Salvaged Toyota Tacoma Bought On Copart Auto Auction

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today were in Utah and we're doing a build walk around Sam Webster's Salvage Tacoma he bought this thing at a junkyard and he built it to where it is today make sure to stick around to find out how much this build cost hey my name is Sam Webster I'm from Salt Lake City Utah and this is my salvaged 2016 toyota tacoma TRD off-road the inspiration really came from being surrounded by the desert my whole life being into like baja race trucks and stuff like that off-roading has been a big thing but I've always driven huge lifted trucks dirham axes and things like that that where they're fun and they're great for pulling stuff around but when you take him off-road it's not very that's just not as fun so thinking about selling my Duramax and I really didn't think of buying a chicama it really was on my radar because I was so used to getting cute buying huge trucks I made a 2011 GMC 3500 HD diesel I loved it it was perfectly running nothing wrong with it it just I wasn't using it for what I bought it for I've always been into pretty ambitious projects and building stuff whether it's I built big sound systems and structures that have gone out to Burning Man or remodeling my house or whatever I just like taking things that are starting from zero and making it something really special and so my daily was great and I loved it I just wasn't using it for what I thought I would anymore I wasn't towing stuff and thought I could really build something special if I bought a wrecked truck save a huge chunk of money you know it sounds nuts so I've actually to buy something that doesn't run doesn't drive and you can't even like pull it because it's this apprentice pension was completely destroyed I knew that I could turn it into something crazy and I really did I had to focus on it and you know his nights and weekends and holidays every every spare second that I had one of the truck because I had to have a car that I could drive around and you know I just kind of put myself in a situation where it's like you have to do it you have another choice initially I started looking at Copart and digging through there I really wanted understand how the auctions worked and then I spent like two months solid everyday pretty much digging through stuff saving the trucks that I thought were good and understanding what the damage was like because you know that's both the trucks that I focused on were ones that were rear-ended and phones I got in front end collisions and so I wanted to understand like when you crash a truck like that what brakes and so after I had a good idea of like what is a good truck and what are the ones to avoid I really narrowed my search field until something popped up so it was it probably about a two month process to to figure out the right truck and once it came up for auction I just kind of had to pull the trigger so it was like it's coming up for auction in an hour it's like I'm gonna bid on it and just hope for the best how was that like it must have been an exciting adrenaline rush just seeing it out there getting excited and throwing money in this crazy project yeah exactly it was it was definitely scary because it's like alright you're committed now like you're throwing down the money to buy it and this truck I in in the listings you could see that it was slammed down on the front and it was listed as non-running non-driving and I had heard that if you put just like the little the lift kit that sits on top of the struts and you don't make the bump stops bigger if you go to full compression you actually break the struts in half and so I was looking at it and I'm thinking I bet that's what happened and so I had the Copart lot go out to the to the truck and shoot some video before me take some more photos and sure enough it's exactly what I thought from doing my research the struts were snapped in half and the front end wasn't pushed into the radiator or anything like that too bad so I thought I had made a good choice but still you're rolling the dice like I never looked at it in person and it was in a different state so it's like throw the money into it and you just gotta go I just kept posting on Instagram it was like it was mostly just for my friends and family they could kind of watch the project I was doing and one day someone commented on one of the posts and tagged someone said hey this looks like your old truck and I was like there's no way there's absolutely no way that that's possible and the lady commented back and was like holy crap that's my truck and so of course a DM tur and was like hey I would love to know more about the truck what happened first off were you okay the story was she lives in Nevada I picked the truck up in Reno so somewhere in that area and she was driving home on kind of a rural road and sleep do 180 miles an hour oh god yeah and so she she said she just she went off into these fields luckily there weren't any trees or anything because it was the middle of the desert but ended up going through a couple of fences through these fields and ended up like a quarter of a mile off the road and said that was that was like one of the worst days of her life I bought the truck for twelve thousand dollars and they had 78,000 miles on it I have no formal training in any of it bodywork mechanics or whatever I got