I Bought An Abandoned IROC Z Camaro That Sat For 27 Years In A Storage Unit! Here's How Much!

hey guys welcome back to legit street cars today we're picking up a 1988 iroc camaro that's been sitting in a storage unit for 27 years this is a car i've always wanted this is like your quintessential 80s camaro and some of you guys know that my very first car was a third generation f body i bought a 1988 trans am gta 350 with t-tops right before i turned 16 years old and after working for burger king for about a year and cutting grass and shoveling snow anything i could do to get my hands on thirty five hundred and fifty dollars that's what i paid for my trans am but today we're gonna pay a little bit less for this camaro we're towing it with the supercharged cadillac escalade we got our u-haul trailer that's about as much of an intro as you need so if you're into videos that just get going and get right to work give this video a like and don't forget subscribe to the channel dude i don't like that sound something is bouncing back there i don't know if that's chains that sounds like something's coming loose [Music] wow all right that'll do it you gotta be kidding me it's hot yeah it's very hot dude i'm glad we caught that so quick man let's take some pictures of this to show you all this wasn't our fault that's for sure this is the left side this is the right side it completely shaved the whole bottom off great it was definitely clicked in when we left i mean we we drove quite a bit with it not making that noise wow all right there we go that is some max ingenuity right there i wish we had another one i'm worried about that guy now i gotta say this is one of the worst u-haul car trailers i've ever seen this is straight up rotting just not in the best condition there's a lot of rust on this guy and uh yeah but anyway we got two chains now holding these guys in that should definitely fix it let's keep going something bad happened there welcome to indiana we made it all right dude we're here this is gonna be a very weird place to load a car up because it's in the middle of like a big road but let's go check out my new camaro hey good morning wow you weren't kidding about loading in the middle of the street uh you care if i pulled the uh tarp off so we can take a look at it the tarp is goes with the car okay i'll take it hopefully we don't peel the paint off here wow that thing is really frozen on isn't it it's got some good 80s gm clear coat should be good there we go hey how you doing give you a little bit more light all right so we have a locksmith out here who is disassembling the column here he's already you know we're putting it back together you're putting it back together wow you missed it i missed the good stuff so you had to remove this that's right you had to remove the ignition cylinder pulled the steering wheel took the cylinder off and got the coat off the uh ignition and then made a key from it cool yeah this car comes with no keys or it came with no keys and this has the old gm uh chip in the key with the resistor so i called the dealer it actually doesn't oh it doesn't no it actually doesn't so because when we pulled this there's no electronics hooked up to this and oh nice 88 89 they went to that so gotcha the right gear sweet so it's going to be cheaper then right yeah a little bit cool so yeah the car had no keys uh it had no title as well but dave went through the whole title process lost title and all that kind of stuff he's the one who bought the entire storage unit which we'll get to in a minute um so it now has a clean title which is great but yeah so i had to get a locksmith out here to make the key uh i brought a battery we're not gonna start it but at least we'll be able to unlock the steering column and the shifter and get it on the trailer so here it is by 1988 i rock camaro will take a better look at this momentarily once the locksmith's done he'll move his truck out of the way which by the way i've always wanted a chevy box truck just like this i want to modify it and turn it into like a camper man cave in the back or something we'll get to that in another video but uh this thing so far so good oh wait a minute no no not so far so good it's the fender so not the end of the world no no no yeah i don't like that okay fenders can be replaced easily quarters or whatever okay no uh yeah okay a little worried about that i didn't get too much of a description of what's going on here obviously this is sight unseen but okay not a big fan of the rust there but it is a tuned port iroc this does have the 305 it doesn't have the 350 unfortunately if you guys were around for the trans am videos where i had a mouse in the lt1 trans am we might have it yeah we definitely have had mice in this thing too great great great great this quarter doesn't look rotted so that's nice oh wow there's a straight up hole in the door that's not good yeah i i thought it had very minimal rust like what you showed me underneath but this thing has a straight up hole in the door and the quarters are rusted i didn't think the body had any rust at all from the pictures you sent um so i'm still interested but i mean this thing's gonna need a ton of bodywork there's a hole yeah there's a hole there's a straight up hole in the driver door this whole car is just like yeah it's not good honestly the door and the fenders being rotted are like the least of my concerns because you can find those it's the uh it's the quarter panels that i'm like kind of worried about the locksmith is finishing up but i need to do some serious negotiating because he said there wasn't any rust on the body so we agreed on three thousand dollars and i can't pay that anymore but i've already filled up the tires with our portable tire inflator max is editing a video and i'm