I Saved $10,000 Buying my Wife a "Lightly Damaged" Audi SUV but it Came Hiding a Massive Problem

hey guys i'm sam crack and my wife keeps telling me it's just too small i assume she's talking about this the lemon lincoln mkc a car i bought for a couple of years ago now i call it the lemon lincoln because it is indeed a genuine manufacturer buyback title car that means that the manufacturer deemed that this car had an unfixable issue and well they sold it to me for literally over 20 000 off its original sticker price best part about this car is it only had 800 miles on it when i bought it came with extended coverage on top of its remaining warranty i figured there's no way a car could be deemed a lemon within only 800 miles so i bought it and just a few months after our ownership it broke down in the same exact fashion that the previous owners had with it just stopped in the middle of traffic went took it into the lincoln dealership they said that they found a loose connection they repaired it and i went off on my way but 48 hours later the car broke down again same exact thing just stop running in the middle of traffic i took it back to the dealer they fixed it again but this time real tight and that's not a joke that's actually what it said in the invoice that i got and 20 000 miles later we haven't had a single issue oh this is by far not the most exciting car in the world it is proof that a lemon law car can be a tremendous value i mean i wouldn't hesitate to drive this car anywhere it still has relatively low miles on it right around 25 000 or so that doesn't stop me from looking around at other larger suvs at the auction and that's when i came across this 2017 audi q7 with the upgraded supercharged engine a clean title and some very minor front-end damage for literally ten thousand dollars less than the next cheapest example at the same auction besides its front end damage the auction report listed it with only some minor cosmetic blemishes like with any other used car and no mechanical issues at all so i figured this would be a nice easy and cheap fixer-upper i bought it sight unseen and when it was delivered the overall condition was really nice but on the drive home the low coolant light popped up and its coolant temperature started creeping into the hot zone i was really looking forward to quickly tidying up the front end of this q7 and gifting it to my wife for christmas you know how they say the best presents are handmade with my track record you know i can't even glue two popsicle sticks together and now with it overheating we have to figure out what's really wrong with it so instead i guess i'll just surprise my rooster with manscape's lawnmower 4.0 with its 7000 rpm motor and quiet stroke technology there's no better way to trim your telluride ah you son of a holy starts and while i just got all cut up trying to gift my gamecock the lawnmower skin safe technology will assure you a smooth experience with no nicks or snags when you prune your panamera now i know from experience that your significant other is going to appreciate the gift of manscape so much more than a broken luxury suv so head on over to the link in my description box and when you do you can pick up manscape's perfect package or performance package and they're going to throw in two free gifts and totally free shipping plus an additional 20 off when you use my code samcrack at checkout i really like the performance package because it comes with this little nifty doodad right here this is the weed whacker which hold on a second oh yeah it keeps all this shrubbery in check now i gotta give a huge thanks to manscape for making my christmas shopping super easy this year and for also sponsoring this video and that rooster is right freaking their home i initially thought i was gonna get this car and start tearing apart the front end to do it easy front end you know grill and bumper job but instead we're obviously concerned with the cooling system here you know we just got this car a couple hours ago and i've let it sit since its drive home so we can pop open the coolant reservoir and everything but before we do come in close here and see uh the damage it really is just the front grille here some of the bumper has been pushed out i think that this bumper is definitely reusable and just you know some of the trim pieces i don't even know the front bumper would need to be repainted also the other thing and this was all disclosed is something pushed in the hood right here you can see it's folded in ever so slightly and it messed up the alignment of the rest of the hood that could be like your hood hinge or something this all is no big deal if we got the great discount because of this i'll be thrilled and even if we have like a coolant leak it's not a big deal but it's if we have something severely wrong with the cooling system uh well i probably won't be too thrilled let's go ahead pop the hood here now i've said it a bunch of times before when you buy a car and the engine bay looks this clean especially for a car that's been well used like this one it is a bit concerning like even the shock towers here really really clean someone definitely washed this thing and then take a look at this these are your intake ducts here one of them looks brand new i mean this never looks like it was even taken out and put back in and this one's all wonky here again that could maybe be no big deal but there's a condition difference between the