My CHEAP Maserati Is UNFIXABLE... And It's Why You SHOULD Buy One

On today's episode of WatchJRGO, we are back with my cheap Maserati, and today we're gonna try to make it not explode. I don't want it to explode with me in it. What is going on, guys? I am WatchJRGO, and like I said, we are back with my 2008 Maserati GranTurismo that I love very much because it was dirt cheap, and we fixed basically everything on it, spending very, very little money. Really, the most expensive thing we've had to do to it is a full set of tires, which are doing amazing, by the way. Even after, I think we've got 2,000 miles of just absolutely shredding in the Arkansas roads, about as hard as you can push this car, and those Toyo tires are doing great. But we still have a gas smell. Since day one, it has had a gas smell, and whenever the check engine light resets, which does take a very long time, in fact, we cleared it before that last Arkansas trip, and it probably had 40 key cycles on it, and the light still has not turned back on. But we do need to fix this gas smell because anytime it's sitting in the heat, the entire cabin fills with fuel vapor, and I don't want the car to explode when maybe I open the electric door latch, and there might be a spark or something like that, and then I get blown back. I mean, it'd be kind of cool. It would look like a movie, I'll give you that. But today, we're gonna try to fix the whatever's going on with the EVAP system and the fuel vapor. So, we're gonna hop in the trunk of the Maserati here. Huh, I must have replaced the trunk struts because they work great, and they look brand new. Anyway, today we're gonna rip all of the interior back out of the trunk, and get the inspection camera in here and see if we can figure out what is going on with that. So, there is a vent tube that runs over here to the filler as well. So you got the filler right here and a vent tube beside it. There's a chance the leak is the vent tube, but I don't really think so. So, I'm kind of thinking it's the fuel pump hat. Now, the fuel tank, luckily, is right inside the trunk underneath this panel. So, after we tear every other panel out of the trunk, we'll be able to see the fuel tank and just keep going from there. So, we'll start with the easy one and just keep going. All right, I got the screws out of the back panel here, which is usually the most time-consuming part of this. And I didn't even realize this came out as one piece. Oh, it doesn't. It just kind of hooked. And now for the actual side panels, they have little retainers that you have to push down and unscrew, basically. So, they push on to metal threaded studs. And then it's kind of a nut, but usually you don't have a lot of luck getting these off. So, sometimes you have to use a trim tool and just pry them off, which seems like we're already at that point. I feel like these nuts are going to be the most time-consuming part of the entire thing. Sometimes if you get them at an angle, they'll unscrew. Sometimes if you pry a little bit, they'll unscrew. And then other times you just end up prying them off. But that one's actually starting to come off. I actually do like these retainers because they sure are easy to put back on, but a lot of times they don't come off very easily. Got that top screw out. And now we're ever closer to the main piece that covers up the gas tank there. We made it into the back of the Maserati. Here are all of the trunk trim pieces. There's quite a few of them. It's actually more than you'd think. It fits together like a crazy jigsaw puzzle in here. But we're at the big metal divider that prevents incursions into the fuel tank by stuff that might be in the trunk in a collision. So, now we have to pull out a bunch of 10s. There's like three on the bottom, four on the top. And then you have to kind of pry this piece out of here if you're working on it. It does not just come out easily because of all these studs at the top there. You have to pry around those studs. So, it takes a little bit of finesse to get that thing out of there. But once it's out, we can finally take a look at the fuel pump and hopefully find the source of our fuel vapor in the car. I was really hoping it wasn't the fuel pump top hat, right? Because there were a bunch of comments saying, order fuel pumps from Ferrari. And I think this has two fuel pumps and they're $1,000 each, which is just insanity. Or we could just JB weld it. It'll be fine forever. It just doesn't matter when you're working on a car like this, right? It was what, a hundred and maybe, it might've been $150,000 new, probably 130, somewhere in that ballpark. It's just a luxury car, not really an exotic. I don't care that it's powered by a sort of a Ferrari engine. It's just fun to make jokes about the Ferrari engine, honestly. But there's no chance I would spend $2,000 on fuel pumps on a car I paid $16,500 for. Every time I get in here, it blows my mind that Maserati doesn't cut their zip tie tails. I think this is the only car I've ever seen where every single zip tie tail is standing up and it makes the trunk look really crowded. But there's some cool stuff back here, like those big giant ceramic resistors in white. I'm assuming this is the amplifier for the audio. The radar head for the K40 built-in radar detector is in the trunk, which makes it basically worthless. But hey, at least it's back there. And another crazy thing is these come pre-wired for every option, even if they don't have it, like a lot of Japanese cars do. Unlike, say, Bentley that builds a new harness for each model or each option set. But yeah, there's just connectors that go to nothing and never did go to anything