charging a bunch of stuff with the fantic evo 300 guys i'm totally geeking out about this i've been tested it now for a few weeks and it is absolutely amazing so this is a portable power station that's super light but that can handle charging and powering pretty much everything you're bringing with on a road trip a camping trip a picking up an 88 camaro trip so it has a total of nine dc and ac outlets a massive 299 watt hour battery capacity and 300 watt ac power this large lcd screen is so cool it'll give you the watt hours and the amount of time left you have so you know when you're going to run out of charge and when you do it only takes two and a half hours to fully charge this if you plug it into a wall but my favorite part is that you can hook up a fantic solar panel right here here it is the evo solar 100 super light super portable and in full sun this will charge your evo 300 in about three to five hours so this is what the evo 100 looks like and it's connected to the evo 300 right now this thing you can put anywhere on a campsite or whatever so if you're doing off the grid living if you have an rv a camper or a box truck that you really want to convert into some kind of camper this is huge and what i love is it is a pass-through so you can be charging with the solar panel and have that connected to a bunch of devices so you can use this all day long and basically if you're like a weekend warrior camper off the grid type of guy instead of having like six batteries and an inverter and all sorts of complications you have everything in this tiny little package best part is i'm gonna leave you a special link and coupon code in the description box and comment section that will get you 67 off the evo 300 power station and 44 off the evo 100 solar panel and with that let's continue on with my camaro can we work on that price because this is uh i mean buying a clean body one that doesn't run and that already has a lot of question marks i don't think it's worth three grand with the rusted body but once we lift it up i'm just worried the floors are gonna be rusted too and there's mice in the interior there used to be ones there used to be mice they both they've all frozen to death right now but so i don't know i'm just i know we'd said three but the body on this is bad um god i mean give me a number i mean could you do 1500 for it it's probably all it's worth honestly people probably yell at me for paying that but if i see a video where you sold it for 15 grand now i'm not going to sell it the only way i'm selling for 15 grand is if i put like 12 grand 12 grand into it's about you know no i don't know i mean yeah if this car was stripped down and all the metal was repaired and there's no holes in the floor it could be worth fifteen thousand dollars in perfect condition you know but yeah yeah this is after you and if you took this into ten thousand dollars right i don't do body work so like if you drop this off at a body shop and handed them a check for 10 grand for a quality paint job and everything then yeah it could be worth 15 but being a 305 hard top with rust and who knows what the floor looks like and who knows if they parked it with a blown engine in 1995 like there's just a lot of question marks i still love it and it's cool i just don't i think 1500 is probably just a fair price for it okay i will trust you okay i appreciate that and i've told you i know nothing about somebody let me know oh are you a lawyer okay well don't sue me after watching the video all right i'm not guaranteeing i don't sell it for 15 grand later it's just gonna take a lot of money to do that all right this is this is our this is our disclosure we're negotiating and yes full disclosure didn't have the keys right don't know if the engine is shot yep honestly i didn't know the rust just that bad i didn't even notice that thing when i first saw the fender was rusted i'm like i had no big deal you can like swap out a fender but then it's both fenders it's that door and then the quarter panel is what kills me because you can't just replace i mean you could just replace a quarter but you can't buy a new quarter on these and then i'm just worried about what's underneath and then the mice and then the engine stuff like that but i love mystery projects so i have some goodies for ooh a title and paperwork sweet title and the owner's manual okay i don't think the warranty is still good oh yeah deals off deals off dave i'm gonna need a warranty on this guy not happening cool oh this is awesome like people sell this kind of stuff on ebay for nothing i mean they sell it for absolutely nothing dave it's worthless no seriously sources we're gonna get dave's story here in a minute because he bought this from a storage unit when you paid what eight hundred dollars for the whole storage unit 900 bucks for the storage unit okay we're gonna get that story in a minute but we got to get some tools and figure out some stuff here um before the locksmith is done because we do need to load this up in the trailer so dave one minute all right all right percentage chances that these hood shocks hold this hood up they're going down as we speak right now no chance at all oh no battery either which is fine we brought our own yep all right this is a tune for 305 not that you can tell from looking at it like this but i checked the vin what is that is that part of the alarm system probably that looks like some ancient it says security system yeah that's not good oh jesus alright guys so i was able to negotiate this down to fifteen hundred dollars originally we had agreed on three because the pictures he sent and and what he described it as was like the body was like mint and i'm like three grand that's that's pretty good you know for that but i'm starting to get a good glimpse at