I Brought my Flood Salvage BMW M3 to an "Honest Mechanic." Here's How Much $ they Quoted!

hey guys i'm sam crack and this has got to be the cheapest e46 m3 with a manual transmission in today's market but it was cheap for a reason you see it came with the flood branded title even though the interior doesn't have any funky smells and it all seems to work the car did come with a major electrical issue you see it would run for a little while then it would die because the charging system wasn't working all due to one loose connection which we rectified in just a few hours and it didn't really cost us anything to fix but one major thing keeping this from being a high dollar car is the fact that it was repainted from its original color its original color was bmw black but the previous owner wanted to be noticed so they painted it red not just any red the most iconic red ever in automotive history it's rosso corsa ferrari red and if you get up close to it looks nothing like rosso corsa at all now while the paint job is of good quality and i quite like the color i was anxious to find out what color it actually is because well again i'm convinced it's not rosso courses so i cut out a square from the bumper i took it into my local paint shop where they've got a camera that will actually analyze the paint that's on one of your body panels and they'll match it to a factory color code and let's just say it wasn't rosso corsa and it wasn't even anything that came on a ferrari now this is what rosso corsa is supposed to look like and it's on ferrari's ultimate grand tourer the v12 power gtc for luso with 680 horsepower it will carry you and your passengers very comfortably as you blast to 60 miles an hour in just 3.4 seconds and while the lusso comes in at over 300 000 new omaze is giving you the opportunity to win your very own plus twenty thousand dollars cash in its very spacious trunk when you visit omaze.com sam crack ferrari the gtc4lusso has one of the most stunning modern interiors i've ever encountered everything is wrapped in beautiful italian leather and the technology is next level the only experience better than driving a v12 ferrari would be to win a v12 ferrari plus 20 000 cash so to enter for your chance to win head on over to omaze.com sam crack ferrari or just click my link in the description box below while you're on omaze's site you'll be able to donate to the race day foundation it's a really cool organization that inspires those with life-changing illnesses by hosting them for a day out on the racetrack and of course i got to give a huge thanks to omaze for allowing this opportunity to my viewers for supporting incredible organizations like the race day foundation and for also sponsoring this video so i bought a quarter paint at the paint shop and the color they sold me based off the camera analysis was inferno red and if i remove my thumb here the manufacturer that has this paint color is kia so next time i'm at a car show with this m3 and people go hey what color is that car maybe i'll just keep the story alive that it's rosso corsa and just doing a little test of our infernal red paint things matched up quite perfectly so this car is going to look the part when it's done but today we're going to be focused on the mechanical side of the car where it's pretty clear this m3 has been neglected but inspired by my friend alex palmeri over at legit street cars i thought it'd be fun to get a second opinion on the m3 you see alex took his same year bmw m5 that was a high mileage car to the bmw dealership where they quoted him over two times the amount he paid for the car to fix everything wrong with it instead of taking the m3 to the bmw dealership where we know they're just gonna quote us some outrageous price to take care of everything wrong with the car i took it to an honest mechanic shop one that specializes in bmws one that a friend told me about and after paying 135 for a pre-purchase inspection post purchase of the car um i could deem that i think they were very fair the quote that they provided to fix everything wrong in the car parts and labor was 2 306.75 and if you consider we paid five grand for the car 7 300 bucks for a good running and driving bmw with a lot of its problem areas taken care of i think is still a good deal but the purpose of taking it to this shop is to show you even though this is a very fair rate to fix most of the things wrong with this car we can beat it by quite a bit and especially the e46 platform which is really easy to work on there's a ton of after-market and third-party oe quality parts available well we're going to be able to fix this car on the cheap so one of the first things that they addressed are oil leaks so let's jump right into the engine start tearing things down and fix some of these old worn out gaskets [Music] this is a really straightforward valve cover i've already cleaned up the surface of the head here put the replacement one on you can see our original one it's very brittle in the middle here so this is spent now something that is super important when doing a valve cover gasket job read a shop manual yes this valve cover is almost too easy to figure out on your own but some manufacturers want you to put a little bit of rtv sealer around the edges of the head where the gasket meets now look right here this is written from bmw you need to put a little bit at the rear half moon shape transition areas a step that would be easily overlooked if i just did this without reading a manual now this