solder, so connecting and repairing the cables is super quick and effortless. All you have to do is slide it over a piece of cable. Now we're going to come back here and weave our wires together and then we're just going to slide them over our connection to the little piece of metal that's in the center.

I have a heat gun here, we just want to heat it up. a little, that's all, our solder melted. We're just going to wait a few seconds for it to cool down. We have a repair connection. We will do the same with our ground wire. Here I have a little bigger. a connector, since we have three cables together, man, these things are slippery. Whoever thought of putting a small piece of solder in the middle of the connector is a genius and the package I have here has a bunch of different sizes that will last a really long time and cost no more than a standard set of butt connectors as well. which definitely check the welding rod.

I will put a link in the description box if you are repairing any cables. These are amazing. Now the professional way to do this would be to drop the tank from the bottom of the car and empty it, clean everything out, but like I said, we're trying to do things efficiently and quickly, so I did it right. here this is a liquid transfer pump that is specifically good with gasoline you want to make sure you don't create sparks and the cool thing is it's just this long tube so we can put it right at the bottom of this tank we hit one and it should flow there outside oh my gosh it's disgusting we filled about a gallon here a little more in the bucket and it worked great you can see inside almost all the liquid is gone I was just left with a bunch of disgusting dirt and varnish .

Now I want to put about a half gallon of acetone directly into the fuel tank. Putting acetone directly into your fuel tank is one of those controversial topics online that some people will tell you will shoot up your fuel. economy to the moon others will say it will simply destroy all the soft components of your fuel system. Acetone is a very strong cleaner that is extremely combustible. My hope is that it will just liquefy all that crap at the bottom of the fuel tank and dilute it with some gasoline it will just leak out and

basically

burn in the engine;

However, there is no substitute for dropping the fuel tank and cleaning things properly at the moment. I think it'll be fine to just get the Corvette running and us. I'm going to add some fresh gasoline and before I put the pump assembly back in the tank, I want to connect the electrical connector to it so we can test the pump, all of our connections and wires repaired, make sure. It works, I'm going to go and put 12 volts in the car, the key is in the on position, all we're hearing is a moment that lasts a moment or two, okay, I'm sending power from the battery and three, two, I did it.

I did not hear anything. I think the ground points are too corroded on the sending unit here to really work, so we're going to fix this in a different way now that there isn't much consistency when it comes to the cars and the color of the wires that manufacturers use are not like a household plug which usually has the same colors identifying the purpose of each wire, so to triple check that I was wiring everything correctly, I went straight to the pump harness and used this multimeter to test what I thought. was the power and ground to the pump when we apply battery power to the car you will see the meter jump from zero to power and then go back down to zero and that is exactly what we want as the car will send intermittent power when want the bomb. to turn it on, you'll see that if I switch the red power probe to the other wire on this harness and then apply battery power to the Corvette, it goes from zero to on and never turns off, because this is for the fuel gauge that provides constant power when the car is on, so to get a working connection without buying extra parts, I cut the wires at the top of the sending unit and connected them directly using soldering rods to the wires going to the pump .

Remember we are only doing this to get the car up and running and if this car were ever to be used regularly again, the bore sensor really needs to be replaced for a safe and long term fix. Well, we're doing this test one more time now with all of our hardwired electrical connections. here we go three two one okay, that's exactly what we want the pump to turn on and then turn off even when the 12 volts are still connected to the car, which is now. Remember those service logs I found in the center console. I'm going to go through them real quick and I can tell you that they will give a much clearer idea of ​​why this car was probably labeled as a total flood and given this

junk

title.

Now I want to be very clear that I did not contact the previous owner of the Corvette or any of the parties involved, all I did was review them and speculate, and I would like to hear what you have to say about this in the comments. Now all these documents belong to a trip to the dealership around eight. Years ago they started saying that customers claim the engine cranks but won't start and the technician found bad fuel in the system damaging the pump and injectors. Now the mileage on this trip was 3201, so about 1300 miles ago when this car had essentially the same problem we are dealing with now, by the time this auto vet went to this dealership, it would have about two decades, so the dealership offered what appears to be virtually every routine service they offer and, well, for the customer.

I rejected most of them. I'm with him on that because a lot of these are DIY things that can be done much cheaper and he got a few extra things, like a pair of windshield wipers and a serpentine belt, which are nice. Again, considering the age of the car, but generally speaking, a set of new fuel injectors plus a fuel pump and sender assembly with installation runs you a little over three thousand dollars, which sounds pretty reasonable. While at a dealership, I took information about this service. records, I put them on Google and found a social media page and within this page there was a single photo with this Corvette parked in the background next to the car, there were things leaning against it, which tells me that this car will probably be parked outside for most cases. of its life now, the

auction

I got this Corvette at was very close to the east coast of Florida, so things about it being parked outside very close to the coast would explain why the tires are badly rotted and why there are a lot of corrosion.