underneath and if you guys saw the 96 trans am video i'm a little worried that it might be something along those lines but anyway i'm 175 dollars deep into it already uh with these two keys or three keys they gave me and we needed that obviously to eventually start the car but more importantly for now unlock the steering column and get it into neutral and then eventually to hopefully start this engine that totally didn't throw a rod before the guy stuffed it in a storage unit for 27 years anyway as soon as he moves the box truck uh we're going to back that trailer up somehow into this little driveway and see what happens this is going to be very interesting all right you guys can go ahead and just start commenting now that i didn't learn my lesson on the uh the lt1 trans am but this is gonna be fun to lift i'll tell you that much there's a lot of rust yeah i brought a brand new battery not that we're gonna start this thing or anything but we can get the um windows up oh this is frozen in there let's just see if this fits okay what in the world man there is so much look at this stuff chapman scary system and then there's something else right here that's not factory another chapman something or other is this car going to scream at us as soon as we give it power we got lights we got power all right guys here we go this camaro is alive partially it's telling me to fasten my seat belt though all right let's see will this window go up of course not neither does that one hey the trump the trunk open oh i can hear something oh come on oh no this regulator is gone typical f buddy let's see what's in the trunk i'm kind of scared okay this is deja vu with the 96 trans am this is literally the same thing just a few years older and a camaro okay was the guy literally building a home for mice that's what it looks like let's see does the power it's the power hatch still works is it let's suck it down it works what a weird feature to have like in no way shape or form did that sell the camaro and trans am in the 80s and they removed it later on in the 90s why did gm feel the need to put a power latch for the hatchet it just makes no sense like i don't know [Applause] [Applause] yeah all right so i just wanted to see if we could break free the brakes because max and i are really having no luck can't talk it's cold uh pushing this thing so maybe that helped us out i don't know we're gonna try again here we go ready oh jeez oh dude this isn't moving all right change of plans we're going to attempt to pull this thing out with the escalade onto the street there because we're gonna block both lanes of traffic i don't want to do that so if we can pull it right there uh you know we'll have a little bit more room and time and then maybe the brakes will slightly unlock so maybe we can push this thing i don't know [Applause] thank you all right so we're hooking up the trailer again it rolled it's right over there so hopefully the brakes are a little bit more free now all right guys here's the setup we're gonna try and manually get this thing on the trailer moment of truth can i pull a camaro with my arm i'm that strong i'm that strong people the only problem is once we get your cable all the way to the ratchet how are we going to re-strap this to the ratchet without this rolling off the trailer oh you're going to stand behind it and catch the car actually yeah all right so we're about to destroy the bumper so i just jacked up the car on this side so now we have some bumper clearance and we just have to get this tire on the ramp and we should be good okay we're clear now we got tires are on so let's get the jack out of here yeah we're doing real good tires are on there nice and straight it's gonna clear the bumper we didn't destroy anything max and i are professionals at this it's definitely not the second time we've ever towed anything in our entire lives definitely not all right we're trading off here my arm is is beat oh look at that mac's a beast i gotta say this thing is pretty sweet though it's dirty it's nasty it's got some rust on it probably not i'm afraid i'm a little worried about that too yeah from far away this thing looks so sweet all right so i just put it in the park we were off by like a foot getting rid of the yellow strap a little too early luckily it's very comfortable under this camaro okay all right getting too old for this i'm just kidding i hope i'm doing this for the next 30 years honestly this is awesome i want to start it so bad but we can't we would destroy the rings most likely these wheels say front and rear although the tires are the exact same size they're 245 50 16s good old eagle vr 50s wow these are super old all right it's rolling we're doing it and i gotta say i love this color i have a friend that has the exact same color hardtop 305 basically the same exact spec and uh he bought that car 22 years ago i spotted it at a local ford dealer golf mill ford if you're from the area and i told him about it and he went bought and he still got it he lives up like a block away from me so we'll get that guy in a video it's got 40 000 miles and it's a mint unlike this so it's going to smack me in the face right now all right are we home free all right we got the camaro all loaded up ready to go and something else that dave found in this storage unit was that motorcycle that honda motorcycle right there it was a 10 by 30 you said right 10 by 30 storage unit is the first unit i saw at this auction they opened the door up basically what i could see was a huge pile of paper grocery bags stuffed full of newspapers not wadded up newspapers but whole copies of the chicago tribune just filling the bags but i can also see the motorcycle but i got the locker unit for i got the storage locker for 900. then i started emptying out the storage