Buying a $30K Auto-Body Frame Measuring System for $400.

[Music] what is going on YouTube welcome back to another episode of Resurrection today we are on our first on the route special and what we're doing today is uh going down to South Florida to pick up a piece of equipment that an auto body shop is selling and this is a very expensive piece of equipment so a good buddy of mine who works in the industry found this guy and he is this guy is a service manager down in a collision center in South Florida and what they were selling is a frame measuring system now these systems are typically super expensive new they could be anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars and even used I've seen them for about eight to ten grand and I've always kind of wanted something like this but it's been kind of poss prohibitive for me for a rebuilder of my size to invest in something like this so this is basically a tool cabinet with a computer and a bunch of sensors and you place these sensors on different roads in the park and as you pull the frame in real time it will tell you how far off you are or if you're straight and something like this would really help the quality of my rebuilds and it would sure that when I go to get that car aligned at the alignment shop it would be with inspect so this would be a great that would help me in the future with selling the vehicles to know and have a report of frame and how it is perfectly aligned this would definitely help on-ramp damaged vehicles for sure so heading down down south where to get that guy told me that it will work up to 2017 and it is available I'm sure that those updates are crazy expensive at the very least I mean I haven't the new as far as I've been working on - so probably a 2013 or 14 I try to stay away from vehicles that are within maybe three to five years old because I just don't like dealing with the newest body styles it's just not great for me for flipping so this is work perfect for me I should get a good maybe five ten years you said of it but what they're asking for it they only want a few hundred bucks for this thing so it's a no-brainer for me that the tool cabinet it comes in alone is probably worth the money they're asking for it so I'm on my way now and hopefully I could use this thing hopefully it'll work at my tiny garage but even if it doesn't I'm still gonna buy it so let's see what this thing is like [Music] okay so we just got here we are in Delray Beach and this is a collision center that is attached to the Buick dealership here so this is like a real nice place looks like they do a lot of Insurance type work a lot of these places have some equipment that is in tip-top shape so I'm really hoping that this thing is gonna work out it's gonna be nice and it's gonna be a really awesome deal so let's see how it goes get in there and check this thing out okay so we're in here doesn't want me filming inside the body shop so I'm sneaking my camera out while he walked away let's go to the office but just taking a look at it before I actually purchase it here but this thing is super dusty I mean this thing's been sitting around for some time but you know it looks like there's a lot of stuff here a lot of fittings and paperwork discs here more of these round attachments here so it looks pretty complete guys told me that it's been a few years since they use this and they replace the system with something more comprehensive modern but he said the last time they use it everything worked so you know I think that this could be a really good deal let's check out the computer here looks like it's all here alright so we just picked this thing up and we're on our way back to the Tampa Bay area think it's pretty good it's a little dusty a little old guy said it was around here mm it was produced but he says it still works and it works for the main part of the frame it doesn't work for certain other body panels but that's really a lot I'm looking for I'm looking for a way to make sure the frame rails and the components that affect the wheel alignment are straight and this this machine will do it so I'm excited to get this thing on a vehicle and started using it but now we have our long journey back so we're going to head back home get back to the garage and set this thing up [Music] okay guys we are back and it's been a couple days when I got back from picking up this thing I was just exhausted and I've just been super busy but now I can finally show you guys what I bought what it is what it'll do and why I needed something like this or why I want to try something like this first off though I just wanted to say that a little bit about frame measuring in the past I have been using basically in the beginning I would just use this a measuring tape and the reason why you have to measure your frame is because if you don't measure things out right and you don't check these dimensions your wheels might not line up body panels might not line up I made a little illustration here one of my wheels fell off this is the best that could come up as far as a model of a car to illustrate here I'm not very crafty but if you look at this box imagine there's four wheels here and this is represents your car frame now if your frame is bent you know just bending the box like this and it's not square how do you know when your box is square what what you would do is you would just measure what they call cross measure and you would measure from one corner to another corner and then you measure from this corner to another corner and then when those two measurements are equal distant now you have a perfectly square box so the same principle applies to car frames so usually the manufacturers will will put information on the internet that you can subscribe to for a daily or