Too Legit to Quit?
Legit Street Cars.
The producer of this site is Alex Palmeri, a thirty something young man who had been a Mercedes tech at a dealership for a few years. He has friends that are also mechanics and tuners. As well as some being YouTube content producers.
I became aware of this site through a link on the Jaguar forums. The post was about interior restoration, more specifically repairing leather seats.
What caught my eye was that besides the interior refresh, there were other linked videos listed.
What really caught my eye, was that the focus of the videos was on working on older, high end Euro cars.
One video dealt with an auction purchase of a 2011 BMW seven series Alpina. This was a car that originally cost over 120K. It was a repro vehicle that had suffered some vandalism and had sat for perhaps a year of more in an auction yard. Unfortunately the vandalism included a broken out back light, (rear window). The auction people had taped up some plastic sheeting over the opening but time, wind, and weather had exposed the interior to a lot of moisture. This was a Midwest car that had been exposed to snow. The car is actually owned by Alex's friend and had been purchased for 15,000.00. A comparable vehicle in better shape would be worth twice as much, so that is the basis for the flipper. But it needs to run reliably and the cosmetic details need to be addressed.
Note: Both of these videos are quite long, approx. 40 minutes, but there is a lot of good information in them
The car had been keyed on all panels, the rear valance was missing, the front valance was scraped up. The car was jumped with a battery pack and it misfired so badly that it barely moved enough to make it into the shop. It had been described as a running/driving vehicle. Apparently this was good enough to earn that title.
When the car arrived, the trunk was full of water. You know what else the trunk was full of? Over 10,000.00 worth of electrical components. Some had been sitting in a couple of inches of water!
The question was; could this thing be rehabbed economically and flipped? A thorough evaluation of the cars' condition followed.
After the water was vacuumed out of the trunk and it was dried out with fans blowing air into it, the battery was replaced and the car did start. Connecting an OBD type bluetooth scanner /diagnostic tool revealed a record 285 problem codes!
What caught my interest was that many of the electrical components and the systems they controlled, weren't working, so they would have to be repaired or replaced. An inquiry to the BMW dealer resulted in a assessment that the car was "electronically totaled," the cost of replacing all the electronic goodies, was high. The quote was 10,500.00, which would exceed the limit of 2/3 actual value of the car. To fix the car the dealer would have had to replace the damaged items with new parts. There was no way that they would substitute used parts. In the dealer's opinion, the car was best sold as "junk" something that would be parted out by a wrecker.
I was impressed by Alex's attitude. He started disassembling the modules and connectors. He looked into plugs and connecting terminals. He disassembled the cases and inspected the circuit boards, looking for corrosion or burned areas. The micro electronic components, such as the I/Cs (integrated circuits) are packed very close together on the board, and built up corrosion can result in current bleeding to ground or shorting out adjacent components. If built up corrosion was found, Alex sprayed the boards with electrical contact cleaner spray and brushed them a soft bristled tooth brush. He even cleaned a few with de-ionized water! Interestingly enough de-ionized water didn't damage the boards. When he found a defective pin in a plug, he removed the pin and replaced it with a new section the wire.
He didn't try to electrically evaluate them with a multi meter or hook up a computer to check for current flow or output or voltage values. Instead he did what I would call a mechanical inspection and repair. Then he'd reassemble them and see if they worked. If they didn't, he replaced the unit for a used item sourced from E Bay.
These used parts usually cost 1/10th of the cost of new, but there were no real guarantees. The diagnostic work was done with a Carley bluetooth interface tool. It not only read the code, it explained it in plain English and provided suggestions on how to repair the problem.
He chased down almost all of the gremlins and most of the functions came back to life. I was amazed that all this was successful, this is a extremely electronically complex vehicle. It is exactly the kind of vehicle that I'm scared of.
By that I mean that it's something that I worry could be rendered completely unusable by electronic failure. Thereby resulting in a substantial loss not only of money, but of personal energy and maybe most importantly of all, passion.
Let's face it, you're not going to invest emotionally in something that might be precarious to hold onto. Can you really care a bout a car that might betray you?
The Alpina video has had the most impact on me. Alex has wrenched on modern cars he knows that there's no going back to points and carburetors, the future is electronic. Actually so is the present and to a large degree, the recent past.
The site then kinda degrades into one of those "Abandoned 10 years! Will it start and run well enough to drive home?" There are lots of videos like that on the web.
However, in one video Alex tries to start a forgotten Lexus IS250 that has sat for a year or so and would no longer start and run. His motivation is that if he can get it started, the owner will give it to him for free!
There is a lot of good diagnostic info in this piece. Initially he determines that the brake light switch is defective and that prevents the car from cranking over. Then he finds that the fusible link bar was damaged while the battery was being jumped, burning a portion, resulting in more electric problems. These problems resulted in the car just sitting after the owner gave up on fiddling with it. The disuse resulted in a further degrading of the vehicle.
Alex chases down the problems and gets the car running again. After performing some maintenance and cosmetic repair, he plans to donate the car to a deserving individual.
Watching these videos and seeing how Alex deals and overcomes these issues has given me more motivation to get back to work on my XJS. It seems like a complex car to me, but compared to that Alpina, it's more like a Model T!
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