because the car doesn't have those options. It's kind of interesting. All right, the wall is free. Now we just have to pry it out of there. We got it. Little bit of finagling to get the tops out. You can see where the studs kind of scratch that. The only way to do this without pushing down on it with a bit of a pry bar or some kind of tool is to remove the entire bottom tray that holds the battery and e-brake and pull all the cables out of that. You don't want to do that. So definitely just give yourself a little bit of prying and that'll get you into where you need to be. Now we can see our fuel tank. Obviously, we took a bunch of this part last time. Never found a single problem. Pressure tested all the lines. Today, we're gonna do the thing I should've done last time, which is take the camera and investigate the fuel pump hat. So luckily, my snap-on camera here has the side camera. And when we switch to that, we get a view of whatever it's looking down at. So now, there's the fuel pump hat right here. We'll just go hunting around. See if we can see any cracked plastic, anything like that. I'm not seeing any problems at all. We might actually have to pull the tank out of this thing. You see that hose right there? It's shiny. Like fuel's been running down it or something. Covered in hair and dust and all that stuff, like it's been wet for a long time. So that's where I think we're gonna start focusing. I think I took a pretty good look at that fuel pump hat. Maybe I even looked at it last time. I just didn't remember. But it sure doesn't seem like it's leaking from there at all. It seems like it's just fuel vapor escaping from one of these lines. I wanted to confirm my diagnosis here before we try to replace any of those. They're all like plastic hard lines, even though they're also kind of hoses. Obviously, I could replace them with rubber hose, fuel line. It won't be any problem. But before we do that, I did go get my smoke machine, and we're gonna hook it up real quick and fog some smoke into the gas cap here and see if we can spot the leak. So let's get this going real quick. We got some air over here. We've got our SuperStart Extreme battery to power it. This smoke machine actually runs on the car battery. It's kind of cool. So all you have to do is throw the clamps on there, and you can see that little spark. And within a couple seconds, it will start making smoke. So let's get the air hooked up. This thing gets out of control really fast. I mean, it just starts fogging the smoke out here in a couple seconds. Johnny's got me all worried about this. He said you can't use shop air with this or everything will explode. I don't see even a bit of vapor in here. I think he was telling me that you have to run nitrogen when you do this. It seems like we're losing it all. Let me see if I can get a better seal out here. I'm choking to death here, guys. I can't even breathe. There isn't a hint of smoke inside this trunk. I didn't see it rolling out of anywhere. Usually, you can almost immediately see like just a little wisp of the smoke coming up. And I didn't see anything in here. In fact, now the whole shop's kind of full and that's why I can't breathe. So I think now we've got it unhooked. We're just kind of idling here for a second. I'm gonna go up front, pop the hood, and see if I can connect to the EVAP line up there and see if we get a different result because I literally have the tank pressurized at this point. I can stick the hose in here and it'll eject itself back out. There's so much pressure sitting in the gas tank. It almost makes me think the vent line's plugged. I don't think it is, but it does make me wonder. For those of you that are wondering, the vent line's that. That hose right there is a fuel tank vent. So I disconnected the vent line from the car. It connects to that metal pipe way back there. You can see that sticking out. It's painted the body's primer color. And when I did, check this out, this hose completely split as soon as I pulled on it. I mean, it may have already been split, but it looks like that could be a leak. And then to clear it, I shoved some air into the T and blocked off the other side there. And of course we know that it's clear to the ground now. So that's something. We're getting it figured out here. And now we're gonna hook the smoke machine up to that vent line right there and see if we can force some air in backwards, see what happens there. And then we'll go up to the front and start checking the EVAP line to the engine. This is not a fun job. So now it makes sense why if you take this to Maserati for some quick EVAP troubleshooting, even if they're just doing something simple, I've heard that they'll charge $500 to not pull the tank. I'll take $500 and not pull the tank all day long. I also think pulling the tank on this is probably a full day job. It's just, it's a big deal. The smoke's hooked up. I'm not seeing any leaks. That's just what was in there from the two seconds that it wasn't clear. Definitely not the top of the fuel pump, tell you that much. I almost have a feeling here in a second this hose is gonna blow off. Let's see how much pressure's in there. Oop, not much pressure, that's for sure. Let's hook it back up. You need a huge fan in here whenever you're trying to troubleshoot like this. So far, we haven't found a single leak. So I'm gonna hook the vent line back up and try to pressurize it from the gas cap again. But there is nothing on top of this tank leaking. It's not the fuel pump. There's nothing to epoxy. There's just nothing wrong. So we've learned that the only part of this hose with the T in it that matters is the line we