into cars in high school with one of my buddies he was always building drift cars and really crazy Subarus and stuff like that and went on to build Pikes Peak Hill Climb cars and crazy stuff and so I've always like followed him around on his adventures and it sparked something in me obviously I really didn't know what the first step was it was just tear down so when I got finally got it home I had it wouldn't roll and so I had to push it into the driveway with another car and winch it part of the driveway because the fenders were sitting on top of the tires and so that was number one is like I got to be able to roll this thing around so get the old suspension off and then I just bought used stock suspension from another guy that had a Tacoma and so now I had something that I could at least maneuver around in my driveway a little bit and from there it was tear all the body panels off anything that's bent or broken that's got to go and after I've dug into that I could really see the extent of the damage and I thought of the project as the two stages because it had a salvage title which you can't drive on the street so I had to get a rebuilt title for it so I did a bunch of homework one of my buddies as a highway trooper and so he kind of helped me through the process of making sure I ticked all the boxes for getting it road-legal again so it went back into stock for him first I was able to salvage the front fenders I needed a new grill and a new plastic bumper surround for it so that was the game plan was get it there get it road-legal and then you can do this stuff to it the front end was what I tackled first I've cleaned up all the broken glass cut off all the airbags that had deployed first ripped up all the body panels that were broken headlights were in pieces crumbling off the front of it it didn't have a grill so I could see what was what was wrong with it at that point which was pretty eye-opening because it's like I don't really know how to do all this stuff I need was confident that I could figure it out just take time but the front end was tweaked and so when you're trying to hang the fenders on it and get the headlights set up right you can't do it because all the mounting points for everything were all crooked and I didn't know what straight was I didn't know what all the measurements were in the engine bay and so I was able to get some factory measurements from Toyota that like a body shop would use and then I built a tool called a tram gauge which is basically you set the set distance on this bar with two pins set it in one spot and then you can measure out all those other points you basically triangulating all the points in the engine bay so I could get the fenders back straight again because they were a little bit crumpled in like this so I didn't have a frame table huh so or went or like a hydraulic pulleys and so I just hooked a come-along winch to a tree and into my house and just cranked on it and slowly got it back to where it needed to be wind up all those measurements and then I could start putting the new hood on it and then I could start putting the fenders on it and even then takes a little bit of tweaking a lot of tweaking weeks of tweaking how excited work it was you saw that the hood it was like perfect oh it was amazing yeah it's a really it's a really good feeling going from like alright I'm making progress with this finally it's not an easy process the mental battle is just as hard as the physical battle of pulling it back because you get tired of it you get you've worked so much on it and it's never quite perfect it's not exactly what you want and so you're always constantly beating yourself up you're like you're not doing it quite right you know but you step back from it take a break look out the window after having a cup of coffee or something you're like wow this is actually really cool I think it's really important to build new skill sets and so by doing this and doing all myself I learned a lot like a ton and it makes you more proud of it like you could take it to a shop and have him do it and that would it would look really nice but then you lose that that's something I keep that connection to it that others that don't work on their cars just can't have you know the interior was destroyed it all the airbags deployed - the driver's side knee airbag and - and then the windshield was broken passenger window was shattered and all the real glass was shattered and so the interior of the car was full of just like I don't broken glass and dust from the air bags that have gone off so that was a challenge in itself learning how to properly reinstall the airbags so it's safe again because that's part of the thing part of the checklist has the airbag system has to be functioning correctly so the front seat covers which were probably the hardest to figure out because on the sides of the bolsters there are air bags and those deployed so the seat covers weren't good anymore so when I replace the airbags I looked into just Reese teaching them and will quickly learn that that's a pretty dangerous thing to do because they use a certain thread and they stitch it a certain way so they will open when you're in a club in the crash so I ended up having to reupholster the entire interior of the car so every seat has seat cover has been taken off and replaced with factory ones I found an upholstery shop in Florida