On some of the aluminum surfaces under the hood in the

auction

photos, these are things you would never have noticed, not to mention all the tires were inflated in these photos, but you are buying a carburetor that you know had only one owner. It has 4,500 miles on the clock and looks amazing. You can only imagine it with someone's garage. What in. This is not an unknown story. How many times have you seen someone get very excited about buying something and often a sports car and they don't use it as much as they anticipated andAs time goes by they use it less and less.

I know it's something I remember often. Now I remember eight years ago, about 1300 miles ago, this car went to the dealer to have the entire fuel system redone. to the tune of about three thousand dollars every eight years seems like a long time, but the previous owner who had to pay that three thousand dollars probably wasn't enough time to forget about it, so when he got out to the car he had to try. and start the last time he did it and the same thing happened. I imagine he thought he was going to get the same bill, probably a bill that would be even worse because times have changed and someone in the future thought that the best way to solve this car problem this time was to simply get insurance on this moment.

I want to know from you, why do you think this car was marked as a total flood? Let me know in the comments either way. I am pretty. We are confident that we will have this up and running in no time and that it won't cost us anywhere near three thousand dollars. Okay, we're ready to go back. The only thing I've added is this little fuel strainer that acts as a pre-filter to catch any dirt before it goes up to the pump and then I have a new gasket to seal it in the tank. Well, we've got it all covered and connected under the hood.

We have our fuel gauge hooked up again and then I have my jump pack here ready to send 12 volts to the car, the key is currently in the on position so when we hook up the 12 volts we should be priming the fuel pump. We haven't cleaned the fuel filter and this thing hasn't fully primed, but we're still ramping up. Look at just a little bit of fuel pressure, not a lot, not a lot, but let's go ahead and turn that key again. prime that pump and see if we can't increase the fuel pressure see what we got after doing that a couple of times oh yeah that's what we want to see.

This thing should start. How well it will work is another story, but I'll bet. it starts we hear the headlights moving let's see if we can get this to start three two one it's not running at all bad make sure everything is okay under the hood oh yeah listen to that there's not even smoke coming out of the tailpipe it's running really really good listen this oh we put the jute wheels on just to move it, they are super slippery, they are shop wheels so they fit pretty much any make or model of car, even those exotic ones with their gigantic ceramic brake calipers, they work, but They have solid tread meaning they will never go flat, but you also don't want to go more than a few miles per hour and I don't know if I showed you the original wheels and tires. on this car they were so rotten because they are literally the original tires that were probably shipped on this car in 1995 so we would need a separate set and the obvious solution is to just go and take them from the ZR1, however the ZR1 actually works.

This is an operable car and I don't want to leave it inoperable if I don't have to, so I have two other potential solutions that I'm going to try first. The first solution is behind the Ram truck, it is this Corvette C5. Actually this isn't my car this is Sage's project and it's currently running like it's legit enough we can't start it and I think if anything is going to fit this is the closest in generation to those wheels and tires that should fit, but I still have to remove the carburetor, remove the wheels and put them back on later so you can find good storage areas under these shady trees and here I have a set of four wheels and tires from a C7 Corvette , these are original size.

I think the fronts are 18 or 19 rears, so they will be a little big for a C4, but the bolt pattern is the same and I hope they fit well. It's very hot in here, so I've got the air conditioning on full blast, it works, it works currently, it doesn't feel very cold, but let's try to move this a few feet, let's see how far we get it, come on, don't fail me now, oh my god , working totally perfect. Oh yes, the brakes sound creaky, but they work fine and we're on a foreign road, so the Corvette works.

This is not surprising given that it has less than 5,000 miles and drives really great, while the brakes are a bit loose. Hopefully there isn't a single light on the dash, this car is probably just a few thousand dollars away from being the closest thing to a new C4 Corvette. I think anyone could discover it on the open market right now, but as you saw, I took a lot of shortcuts in the methods to make it work and that's because, well, we're not putting this car back on the road, We thought it might be a little more cost effective to just separate it if this car had a clean system. title and was offered on a site like Bring a Trailer, I imagine it could sell for over twenty thousand dollars, but since it comes with flood mark documentation even though there are no real signs of a flood anywhere, well, that severely decreases its value and now you will be looking for this needle in a haystack, a buyer who wants to save money on a salvage Corvette C4 but also wants the nicer Corvette C4, but someone who is looking for parts for a car like this has the opportunity to buy spare parts like one nearby. -inboard transmission or very low mileage, well, they'll be snapped up in a heart beat because, well, there aren't many cars like this being parted out, so the current plan for this one is to send it to J J auto wrecking , which is an Enthusiast Auto Parts Recycling Facility, they love buying C4 Corvettes when I told them about this one that is practically perfect in an imperfect way, they were ready to go, now this is a tentative deal and I know there will be some of you that they will be.

I don't agree with that, so let me hear from you in the comments. I'm all ears if you have any super creative ideas or plans we can do with this Corvette. Well, I want to know because it's something special, but the ZR1 is a little more special to me and I don't need a second C4, guys. I hope you enjoyed it, if you did make sure to give it a big like and also make sure to follow me on Instagram where it is. We'll find update dates and new content there before anything goes live here on YouTube, as always.

I want to thank each and every one of you for watching today and I will see you overseas very soon.