locker and discovered the car buried under all of that crud so you had you didn't even i didn't car when i walked i did not know the car was there that's crazy when it was put in the storage unit they had put the hood up and filled the engine compartment with these bags full of old newspapers but yeah so the guy had the storage unit since 1995 the plates on there 1995. all sorts of stuff in there all sorts of collectible stuff from the late 70s early 80s so aside from making 600 from me selling the camaro for 1500 bucks what up you're gonna get the bike what else did you find anything else of value in there well there's a lot of most of it fair amount of cash really i mean well cash in the form of change okay okay three or four hundred dollars okay not a bad deal but this stuff was in there too yeah dude get out of here this is awesome i remember this stuff can you uh throw some of this in the deal dave 1500 bucks was probably way too much for me to pay for this camaro come on let me bring one of these back to the kids this is amazing uh look at this dude i want to buy a storage unit too is there a camaro in here we got a countach i don't know if there's a here oh is this an elante yes it is that is really cool chevy blazer k5 nice this is bringing me back man wow look at that so how much was this thing it's from montgomery ward who remembers that 26 bucks a toy like this nowadays would be like a hundred dollars all right can i get the k5 sure yes all right dave well thank you so much i appreciate it it was interesting i hope it works out me too we'll see hopefully i'll watch the videos we're going right back to legit three quarters right now well thank you so much good luck thank you thanks dave all right we're hitting the road is that a matchbox car oh yeah look at this i got a k5 blazer dude he had a whole bunch of this stuff man it was awesome in there this is old yeah dude 87. yeah it's all from the storage locker holy cow who knows how long that thing's been no literally it says 1980 yeah some of them are from the 70s holy cow dude this escalade is a total beast we got the louvers open and the fans going crazy wow this thing will suck your hand in but uh it's keeping that transmission very nice and cool i think it's only getting up to like 160 170 something like that and i just pulled over just to double check everything we're about 20 miles out and so far so good and i actually believe that this is one of the storage units i'm not sure which one uh that he bought it at he said it was about 20 miles from here and it was a big place and this very well could have been where this camaro was fished out so anyway camaro is looking good trailer is looking horrible this is probably the worst u-haul trailer i've ever gotten but let's go to legit street quarters we got to move this thing around we'll pop it up on the lift and see exactly what i got myself into all right guys so transtemp is at 180 but look at the engine temperature it's not even registering and we've been on the road for like 40 minutes or something when we were driving here without the car in the trailer it was just at normal operating temperature and now it's way way below we're still getting heat in the truck but a little weird not gonna lie i wonder if we're gonna get a check engine light for a thermostat issue where it's just stuck open all right so we got the camaro back at legit street quarters and i'm going to attempt keyword attempt to back up the trailer into my shop here but first we got to move some of the fleet around [Applause] [Applause] yeah this thing hasn't ran in a long time this is why i have the ml so we can winch stuff [Music] some scrape all right it's off cool thank you alright guys so it's a couple of days later and uh this camaro won't move it won't budge at all so i've jacked up the back the rear tires are off and uh yeah we could push it before after we kind of broke it loose before max and i have both tried it's not moving so these brakes must be kind of like re-locking up so yeah we could winch it again with the ml but the battery's dead i want to try the lightning all right we're gonna do a little tug of war with the camaro here we go i promise this is the last thing i ask of you lightning before i do your head gaskets yes i'm gonna replace the head gaskets look they're right here they're right here i'm gonna do it i just needed to tow one last car a third gen the lightning brought us closer but we have to winch it the rest of the way using the lift totally does not void the warranty on your bendpak lifts this is totally fine ran out of slack so we're attached to that one now and i mean this thing is just grinding to a halt every time it's weird because we did push this at one point i don't get it all right now for some reason it'll move a little bit see that we're pushing it awesome all right this is about as good as we could get it so it's lined up pretty well it's just everything under there is rusted all the jacking points where they've jacked it up a million times or kind of smushed in so we might hear some crunching noise let's do it [Music] [Music] oh i heard some crunches they're gone now we've crunched whatever there was to crunch the camaro's up in the air oh i'm scared guys it's going to be worse than the lt1 trans am very well could be why do i keep doing this [Music] all right the camaro is safely up on the lift so first things first okay yep that's why we couldn't push this thing the front right wheel is locked this one is locked also and let's see it's got drums in the rear this is what i would have assumed wow are you serious these are fine these are both fine it's the fronts so just frozen from sitting so anyway let's uh let's start this inspection and uh right off the bat we have literal rust holes wow this entire this