that pulls off the factory seat covers and then replaces them with leather and so they were nice enough to send me the take outs of the truck just like mine so it's a factory interior again but the seat covers weren't salvageable the front end was the most challenging piece of the whole puzzle because you had to get it straight again otherwise none of the body lines didn't line up and so it was very meticulous about it and spend a lot of time making sure that everything was perfect and the body lines were nice the doors lined up to the fenders correctly the hood lined up to the fenders the grille was right because I've seen other where it just doesn't look right and you see that right away I wanted people to look at this and think like wow this is really this is something nice and they would never know that it was totally destroyed when I bought it there were time there was times where I was like screw this I'm done like I I'm just gonna push it off a cliff and be done with it the front suspension honestly getting getting the old stuff off was relatively easy but putting on the used stock suspension that I bought from someone else was a total disaster because he sold me parts that could bent and so as I'm putting them on trying to fit them I didn't realize that the parts were event I thought the frame of the truck was bent and so I'm sitting there in the driveway tools around me all dirty just being like I know I got to figure out how to cut front the frame off the front of this thing and put on a new one because it's nothing is lining up I didn't know what reference points to use as what's what straight where am i measuring from and turns out it was just bent parts and so it wasn't a big deal the frame wasn't totally fine shape that was one of them the other really frustrating one was the door was all smashed in on the passenger side or the driver side in the rear door and I had never done any bodywork and I didn't want to buy a whole new door because it was pretty expensive and so I've had to teach myself how to do dent repair and that was a warning process that was a lot of nights and the cold trying to figure out like how to glue pull things and eventually after like two weeks of messing with it because I wanted to give myself enough time to actually warn it and rather than just throwing in the towel and giving it to a body shop I got it really close I started getting getting the hang of it and then used some body filler to finish it up but that was really frustrating that was one where it's like you're learning all these things you're trying to apply them and none of it's working like at all until something clicked and then it's like if you feel the progress you feel like you know you're a little bit closer to your end goal that's awesome yeah it's penny speaking dude honestly this is inspiring them I think the most challenging one for me was the rap I'm most proud of the rap that's on it because I've never rapped anything before out of the whole thing the rap I know that sounds I know that sounds crazy but it's like it's the exterior of the car it's what everybody sees and I spend a lot of time choosing the color for it I wanted something that was understated but still it looks pretty it looks pretty cool the rap was a lot of work I didn't understand the skill that's involved in it and I didn't understand the amount of time that's involved I went and had a bit done to have it wrapped because I was like I'm just this is something a professional should do and they quoted me about $5,000 to do it which it was like way more than I was expecting to do expecting to spend on it so I bought the rap and watched a million YouTube videos tutorials professional rappers I mean at that point when they told you like $5,000 you were like oh yeah my heart sunk yeah yeah I was like oh no this is gonna be three colors for a long time definitely was like I think it's the thing I'm most proud of because it was like it really challenged me and the goal is to get the truck done before winter time I bought it in early September it's which of course that did not happen I'm ended up working through the winter in the rap he can't really use it in the cold it gets really brittle and tears and so I had to find a place that I could actually that I could wrap the truck that I heated garage and so my buddy Anthony has this big huge garage that's heated and he hadn't wrapped anything either and so the two of us like watching videos and I came up with a game plan bought the rap and it took a lot of work you had basically disassembled the entire truck take the bed off to take all the headlights off fenders everything comes off so you can wrap behind everything so you can't see any of the color for the original paint but it was the first weekend was to like 12 or 14 hour days with two people and got it to a point where it was like the front was mostly done the cab was mostly done - the door and then the bed and the tailgate also needed to be done so they were nice enough to let me leave it there and come back throughout the week a couple nights work on it some more and then another full weekend 12 to 14 hours with two people and I really started to appreciate why they charged so much to do this stuff because it's it's really time consuming and you have to be really really focused otherwise if you mess up you screw up a whole panel and you have to start over