were feeding with the smoke machine. So the other line with that split just goes up and drains the gas cap area. It's like a water drain, whatever needs to be drained down, dirt, gasoline, water, it drains that down to the ground. So I would assume the other end of this has a check valve on it and we can't push through that check valve. So now we need to find a way to push the smoke into the tank better. And that's probably the gas cap. Everybody says it's the gas cap, but it's really hard to seal the gas filler neck. You can see it's all slimy already because it's covered in baby oil, but I'm gonna try to shove the hose farther down in there and then maybe throw some tape or a rag in there and we can get a real seal. Well, we have that sealed pretty well. I guarantee you, even though it's still flying out of there, there is literally no leak in the tank area at all. And I can prove that we've got steam in here, or smoke in here, baby oil smoke, because if I pull this EVAP line here, it's just pouring out. You can instantly see, that's what it should look like. Don't see it anywhere. Let's look up front. I don't see it. That's what it should look like if there's a leak, guys. You see the smoke rolling out of that connector. I know it's tough to see, but it's like dry ice fog just pouring out of the bottom of that connector there. I just put the hose on there and threw a bunch of smoke in to check everything else. Mostly this rollover check valve, EVAP valve thing right there. And also this one. And I'm still not getting anything out of the tank. I mean, it's just perfectly sealed. This inflatable adapter for smoke machines, which should let us get a perfect seal on the gas cap. I just couldn't give up. And I talked to him about it and he was like, try it with a perfect seal and you might, there's a chance you'll see a leak. So we've tried everything, obviously. We're gonna try this one last thing. If it doesn't work, we'll just find the ticket on this car and check the unable to reproduce box there because what else are you supposed to do? It just won't leak. So far, we haven't been able to find a single issue. And I keep running up and checking the intake where the EVAP line runs into, nothing there, just no leak. So whatever it is, is just so minute. There's no actual cracks in anything, nothing visual. And that's what I was hoping for when I jumped in here, that we'd find an easy problem that we could just jump in here and fix for no money, basically. And even if we do find a problem, it'll still be a cheap fix, but let's keep going. All right, here we go. This thing is very flexible. There we go. And hopefully better than a rag. That's kinda, that's what we're going for. All right, so she's in here. I think that's a really good seal. And now let's see if we can make this here a connection. All right, here we go again. Time to open the valve. Will we see a leak? We're definitely getting smoke in. We've got just a little bit of a leak right here. Unstoppable, I guess. Oh, this hose, obviously, because it's not hooked up. Okay, she's back together. Cranking the pressure onto the tank here. Tell you why, it's a lot easier to test like this because I'm not breathing in clouds of smoke. It's been a really rough day for breathing. Ah, we've got so much pressure, the hose has quit. And our seal out there is not great anymore. And we have literally no issues inside here. Not even a whiff of smoke. That's it, I'm calling it. We're dumping as much baby oil as we can into the atmosphere, but we are finding literally zero trace of a leak inside this tank. Perfectly synced. Well, they were, they were perfectly synced for a minute. It's a bad day for breathing again. The whole shop's full of smoke. Took all of three minutes. All right, I don't see it. I don't think you guys saw it. I think it's good. Well, I've got the wall back in. It's time to start closing everything up here. Went ahead, put the smoke machine away. Honestly, we have literally tried everything to diagnose where this smell is coming from. And it's not any of the common issues. It's clearly not a leaking hose. I don't see any leaking O-rings. I do not see where this thing could possibly be getting any fuel vapor from. Maybe it's just the filler neck needs tightened down because we don't smell it all that often. So before I finish putting all the trim back in the trunk, I'm gonna tighten down the clamps in the filler neck. And that's like the last chance for this to actually be an issue. It could be fuel sloshing through the hose. And like in a way where the smoke can't make it through, but like a liquid can seep through, it would get splashed. I don't know, it's possible. It's just such a far-fetched possibility. But at the same time, it doesn't really bother me that much. I just don't want the check engine light coming back. But then again, sometimes, like I said, the check engine light doesn't come back. What a mystery. Well, this is kind of like the Equinox, but it's not just bad fuel. Instead, it's some kind of a weird Italian hand-built car thing. And maybe it's like one of the welds is bad on the hand-welded gas tank. The gas tank literally has Maserati SPA engraved in it with like a ball dimple thing. So they have like a robot that just draws Maserati on the tank. How crazy is that? Anyway, let's get this thing put back together and get it out on the road. The only question now is how fast can we put it back together? Getting this light hooked up is a little bit tough, but we got it. Don't worry. Light's not gonna hold us down. Can you believe every screw in this thing has a washer and then a nylon washer? And the nylon washer is also the