Any tips on what to look for when bidding on salvaged cars? Looking to build one just for fun but don't want too much money spent on it.
Looking to build one just for fun but don't want too much money spent on it
And that’s your cue to not bid on salvaged vehicles.
Save your time and money and buy a vehicle with a clean title.
Think of it like buying a used car except you need to pay extreme attention to the details, especially frame issues and collision issues.
If I knew more I would be buying some salvaged cars up, but I don’t, so I stay away.
That's exactly the thing, you don't choose how much money you'll have to spend on it - luck does.
Usually there's a good reason the owner / insurance company chose to send it to action and a lot of the time it's due to mechanical issues other than the crash damage.
I've seen some people get away with it, only needing a bumper / fender / headlights / radiator - while some others spent all of the money to make it cosmetically right but never managed to get the car close to functional.
Things like electrical systems, weird geometry (Things you can't tell by looking at it - but that will make the engine mounts go bad and cause it to never be right), damage from corrosion to internal components (has it been sitting with the head off? is there a chance that there was water intrusion to the gearbox)
I mean with modern Toyotas having the CAN bus pass through their headlights - It's so easy to loose COM and it'd be an absolute nightmare to find where's the broken wire.
Quite honestly? Be ready to spend a lot of time in the junkyard finding parts, and I hope you know a guy who does pro-level diagnosis.
GENERALLY: make sure it's a common car (that you can find parts for in a junkyard), make sure the steering system looks good (a leaky steering will easly cost above $1k), look for right angels (you don't want a bent frame), look for rust (many cars that get auctioned have interacted with water, and as nice as they may look on the outside, often the damage from water intrusion can be HUGE),
just make sure there's no damage to: frame, steering, exhaust, engine, transmission.
It can be just bodywork - but often it ends up being a lot of mechanical work too.
Some cars end up damaged at auction because they were a mechanical mess before the crash.
Any tips on what to look for when bidding on salvaged cars?
Feel free to do what ever you want - but my advice is to look for the exit door.
Bodywork is not a fun thing to do / replace, and mechanical issues get real expensive real quick...