two and stuff like that well it's not telling us anything what's going to tell us something is this we're going to start off with something really simple i've got a coolant pressure test and vacuum kit of course i got that from the other european car that had a cooling system issue the bmw i8 what that's going to do is pressurize our cooling system which by the way you know it's tough to see but i don't even think there's any cooling in there no there's not even any there's no cooling in there but it didn't completely overheat on the drive home so what i'm thinking is that there's definitely cooling in this system it's just that it's really low so let me go ahead we're just going to put some water in there right now to top it off we're going to put the pressure tester on here and what that does is it puts air into the system it basically pressurizes the system almost like when you're driving and if there's any leaks we'll spot them immediately should gush out the cooling system's not under like a huge amount of pressure so leaks can be really hard to find without a tool like this i'm sure everybody's going to love the fact that i'm playing hose water in the audi but once we do figure out our issue which we're starting to see a little bit of water coming to the reservoir now i'll be draining and refilling the system just because it's not hard and it clearly needs to be done so right now we're going up up we are right at the min line so i'm gonna put a little more and then this thing is awesome it's a bit of overkill for what i need to use on like a day-to-day basis but on the i8 when we couldn't figure out that we did have a blown head gasket it's stuff like this that can really help you kind of just narrow down exactly what's going on so again this is used to vacuum fill coin systems but it also comes with this air pressure pump now you don't have to buy something like this the auto parts store carries tools just like this you can rent them but again i'm i'm having to use this twice this year so that's actually i think a worthwhile investment so basically what you want to do is look at the cap on your audi it's got the threads on the outside so we're not going to have one exactly with three gaskets on it that has the threads on the outside but there's the closest one i think should work and all you do is screw it on like your regular coolant cap so that's going to create a nice tight seal and then hook the line up and just give it a few pumps let's see you can hear a little bit of water like circulating in there but with that much pressure in the system if there was like a major leak like a hose was torn or something like that you would see it just spraying out good all right look you see that now we can actively see a drip since we turn the car on and look it's definitely losing pressure look up here remember that was at one bar and you hear it gargling so turning the car on put it under a little bit more pressure we already had it under pressure with the pressure test so we gotta find our leak all right we got the under cover off so we're gonna do this test again what i did notice is that we lost a lot of the water that we just put in the tank so i went ahead filled it back up but also right underneath the tank something that is going to make this semi difficult for us it's gonna be hard to see but you see how damp it is all down there that's telling me that there's like a pressure relief valve somewhere underneath here and basically when it gets under too much pressure like i did with my pressure tester and then starting the car which again puts the coolant system on her system under a little bit of pressure it was just too much and it just threw the water right out of the tank which very well is in the similar vicinity of where we saw the drip underneath there so i'm gonna give sage the camera underneath the car we're gonna go again but just with the pressure tester and see if we can find if it is indeed dripping or if it's just coming from uh up there in the relief valve and coming right down there i'm also looking from up top while i'm pumping this up to make sure it's not just coming out from the bottom of the overflow tank all right we're under a little bit of pressure you seeing anything yeah i got it okay where's it at is it spraying yeah it's got to be there okay so it's that metal line yep cool so even though we got a coolant leak that wasn't disclosed it's a good thing that we found a leak itself because it tells us that likely that's the the issue here it's really funny how it's on a metal line and it's in the metal line that goes right into the bracket because you know you think a metal line would last life of the car but where there's bends and like brackets welded on that's generally where they crack and of course we've got the front end issue here so maybe it got pushed in enough to just cause an issue there who the heck knows but uh we're gonna probably order that line replace it all while we're doing the front end stuff and it shouldn't be too difficult it is the biggest car out he makes with this platform so we should have enough room to just kind of snake in there and get it but to be 100 percent sure because again his car was getting pretty warm on the drive home we want to make sure that there was no damage done internally and i don't like breaking this out but this is the block tester this is what i use to find the blown head gasket my bmw i8 and chemicals straight up