is horrible ah geez okay not starting off not starting off well that's for sure the frame structure seems to be intact that's good but this car is a pile this thing is a total pile oh man this might be worse than the firebird wow just the rust has destroyed this you know for sitting inside of a storage unit for so long i wouldn't think it would be this bad but i think this car just had a rough life its first you know 10 or 12 years when it was actually on the road but then i found out from dave that this had been sitting in his driveway for the last two years so i didn't understand that when i bought it i thought he had just plucked this thing out of the storage unit like two months ago and then he had to deal with the title issues and stuff right when i was leaving he's telling me the story about how long it took him with the attorney to uh to get the title i'm literally ripping pieces of the car off as we speak um and he said it took two years so i'm like wait a minute two years and yeah it turns out he's had this car for two years in his driveway now that's not gonna cause all of this just sitting there it definitely didn't help but this car was probably really rough when it went into the storage unit and it's even more rough now so the lt1 trans am had literal holes in these areas here so this one is better in that sense but i mean realistically it might as well have a hole here like you wouldn't want to leave this alone let's see here yeah i mean this is just bad this is really bad all the floors would have to be replaced if you were doing any kind of real restoration on this car but i can push this with my thumb so i bet you if we took a screwdriver we can go right through right through the floors so it's got the factory catalytic converter i'm going to go ahead and assume this 200-ish horsepower 305 is totally stock and what do we have going on here the motor is relatively dry might be completely empty on oil but those are just minor details um and uh let's see the subframe is intact i guess that's good these brakes are just rock solid so it would need pads rotors calipers everything probably hoses and i mean everything's there it's intact i don't suspect it was wrecked or anything all these brackets look factory but i mean just everything is rusted yeah great another weak spot is right here where the shocks kind of mounted to the body of the car this is all rusted this is very weak so the structure here is probably compromised and uh i wouldn't want to hit too big of a pothole with this car but yeah fender is no big deal doors we can fix it quarters okay that can be done too but the overall structure all the floors everything on this camaro i mean this would need a frame off restoration everything is just shot and there you have it my 1988 iroc camaro or at least what's left of it it looks pretty darn good from here but uh yeah pictures can be deceiving and i'm not gonna lie i'm pretty disappointed right now so i went into this very excited to get a really nice third gen so it was described to me pictures were sent which just can never go off the pictures guys but it was described as a rust free car he had taken some pictures underneath of just like the pinch welds and i saw a little bit of rust i'm like no big deal but this thing is shot so i just really wanted another third gen and i love the irocks i love this color i love the wheels i love everything about 80s f-bodies and i was looking forward to doing a mechanical restoration to working on a car that had been sitting for 25 or 27 years whatever the math is and i was even willing to put some paint work into this thing we're gonna put a little bit of money into it because it would be worth it these cars in good condition can be worth about 15 to 20 000 so i thought a rust free eye rock at 3 000 was a pretty good deal and uh it would have been but you know we got this so i'm disappointed that i don't have a cool third gen but i'm not upset at the fifteen hundred dollars that i spent on this clean title i rock because i'll more than break even on this car even as a parts car this thing is worth a bunch of money the hood on ebay is about 400 bucks the rear hatch with the glass is about four or 500 bucks the wheels are 500 bucks these factory bumpers which are in excellent condition are about 500 bucks each the interior there are a ton of good parts on this car so 1500 is still you know a pretty decent deal but uh i'm not gonna part it out i'm going to get this thing running so in the next episode i mean i hope i am who knows this engine could have thrown a rod or something um but in the next episode we're going to pull the plugs we're going to bore scope the cylinders i'm assuming the engine is locked at the moment so we're going to try and unlock it we're going to try and fire it up we're going to try and drive it i want to enjoy my 88 camaro before i do something with it i don't know what that is yet let me know in the comments what would you do with this car so with that i hope you enjoyed this little escalade camaro picking up adventure as much of a disappointment as the car is i still had a ton of fun so with that give this video a thumbs up if you haven't already share the video with your friends subscribe if you're new follow me on facebook and on instagram for little updates here and there and most importantly have an awesome day i'll catch all of you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: LegitStreetCars

Views: 372,233

Keywords: I bought an 80's IROC Camaro that was abandoned for 27 years in a storage unit, buying a storage unit, Camaro, Iroc, LegitStreetCars Camaro, Should I buy a Camaro, Chevy Camaro, how to buy a Camaro, buying a new Camaro, buying a 3rd gen Camaro

Id: HxCLn6TZ59M

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022