is just a snippet from the shop manual that is for this m3 it's literally the same exact one they use at the dealer and it has every procedure for this and a bunch of other bmws from a simple filter change to pulling the entire engine apart i bought this manual at emo and they have one for nearly every make and model i'll drop a link in the description box below for these shop manuals and if you're planning on any maintenance on your cars i highly recommend them they'll save you a ton of time on your repairs i use the bmw interactive manual all the time because it works on both this m3 and my 335i otherwise all you got to do is pull off these old spark plug gaskets here this is a pretty straightforward simple diy job here something that anybody could really do with simple hand tools so i'm going to finish this up real quick and then i want to show you how we're going to refinish this beauty cover to like new [Music] i cleaned up our valve cover plastic beauty cover here and the m badge was all ruined and overall there's no cracks it's in pretty good shape but it's a bit dingy looking so we're gonna restore this like new i picked up right here this this is eastwood plastic resurfacer this isn't like a paint it's actually like a die that's literally just a few minutes later this is one light coat again our valve cover wasn't in the worst shape but stuff that's really faded you might use another coat i use this to restore the cowl on my lamborghini which was a bit dingy look it doesn't leave any residue on your fingers like i said it kind of dyes the plastic supposedly it will last for several years now all that's left is to get this lined up let's see we can do it with one hand yep down right there that looks awesome now when i originally got the m3 home and took a look at its undercarriage and saw a heavy cut of oil on both the engine and transmission i thought for sure we had a rear main seal leak which would have been another good reason for the previous owner to dump the car what i found out is that there's a little valve on the side of the engine it's called the cpv and it's one of the most misdiagnosed oil leaks on this platform it's one of these parts that you wouldn't even have a clue existed if you didn't look for it i got the cpv out and i gotta stress if you're gonna do the same exact thing on your car you can do it but you have to get this tool right here i don't even know what they call it i'll link it down below but it is the perfect size to get right in there you can see mine is chewed up a little bit already somebody's had this out and used the wrong tool now the o-ring that's on this this is the failure point the dealerships are like in the case of our shop they quoted an entire valve replacement i think this thing is about 60 bucks look at how hard this o-ring is it feels like a metal washer at this point look at how nasty and dried out this o-ring is i don't know if you can see but there's no flex to it whatsoever it's just a hard piece of plastic almost at this point look broken half here's what you want a viton o-ring assortment now this little pack is probably under ten dollars and has a million o-rings but they are viton o-rings the regular auto parts store carries just like a regular rubber o-ring these are more heat resistant i think they're more pressure resistant this is a stronger o-ring this is what everybody does for this solution so found the perfect size here i'm going to put it back in place and that just saved us well over 100 bucks all right i took a little trip out to the 335 to kind of do a quick comparison because we did the very similar job on this car that we just did on the m3 we swapped out our valve cover which is underneath here but on the 335 just one generation or that valve cover is made out of plastic and since it's made out of plastic about the time you do a valve cover gasket on it you need to do the valve cover as well because it cracks the one on the m3 was made out of metal which adds to the simplicity of the car and you can of course reuse the metal component it will last the life of the car now the labor rate on the valve cover gasket is 2.1 hours at 135 bucks an hour look 283 dollars just to replace the valve cover and for the cpv they want one and a half hours it's hard to see here at 202 bucks labor so that's 500 bucks and what took me probably a little bit over an hour now if this is your first time doing it i'm still confident you could do this both of these jobs between one and two hours that cpv it's a little tricky to get to you don't have to move anything out of the way but like i said you gotta have that tool so if we consider that we spent about sixty dollars on the valve cover gasket set at fcp euro we paid twenty dollars for that little fitting and then the o-ring didn't cost us anything we did all this under a hundred dollars that's with parts included and while the shops par prices were very fair i didn't include that in the near 500 in labor charges i just told you so those two jobs would have cost closer to hundred dollars and what again we did very simply for under a hundred bucks now another failed component found by the shop was a leaky radiator so i went and ordered me a nissans not a nissan nissans that's important you got to get yourself an essence seriously this is the good stuff right here also bear is another good oe supplier basically original equipment supplier the funny thing is is that what's in this box is the same exact radiator that they'd sell you at the bmw dealership