cap for the little screw cover there just to try to keep stuff from rattling in this car. Pretty ridiculous, the lengths they went to. And actually, I think it works pretty well, though. It's not a very rattly car. They got a great big LED sign out there that- I think it's a Daktronics, too. Yep. Yeah. Okay, I better get the Smiley's on the phone in case they happen to have one. Well, the hub will probably have it. All right, well, I'll give them a call. All right. Okay, thank you. Yep. Well, we're almost done putting this thing back together. And of course, one screw doesn't want to go in. I need like a pick or something so I can pull the interior piece over to line up the screw hole. That's what happens when they make the interior panels actually screw in instead of use Christmas trees. I used to hate Christmas trees, but now I love them. They're just so much easier to get everything lined up. But one more screw and then we can drop everything else back in and have this trunk buttoned up. Finally. What a chore. It's always a big deal to take this thing apart. I'll tell you that. Last piece is the latch trim here. Honestly, I thought it was broken, but it's actually supposed to be like that. This is the only part that's annoying. It looks like they glue this in from the factory. They like put silicon in there to hold it inside the seal so it looks correct. But honestly, there's just nothing you can do to make it sit up there. Hand-built Italian things. What can you do? I'm sure they probably put double-sided tape on it if you're getting a dealer service, but I'm not gonna go through all that nonsense. It's got four fasteners in it. Well, another valiant effort trying to fix the Maserati. We're shutting it down. This will now be known as the unfixable Maserati, but somehow this car is just perfect. Every time I take it out, it delivers better than my expectations. Although at like 120, 40 mile an hour in that 20 mile an hour window, the front end gets so twitchy that I'm not as in love with it as I used to be. Those real high-speed turn-ins. It likes to turn in one way just a hair faster than the other way, and I'm not a big fan of that. That's the real problem with it, is strange turn-in behaviors at really high speeds. I'd love to go make big pulls in this thing. It's supposed to be a super fast grand touring car that you can go do rallies in, haul the family in, do whatever you want. And it did all of that perfect until I found that high-speed twitchiness that I'm not in love with. Other than that, though, I can't sing this car's praises enough. As long as it's cheap, don't go buying one of these for a bunch of money. But if you get one of these cheap, what a deal. That is it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to head on over to shopwatchchair.com for cool shirts just like this. And please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you want to do. And I will talk to you next time. The building is finally starting to air out. I had to open all the windows. It still smells like pure mineral oil in here. I'm hoping the Camaro's not ruined because I just detailed it before Cars & Coffee. It was looking stunning. And it's clearly filthy again just from being driven and getting some dust on it, somehow water spots. I don't know how. It was all wiped down. It was perfect again, but now she's looking really filthy. But soon, soon, hopefully this week, both of these cars will go back in their old garage spaces and they'll be out of our way here in the shop. Obviously fixing the last piece of the Maserati puzzle, that fuel smell, was on my list for a very long time. And at this point, it's not on the list. It is checked off. It can't be any more checked off than it is right now. It's just gonna continue being the fun, rally, Arkansas beater that it is. Love it to death, but it's staying the way that it is. It's a really good car. Sounds great, drives great, really fun. Hauls anybody around. When we're in Arkansas and we need to take four people, everyone else has two door cars with two seats. I can take four people. It's the taxi. It really does do everything we want really well. So if you get a chance to buy a cheap Maserati for 16 grand and you can work on it yourself, minus fuel smells, buy it. I'd planned on making a video working on the 496 SS here, but it had like this slow coolant leak. It was parked in the garage for a while, you know, and it really hadn't been driven in the last three years. And it had dripped about that much coolant on the floor. So I came out here and I checked and I was like, yeah, it's a little low on coolant, like a little under where I think it should be on the radiator. And we filled it back up and it's been driven like five times in the last two months or something like that. And there's no more leak. Maybe it just needs driven. It seems like it's a gasket on the back of the water pump, but maybe it's swelled back up. I don't really know, but it did magically fix itself. And now it's completely full of coolant just the way it should be. So that was actually a little bit interesting. The only other thing it needs is probably an oil change because I don't think it's had an oil change in three or four years. It's also had maybe at most 250 miles in three or four years put on it. So I just don't think an oil change is interesting enough to give it its own video. It does need the dash lights looked at and I need to change the gear in the Speedo drive again. The little plastic gear that sits in the transmission has like a couple little things that it needs to just be flawless. But at the same time, they're probably easy things that won't take too long.