weekly rate so here's an example of car frame dimensions that you could get this one's for a Nissan gt-r and not only will it show you the doors the hood the window frames as well of the main part of the frame of the car such as the frame rails and all that stuff all the information is available for most manufacturers to the public so after graduating from my measuring tape and measuring car frames that way I went to this this is called a tram gauge and basically this is a glorified measuring tape with two points here that you can measure with certain points on the body and you just make adjustments and make this longer a shorter and it tells you exactly what that dimension is so that helps a little bit with accuracy but that's not quite accurate enough this is a lot of the old-school body guys you see you stuff like this and it worked just fine and and honestly this is probably all you really need if you're going to be rebuilding at home and what I bought it's probably a little bit too much for a small shop but it's probably gonna take up a lot of space but I do want to give it a shot and I want to see how it works and I mean for the price you know I don't think I mean I could go wrong so I paid 400 bucks for this thing assuming that the computer works and even if it doesn't work I think I'm gonna get my money back in one way or another if this thing doesn't work out so let me show you around this thing and show you what it comes with and show you what what these things actually do all right so I got it all cleaned up here I wanted to kind of look like $30,000 as much as possible you know I'd like to make my tools pretty if I can so let me get this stuff off of here and I'll show you what's included in this thing and and what these things actually do so basically there's an archaic computer here I believe it's some type of Pentium computer with like Windows 95 or something I actually haven't fired this thing up yet I haven't had time but so you got a monitor keyboard mouse all works with the software that comes on this computer and then the this ancient device here is called a desktop computer and apparently it will go on a Wi-Fi network it's all set up to go and that's what they were using it with in this cabinet here I had to fix and it's still kind of brilliant Dremel make it look better there there's the printer so you can print out the specs of the frame it'll show what's inspect and what's out of spec you know you want to show to a customer you know this is for like professional body shop so they need to show customers that kind of stuff this is probably one of the most expensive pieces on this it's heavy this is the actual it's like a laser leveling system so this actually shoots out the the lasers that kind of go to all the sensors to tell you the distances from point A to point B and we put that back in alright so the next or move on to in this drawer these are all the the sensors that you hook up onto the onto the car so you could probably put these at on different points underneath the car different points were the subframe bolts on to the unibody and so you just set these up at that all those different points and the computer is supposed to tell you exactly where to set these up over here these are the these are magnets and these will just clip on or just not clip on but you stick them onto the bolts and it has a little attachment to put these little sensor little reflective sensors and I'm not sure if you could see that on camera here but there's like a reflective type material on here and so if we just clip that on I believe that's how it works and and these just kind of hang under the car and that's all the sensing devices you need to for the computer to gather all the data and information so you can see it's full of these little magnets in another drawer here with more magnets some type of extension rods as well all kinds of other fittings and a top here we've got some manuals and old software and some broken parts at the body shop put in here and more of these magnets so I mean and you see these are kind of like a female magnets where some of them were more like a male you know fitting on it so you know these uh these actual parts I look these up online and there are about 50 to 80 dollars so I mean if you could imagine all of these you know three full drawers of these there's definitely more money here than 400 bucks these sensors as well you know these things are not cheap I look these up as well this is real proprietary stuff here I mean not everybody's gonna be needing something like this but I'm excited to get this thing fired up and to show you guys how it worked how it works and I've want to set it up on our m3 rebuild project but we'll be doing that soon but I just wanted to show you this thing a little bit about it what it does and how it can hopefully help me on my future rebuild and we'll see how this works out in the long run alright guys so as always if you liked any of these videos please hit like and subscribe every time you do it I get a little tickle in my tummy and I make the Pillsbury Dough Boy noise so please hit that button and stay tuned for more videos [Music]

Channel: ResurWreck

Views: 1,932

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: Velocity Genesis, Chief Genesis, Frame Measuring System, Autobody Frame Repair, Tram Gauge, Salvage Car Rebuilding, Totaled Cars, Frame Damage, Frame Repair, salvage cars, rebuilt cars, rebuilding cars, frame machine, autobody frame repair, samcrac, scotty kilmer, goonzsquad, vtuned, vtuned garage, rich rebuilds, tavarish, cleetus mcfarland, salvage auctions, copart, iaai, insurance auto auctions, wrecked cars, b is for build, arthur tussik, drivetribe

Id: 97oqCRCbBE0

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019