again and it gets really expensive when you do that which I did I picked it up and I ripped the hood in half one time and did it on the doors I left it on that I'm one of the doors just loosely one night came back pulled it off ripped it in half and it's hard like it mentally it's draining because you're like I just did three hours worth of work and I just ruined everything was it worth it or would you go back like I would definitely do it again honestly it became fun I started learning cool tips and tricks that helped me with it and really wanted to make sure that it lasted a long time because you don't want it lifting up on the edges and things like that and I knew that I would eventually probably get sick of this color and if I were would have painted it it would have been really hard to have the whole thing resprayed but with a wrap and now that I have this skill set I can go and change the color if I want in a year or two and it could be you know transform the truck once again into something else it's awesome and how much did it cost you to wrap it were you able to see it's about 900 dollars oh wow that's a big savings yeah big savings nine hundred dollars and I had ended up having to order more because I ripped those panels by accident but nine hard box and then I thought it was between 60 and 70 hours of work between like personally 70 hours and my buddy 70 hours himself to working on it so it's it's time intensive but I think it turned out I think it it makes a statement dude you did it you did a solid job thank you love a challenge huh yeah I love a challenge love a child I love the challenge I don't I'm not I'm not good at doing things the easy way I would say five months to get it to where it is now it's about six months later now so I've been able to enjoy it for about a month which has been wonderful but to get it running and driving that was probably about two months and then it was probably three months of work after that to get it to what it is now with the fiberglass and the long travel suspension and all the cool components that are on it what about to get it approved like to get it ready for the road so get it for the road that was that was about two month mark I went through and I got my hands on the actual training manual that they use at the shops too for their Tech's to use to do the inspections on these things and so I was able to go through and line by line do the inspection myself so I was pretty confident that I had it had it all done and sure enough no problem walked out of there with plates in my hand and a huge smile on my face like goosebumps it's like holy crap you actually did it and you drove it to the DMV like this is nuts that's awesome and then we've been in thing that woman yeah that was a good day has it been read eared have you gotten to that point yet no redos no not yet it's gonna happen the headlights got ripped off completely in the accident and so when the headlights came off the connectors went with them and so I really didn't have any idea of what the wiring situation was in the front so it took a lot of investigating to figure out what was broken and where it needed to go and for a lot of it the headlight switch wouldn't work and so I figured when the airbags went off it messed with the clock Springs so there's like a spiral wires that's in the steering wheel that spins so that's why you can use the controls on your steering wheel and so first I had to go through and diagnose the clock wheel the clock spring and made sure that all the connections were working and from there then I started working well towards the front of the vehicle and was able to after a lot of trial and error figure out how the headlights were working I actually emailed Spyder Auto and saying hey your headlights aren't working right you know and it turns out it wasn't them it was me I had connections switched but that was a challenge and doing the airbag wiring was a challenge also just because a lot of money for the airbags and if I did something wrong and the airbag is deployed again that would be a really bad thing how much were there bucks I spent $3,000 on the airbags on all of them on all of them the most expensive ones were there side curtain bags they're about eleven hundred dollars apiece well I was pretty spendy so I did a lot of research into how to properly mess with airbag systems before I even remotely one like went around unplugging anything because I've heard horror stories of people you know the static electricity and their finger and they touch a connector and it fires the airbag or something like that what you could really hurt yourself yeah if you were doing that so the wiring was mostly the front end and the airbags but after a while we started to figure out a pattern of how they how they wired stuff and started making more sense the question that I've been waiting to ask you how did you feel when this truck was finally ready goosebumps that's that's really the thing like there's those moments in life where you like sit back and just like gaze at what you've accomplished and it's like some of those moments are like graduating from college you're like holy crap I'm here you know this was one of those moments for me because it's it was such a huge project and I dreamed of it for a long time and to be able to actually like look at it and drive it and it's like I still get goosebumps when I'm