rev up your engines, well we're all trying to save money and if you're
looking for a good cheap car, if that car still runs good it could be a good car
but you need to check some serious things first, and I'll use this 68
Mercury Cougar as an example, now it's sort of a classic car, though this one is
in pretty rough cosmetic shape, but if they are rough cosmetically, hey you
can get them a lot cheaper that way, as long as they're not rotted the whole way
through, give them a good tap you can see this is
still pretty solid, it's just that the paint went off, it can be sanded down and
repainted if you want, but there's some parts that you don't want all rotten
like the frame, so you want to jack it up and check that so when you crawl under
the car start looking now this part of the frame might not look that good, but
you get yourself a little hammer and hit it, it's still real solid that's just
some of the undercoating coming off that's fine, but if you would have hit it
in pieces would crunch in and it was all flaking off, hey then you wouldn't buy it
you don't want one with a rotten frame years ago I had an old customer,
I'm in Texas, he bought a used Mercedes from Florida, he drove it here and then
he wanted me to service it, I put my jack under there and I started to Jack the frame
and the whole thing was just breaking into
pieces and I looked, the entire bottom of the frame was rotting away, the car was
basically worthless, and while you're under there check stuff like the brake
lines, see if they're all old and rotten and have welded into one piece where you
might have to replace the entire brake line assembly if anything starts leaking
and before you buy any old car, do a little research about are parts still
available for this thing, now this cougar may be 51 years old but check
this out, I just put a brand new carburetor on it, believe it or not since
I live in a big city Houston, it took me one hour to get a brand new carburetor
for this, now yes the Cougar is basically the mercury version of the Mustang, so
most of the parts are totally interchangeable, and people always like
mustangs so you can get parts for them readily, and as a small aside if you're
thinking of buying an old classic car you might think about a cougar, the
Mustang prices are through the roof but the Cougar is basically the same vehicle
with a different body style, and when it was new it actually cost more than the
Mustangs did, so if you want to say get a snazzy or old car, hey why not pick one
that's a little bit off-brand, not quite as popular, you're gonna pay a lot less
and still could have a great vehicle but regardless of what type of car you're
buying, just an old beater to get you around, or a semi classic, make sure that
parts are available for that model, don't don't go out and buy from manufacturers that
don't even exist anymore, you want to buy an old
Triumph car, hey you're gonna have a lot of headaches getting parts, fixing it up
stick to things that were extremely popular, that parts are still available
for, now the next thing to do as simple as it sounds, is check the coolant, now
this is nice and green it came with green coolant, it's not corroded if it's
all rusted out and gunked inside, you don't want to buy a vehicle that has a
cooling system that's all corroded inside, generally means the engines gonna
have overheating problems, things are going to corrode and wear out, so check
the simple things like that, and if it's all corroded inside, yeah don't bother to
buy it because it's probably gonna have cooling system problems if it doesn't
already have them, and the next thing is take it
for a good road test, a trick a lot of guys do is they hardly have any gas in the
tank, so if you got it and it's almost out of gas
hey put five bucks of gas in it just so you can take it for a good test
take it on the highway, see if it's out of control when you drive it at high
speeds or whether it goes good, watch the temperature gauge when you're on the
highway see if it overheats at highway speeds, and then when you get in town
drive it around 30 mile an hour zone for 15 minutes or so, see if it overheats in
traffic, you don't want to have a car that has overheating problems, you're
mainly going to be looking for big problems
stuff like brakes, brakes don't cost that much especially today there's
aftermarket stuff, a lot of times you can get brake pads for
$20, you can get rotors for $29 on a lot of vehicles, so you don't worry about
stuff like that, what you worry about is the big-ticket items, the engine and the
transmission, and whether the car suspension is good
because if they've been wrecked a lot of times they won't sit right, I had a
customer years ago, they had bought a used car and they said, hey their friend
said the car looked a little weird when they were following behind him, so they
brought them over here, and I saw the entire vehicle the bottom had been shoved
to the right, so when you follow him you
could see that the right wheel was sticking out further and the left wheel
was sticking in further, the whole thing had been shifted, so look at the car from
the back and from the front, and if at all possible have friends follow you or
have the friend Drive it and you follow it, and see if the thing is sitting
cockeyed one way or the other, because if it's really bent, you don't want to buy a
car like that it's gonna be more bother than it's worth, and when it comes to that
demand to see the title, because it's not just your own
financial safety, you want to make sure they actually own the car they're
selling you, but you don't want to buy one of these cars that had been wrecked,
if the title says reconditioned refurbished or salvage title, yeah it's a
good idea not even to mess with those things, because that meant they've been
totaled by an insurance company and they total them for some pretty good reasons,
and sure once in a while there might be a great car like that but hey, you want
to play the lottery when you're buying a car, you know millions of people lose the
lottery and only one person wins, check the inspection sticker, if you're buying it
your using it for transportation, make sure that the sticker is current and
valid, don't believe anything anybody tells you when you're selling the car,
like oh it just needs this the passed inspections or that, one of the biggest
reasons my customers get rid of their old junky cars, is because they're sick
of spending a ton of money every year to get their car to pass the state
inspections, if you're in a state that does state inspections, hey make sure
it's got a valid one because if it doesn't you might be just falling into
somebody else's money pit, another thing do is to go and check the tires, these
tires even though they have mud on them because they've been
sitting a while, they still got a lot of tread left on them and they don't have any
bald spots or really bad marks, now sure tires aren't all that big of an expense
but if you see really bald tires on one part and not another, that generally shows
the car has got a serious suspension problem and you're gonna keep buying
tires and they're gonna keep wearing out too fast, so if they look good even if
the tire treads are getting a little thin, as long as everything's even it
doesn't have a serious suspension problem, now after doing a good road test
the next thing you have to realize is, before you take possession of that
vehicle, make sure that your insurance company is told you're buying it and you
have a time that the insurance is valid, because years ago a friend of mine, he
bought a used car, he was driving it back and he got in a massive wreck, he ended up
being sued, because he had no insurance on that car while he was driving it, and
even though whose fault it was is still up in the air, he drove pretty fast so it
was probably his fault, but regardless you don't want to be driving
around in a non insured car even for an hour or something, you never know what's
gonna happen, because these days with cell phones hey, you can contact your
insurance agent, you can have proof of insurance on your phone immediately, once
you tell them that you're putting this car on your policy, make a point of doing
it before you start driving it around, I made a mistake years ago, I had a
customer who was thinking about buying this used Mercedes, so they brought it
over here and she got in the car with me, and I road tested it, well while I was road
testing it, I got pulled over by the police, because the sticker wasn't valid, the license
plate one of them was missing, didn't have insurance, I had to go to court for
that and it was a royal pain in the wazoo, so now you know what to do if
you're buying an old car, so you don't get stuck with somebody else's money
pitch, because there's plenty of old cars out there that are still
running quite well, but being really old they're not worth all their much money
and it can be a fantastic deal sometimes, like my 94 Celica that I paid 350 bucks
for, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember
to ring that Bell!