probably for at least double the amount of money uh but instead of it saying the brand name of the company that manufactures it it would say bmw there'll also be a stamp on the radiator somewhere with the bmw emblem but this is again how you can save a ton of money doing diy repairs it's another reason why fcp euro is key because they carry the oe the original equipment supplier parts without the stamps on them again it's the same exact part but the price will be a fraction of what it would cost at the dealership now to get the leaky radiator out of the m3 we need to pull the fan and the shroud out of the way first once it's out of the way it's going to give us a ton of room to check out the pulleys and the belts up front because they apparently are a bit worn out need some work too now the radiator is a diy friendly job but it does have one of those fan clutches that you have to get off with what i have here is a set of special tools you can order these on any generic site i've had these a while and they're not the best but they do the job i've already loosened things up you could see you just line up the nuts on the pulley with this tool here that's a 32 mil wrench and then we'll spin our fan clockwise until it falls off there it goes at this point the shroud will come loose the fan will come out fan coated with oil here but all the fins are in good shape so we should be able to reuse that just fine shroud again in good shape since these aren't mechanical items i'll reuse them but one of the things i want to do while the radiator is out that's going to be really simple and again one of the things that was marked by the professional mechanics is look at this pulley this is missing the whole entire plastic surround so this pulley should look a bit more like this one down here say and all the idler and tensioner pulleys are so cheap on this car i'm gonna replace [Music] now here's the problematic idler pulley right here you can see the plastic surround is just completely falling apart but while we have it in the belt off i figured we might as well replace all the other wear pulleys which are these two tensioner pulleys right here and the tensioners that go along with them i bought a new belt and all of these parts you're seeing right here all the replacement parts for about a hundred dollars at fcp euro now the shop just wanted to replace the one pulley and the belt 1.4 hours it's 189 and 29.75 just for the one pulley so for less than half the price we're gonna have all brand new pulleys and really to pull these pulleys off and put them back on it'll take about an hour another simple job all done with hand tools anytime i'm looking for a restoration or rebuild project i like to try and find something both diy friendly and something that can be done on a budget and to be honest lately especially with the range rover i've been throwing a curveball or two that can kill the diy part of it or the budget part of it with the e46 i'm really amazed at how just simple this car is to work on i'm sure you guys have caught the theme of this video that if you do the work yourself you're gonna end up saving thousands even compared to an honest repair shop now this isn't a slight against the repair shop as a matter of fact i want to thank them for doing the pre-purchase inspection on this car because i told them straight up look i want an inspection but i'm going to end up doing all the work by myself and they were totally cool with it that's a trait of a good honest shop the shop was roluski auto outside of the tampa bay area but i would encourage you to try out the simple maintenance stuff yourself grab yourself a shop manual and some hand tools and get at it it is incredible how simple this car is earlier when i showed you the plastic valve cover of the 335 versus the metal one of this card just to compare prices i think the valve cover and gasket for the 335 was like 350 and since it's a turbocharged car it's a lot more difficult to get to this one again under an hour and 60 bucks it's that sort of stuff that can be really fun and just really gratifying knowing how much money you can save and have the car running so well at the end of the day now at this pace i'm pretty confident all the mechanical stuff will be buttoned up also some suspension related stuff as you see we got a new set of wheels on it and hopefully all the body stuff will be knocked out and once it's all put together we'll be able to put all the numbers together and find out really how much of a budget we were able to complete this car on and if you're excited for a completed m3 well under 10 grand we'll be sure to hit that like button also if you're not already following me on instagram where i'm posting pictures in progress of the m3 and any new projects you might have saw one in the background if you're paying close attention to the channel before anything goes live here on youtube well visit me right here click the link in the description box below i want to give a huge thanks to each and every one of you for watching today and i'll catch you very soon [Music] you

Channel: Samcrac

Views: 431,139

Rating: 4.9117398 out of 5

Keywords: Omaze, Ferrari, GTC4, Lusso, Shop Manual, Dealership, Mechanic, BMW, E46, M3, DIY, RWD, Drift, FCP, Euro, Flood, Totaled, Salvage, Auction, M5, Dealer, Rip Off, Junkyard, cheap, rebuild, repair, refurbish, restoration, detail, mechanical, 335i, twin turbo, turbocharged, supercharged

Id: DHOJ_JOB8zM

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020