don't lie so this is like a purplish blue fluid and you just put it in this little guy here this sits in the coolant reservoir and if it turns colors that means that there's combustion gas uh getting in to the cooling system and that would be through a blown head gasket i'm not expecting anything but i shouldn't even say it last time i said that we have a blown head gasket so we'll just go ahead and fill it up if you're buying a questionable used car especially like if you're going on a marketplace or something and somebody says it has like an overheating issue buy one of these things they're like 30 40 bucks because it will save you a massive headache on an old honda or something you know head gasket is a few hour job on these modern cars it's a nightmare and this audi was really thought out well because it's got the timing chain and the back of the engine and all the components in the front and the whole thing's got to come apart it might be easier to actually drop the end let's just put it this way even though i got a decent discount on the car it totally wouldn't be worth the discount i got if it's got a blown head gasket so all right so we're going to start the engine we want the fluid to stay this color and to speed up the process you can aerate the fluid a little bit with a little plunger on top now the other thing i want to focus on as well besides the fluid colors on the i8 in particular and any other car i've had with a blown head gasket you'll physically see the reservoir itself kind of shake because that exhaust is pushing its way into the system something it shouldn't be doing but as long as it stays still and that stays the right color we'll be all right all right let's start her up and like i said i'm not really expecting much because the thing just i mean you hear it idling right now idle's good no check engine lights the other thing on the i8 it turned colors all by itself without me even aerating the fluid just because there are so many exhaust gases in there rising but like i said let's go ahead aerate it a bit see what we got all right we've been running this for at least three four minutes now still the same color so we should be good let's go ahead and figure out what we need all here in the front end and also that coolant hose and probably a few other little mechanical you know maintenance items now look at that look at that look at that let's get that get that right now are you recording what is that now look at that look at that look at that let's get that get that right now are you recording well when you see that look here hold on when you see those little bubbles like that that's like there shouldn't be any air in your cooling system that's definitely clearer than yeah i'm tripping yeah see that's green what's green well if it's green it's a problem yeah it says so number two is warm engine enough to ensure thermostat is open and leave engine so the first several minutes when the car was cold might not have done anything let me check the inside real quick yeah we're sitting dead in the center so and we heard that click and the fan turn on and i mean it's what color hold on i'm going to take this out for a second no way can you see that better through the sunlight now can you see it better like that yeah there we go because like against the the backdrop of the hood dude this thing we got hat on this one man this is this is not good well that clearly wasn't the ideal outcome on the q7 but if you think about the situation it wasn't really extraordinary i mean i did get a ten thousand dollar discount to buy a car that i thought just had a crack grill and some bashed up trim pieces and frankly there was more to the story and that story came in the mail a few days later after we shot that footage i just showed you in the form of repossession paperwork so when you get the title work from the auction they'll give you any sort of other accompanying paperwork you need to either resell the car or to go and register it and it had repossession documentation i think that's important for you guys to know because a lot of people watch these videos and go an audi that's a late model with less than 100 000 miles has a blown head gasket i never buy an audi because that and it's generally just not the case like in the case with the i8 and like in the case with this q7 this is clearly owner neglect and that's why it has such a bad issue needless to say i won't be fixing this one i just don't think it's worth my time and well if you don't like that let me know in the comments but i just have so many other projects uh like this right here that has turned into my project even though this wasn't my car this has the same exact engine as the q7 in it but as you can see it's quite a bit smaller 2013 b8 and a half audi s4 and it's interesting for uh one reason that's because it's really broken when my friend alex told me he was interested in doing a project audi i happened to run across this one at the auction at the same time i bought my b8 s4 the one over there that was the one with the bad mechatronics and this car was actually cheaper and i think it's in a little bit nicer condition my car has a few more options on it the reason why this one was cheaper was for a really good reason so uh we found the car initially on the dash we bought it the auction had noted that it had this it's like a coolant warning on the dash now a cool warning is gone because alex fixed it the coolant warning is very