driving it because I'm like this is this can't be real this is not a real thing that it's actually finished and it's and people are taking notice in it which blows my mind also so it's like it's an incredible feeling and it's one of those things that you wouldn't get if you didn't do it yourself I mean I'm sure you do you know you're proud of an awesome car that you bought or whatever but having your hands on it and knowing that you thought through the whole thing it's like it's the best feeling in the world let's talk about how it currently stands right now what suspension system do you have up in the front so I went with the dirt King long travel race kit plus three and a half on either side and that's paired with a two and a half inch King chock with the remote reservoir with adjusters the suspension in the back is still stuck that's something that I'm working on in the future it's the next major thing I kept the original wheels because I liked them their fuel off-road vectors seventeen by nine and the offset was perfect for what I wanted to do the tires actually came off of my Duramax that I sold I had two sets I had these which is a BF Goodrich ko2 in the 35 12 and a half by 17 I decided to keep those tires put him on this because they're great tires I've always loved them alright so for the fiberglass I went with fiberwerx I did the six-inch bulge on both the front and the rear I really wanted that wide aggressive stance I love the way it turned out and a lot of work to put it on to get it to fit exactly how you want it especially when lots of other things were crooked but I loved the way it turned out for the front grille I had the Raptor style girl I liked it just the Raptor lights are really cool looking and this was a great option I didn't have the the truck did not come with the surround for the grill so this it was nice of when I bought that it came with the full assembly so for the headlights I'm with this quench I'll turn signal headlights off at Tacoma beast I love the way they look they really they make a statement a nice and clean so the only piece of armour that I have on it now is the c-4 fabrications front bumper which I absolutely love I had them do the wider version for me so that it would match up to the fiberglass since the body's a little bit wider and it turned out great for the engine bay it's completely stuck I have made no modifications at all the goal is just to get it back running and driving which I've accomplished I think in the future we'll probably do an intake of some sort and then maybe a fuse block once I do if I get a winch or have a bunch of other accessories that are going on processor or whatever I bought it for 12 as it sits now I've put 28 thousand into it so I'm actually below where I would have spent buying a stock truck with a clean title which is amazing but that's not including any hours that I put into it so is tomato I'm anywhere between 550 and 600 hours into getting it to where it is now which is a pretty significant amount if you were to go and have a shop do it themselves every every spare moment that I had for the last five months went into building that just crazy dude all right man so if you have to give the advice for somebody to jump into this project yeah what advice could you give biggest one is just do your homework first no buying a quality truck even though it is wrecked is really important because there's a lot of things that can go wrong with them that could cost you a fortune and you'd be in over your head but I I'd say do it I mean that's me but I think it's you learn valuable skills you get to meet a bunch of really cool people through the build you know online and you end up being really proud of what you've done and it becomes this thing that you cherish and a weird way it becomes like a part of you an extension of you so if you do it you know check out Copart check out forums people that have done this before and and just go for it and just go for it yeah just just go for it believe in yourself because now it is possible [Music] alright guys that about wraps it up for this video Sam it's been an absolute pleasure hanging out with you these last couple days you absolutely killed it with this build thanks man I really appreciate it a great time hanging out with you guys and I'm really looking forward to people being able to check out the film so what's the best place for our viewers to find it yeah so on Instagram they gonna taco taco underscore taco and I'm putting together a YouTube channel right now so the link will be in the description below so guys make sure to check it out if you guys like this video make sure to hit the like button you haven't already subscribed make sure to do so and I'll see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: TacomaBeast

Views: 1,022,367

Rating: 4.8512321 out of 5

Keywords: tacoma, overland, overlanding, overland bound, road trip, off road, travis haley, haley strategic, alucab, shadow awn, shadow awning, toyota tacoma, adventure travel, rig walk around, long travel suspension, total chaos long travel, c4 fabrication, baja designs squadron sport, dirt king, dirt king fabrication, king shocks tacoma, tacoma fiberglass fenders, salvage tacoma, wrecked toyota tacoma, rebuild tacoma, tacoma headlights, tacomabeast, baja tacoma, long travel tacoma

Id: CEEgnvA-fY8

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020