indicative of a thermostat failure he did the entire job here in the barn and uh we didn't use a lift that's just a joke for all those guys that keep bugging me about getting a lift in the comments so anyway if you get in the car if we go car fires right up [Music] car starts right up it doesn't overheat anymore and idle's halfway decent alex and i took it on a test spin and during that test spin the check engine light came back on it was no longer for that thermostat issue instead it threw camshaft crankshaft correlation codes well car guys out there know that that means that this audi is out of time which is crazy considering how well it starts up runs and idles remember that timing chain rattle i told you that we experienced a few times while we were working on the car it usually comes upon cold startup well audi had an entire technical service bulletin on this issue and they said it's no big deal that noise is perfectly normal and it does not affect the way the car works but it might have affected the way this one works it might it might have not you see there's so many different timing components and to do a complete timing job again on this car you have to drop the entire engine out of the engine bay because it's such a tight fit that you can't get to parts of the back of the engine where like timing guides and timing tensioners fit but the two upper tensioners are what are known to make this timing chain rattle and they were in some cases replacing these on customers cars that really seem to complain about the issue so if the issue is with one of those upper tensioners it actually makes for kind of an interesting project car here let me show you what i'm talking about when was the last time you heard about a v6 in a sedan having to come out of the car to do certain service items on it the only time you ever hear about like engine out services are these big v8s or v12 cars or supercars this audi has a handful of different jobs that requires the engine out on it which is kind of insane but again this platform is known to be decently reliable now that rattle that we heard upon startup is coming from the timing chain tensioners that live behind the covers there's one on this side and one on this side behind the intake tubing here and you can just see again how tight of a fit all this is so in theory what you would want to do is use a special timing tool i think you'd still have to take the supercharger off the car the valve covers off the car but you'd be able to lock everything in place that part isn't that hard we had this supercharger off and since i helped alex with it i think i could have the supercharger and valve covers off in probably a couple hours the big question is whether you can actually get to these timing covers in the back here you'd also have to lock the crank in place using the special tool and then you go and remove the tensioners back here and you should theoretically be able to replace them put tension back on the chains and cross your fingers and hope that you fix something now if we've got slack in the chain or like i said if there's a broken plastic guide somewhere in the back of the engine there all bets are off so really just doing this job would be a total gamble but if it pays off you've got a car that's now worth three or four thousand dollars more than it is currently just sitting right here now we spent right around 11 grand on this car and in hindsight it's not that great of a deal considering this timing issue but if it is just the tensioners those parts alone cost anywhere between like three and five hundred dollars depending what brand you buy and where you buy them at it would turn this into maybe like a fourteen fifteen thousand dollar car so i wanna hear from you guys do you think it's worth it and specifically the guys that have worked on this engine in this engine bay can you just replace these tensioners with the engine still installed in the car i've heard about it being done on a6s a multitude of times problem is the a6 is a bigger car so it should have a little bit bigger of an engine bay i want to know if you can do it on this platform right here the s4 now i know this video is a bit unconventional but there are a lot of cars i do buy because i think they're a good deal and they don't work out for one reason or another and sometimes they just send them right back to auction but if you like to see these videos with the real pitfalls of buying audi specifically for some reason at auction be sure to give this video a like also if you're not already following me on instagram where i post pictures of the new projects coming to the channel before anything goes live here on youtube go ahead and follow me right here or click the link in the description guys thank you so much for watching today and i'll catch you very soon foreign

Channel: Samcrac

Views: 553,037

Keywords: Volkswagen, VW, Audi, Jetta, GTI, GLI, Fast, Car, Automotive, Race, Broken, Junk, Salvage, Rebuild, Rebuilder, Money, Spend, Spending, Cash, Ferrari, German, Auto, Mechanic, mechanical, Repair, Fix, Lamborghini, Build, Building, Drift, Drifting, BMW, Mercedes, Benz, Fiat, Ford, Vehicle, Rich, MK6, Turbo, Turbocharged, Nitrous, Junk Yard, Scrap, resell, dealer, deal, wheel, wheels, work, import, tesla, Dominos, Domino's, Pizza, DXP, Chevy, Chevrolet, Spark, Corvette, C6, Jaguar, Focus, RS, RS7, MK3, auction, carly

Id: OrMQaHiUS04

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021