Flipping Up To My DREAM Car!! EP 1

You guys know what it means when we have a U-Haul trailer in the beginning of the video. Welcome back to Simple Builds. We are starting a very fun, exciting series where we are flipping and trading up until we have our dream car. Car number one is super exciting. I cannot wait to show you guys what we just found. Super good deal. I'm gonna share it with you. We got a two hour drive. Let's get on the road, go check out the first car in the series. With this series, I plan to show you guys everything, show you guys the budget, show you guys how much I spend on the cars, how much we spend on the repairs, and how much we sell them for, and the profit. And then as we flip or trade, I'll show you guys the whole process there, show you guys what I look for in Facebook Marketplace deals, and how to get some deals. And hopefully you guys can learn and see that anyone can do this. And I hope that I can be successful. I've never done this before, but we're going to try it together. And again, if I can do it, you guys can do it. So stick around for the journey. It's going to be a lot of fun. And we're pulling up here really shortly. So I can't wait to show you guys car number one. We're about to push the car on. And you guys will shortly see what the car is that we picked up. ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. ♪ She's up. Ooh, what do you guys think? Well, here she is, guys, my new-to-me 2014 Ford Fiesta ST. Let's get back on the road, and I'll meet you guys back at the shop. Get this car in there and unloaded, and I'll show you guys all the details on how much we bought it for, what the plans are with this thing, what it needs, and hopefully we can get this thing ready for sale or trade really soon. So let me break it down for you guys, show you guys what we bought, how much it costs, and how much we're gonna be in all-in on this Fiesta ST. Really excited about this car. I really wish we could keep it, but I can't let this get to my head because we have a mission to complete, guys, and this is just one step of the journey. Yippee, yippee, yippee, yippee, yippee, yippee, yippee. Is it in? Finally got the car in. A really nice man came by, literally just in the nick of time. I was trying to get this in for like an hour and a half, and we finally got it in, and I couldn't get this piece out because it was digging into the bottom of the car. Barely snuck it by the garage door here, but we got it in, and not without a little boo-boo. I think it punctured some kind of coolant hose down there, so that is a little bit of a setback. In the shop, about ready to diagnose this car and see if we can get it started before getting it over to the lift, but let's talk about some of the costs that we've accrued so far. Before we get into that, of course, this is a 2014 Ford Fiesta ST. It has 112,000 miles. We purchased it. It was up on Facebook for $3,500. We purchased it for 3,200 after negotiation. The U-Haul was $250, plus gas was about $50, and we might need a couple parts for this thing, so we'll keep you guys going on the tally with the costs that we accrue, but for now, that is all we got, so let's jump on to why I got this car so cheap. Let's see if it even gives any kind of juice here. Probably not, but... So first up, let's test the battery and see why we're not getting any juice. So let's get our voltmeter and test the voltage on this battery. We're gonna turn it on and set it to DC voltage and 20 volts right there because this is a 12-volt battery. We're gonna do the least amount that you can without being under, so 20 volts, and let's put the terminals to red and black. Okay, we got the black on negative terminal, and we got the red on the positive terminal, and we are showing 6.8 volts, so there's many reasons why a battery can pretty much die out like that, and I believe if it's under 10 volts, then the battery is pretty much discharged, so we did go ahead and pick up a new battery. So this car sat for about three months. The guy that picked it up, he picked it up on auction for about $5,000, and that's a pretty good deal. He was a dealer, he worked at a dealership, and he had an auction set up, so he picked this car up for five grand, and then he drove it around for a few months, and he parked it one night, came out the next night, and it wouldn't turn on, so he left it at the dealership, told the mechanic to go check it out, and he never got the time to check it out. That's what the story that I was told. I hope that's true. So I'm thinking, okay, what could possibly go wrong in one night for the car to not start overnight? It could be starter, it could be battery, it could be fuel-related. I'm not quite sure, but we're gonna figure that out. You can see it was sold, it was posted a day ago. One day ago, and it's sold, and obviously I bought it. So when I found this car, it was about 15 hours posted. I was on Facebook every single day. I was trying to find the first car for this new series, and when this thing popped up, I knew I had to jump on it, and by the time I got there, he told me there was about 20, 30 people that were already DMing him, so you have to be fast, you have to jump on good deals, you have to be on Facebook Marketplace regularly. The car needs three main things to start. It needs spark, it needs fuel, and it needs air. So obviously, for the spark side of it, the first thing we're gonna test is the battery, and that is no good, so let's swap it out. I would be pleasantly surprised if it was just the battery, but I highly doubt that that is the case. So in anticipation, I had already gone out and grabbed a new battery for this car. This thing was about $130 from AutoZone, so let's add that to the current tally and the total. So let's go ahead and swap this out real quick. Before I put this new battery back in, I noticed some kind of weird extra wiring here. Positive going to the positive, and then a ground over here going to the ground, and there's a box down here of some sort. So I'm gonna take these two bolts for this headlight out. That could definitely be something that is messing with an electrical system, so let's take the headlight out and see if we can get a better look at that. You got two T30s, one on the top and one on the bottom, and then just one electrical connector. The good thing about flipping a car that you know well is you know how to take it apart and how to put it back together pretty fast. I've owned one of these, and a lot of you guys remember mine. I miss it a lot. I wish I could keep this car, but I can't get attached to it. We'll have another at some point. Okay, I found whatever the heck this is. This is, I think, a security alarm. I don't know what the heck this is, guys. I don't know what the heck is going on here, but it looks like we might be able to fix this if this was an issue. Track 6V pass time, let me see what that is. Oh, fleet management, tracking device. Okay, so it's a tracker. Found something pretty interesting here. You can see it's literally just negative and positive, so we can take those off, and then it's not hooked up to the headlight whatsoever. It just looks a little weird because this thing is pinned weird with the headlight, so it's just attached there, and then these are removable connectors, so you can literally, let me see, let me put it on a tripod. You can unplug this one, and that leaves you with a new male and female lens. Okay, that's connected. New battery. Well, I'm doubtful, but let's see if removing an immobilizer and putting in a new battery was enough to get this car started. Let's check it out. You never know when crazy things have happened, so. And no, that did not fix it, so it sounded like it wanted to take over a little bit, but let's check out the next thing. So we checked something with spark. Let's check something with fuel, something simple. You just pop a couple clips out for the back seat, and we're gonna get in and put it in accessory mode and see if we can hear the fuel pump priming. When you put it in accessory mode, you should hear a little buzz or like a hum. I think I heard it. I'm pretty sure I heard the fuel pump humming, so I think we can rule that out. I guess there's no reason why we can't put this headlight back in. Spark plugs are another maintenance item that could be fouled and could give us an issue, so they're cheap enough. This is about 40 bucks. Let's add that to the tally, and we'll throw in these brand new Motorcraft Ford pre-gapped spark plugs, see if that does anything, and then if not, that's another line down the spark track that we ruled out of the equation. You can see just how dirty and fouled up these old ones are, and they are not OEM, so we are hopefully going to fix some issues, if not all of them. This is what the OEM Motorcraft one looks like. Okay, spark plugs are in, coil packs are all back on, everything's torqued to spec, and let's see, I'm not getting my hopes up, but I really hope it starts. I guess I am getting my hopes up. Here we go. Okay, nothing yet. I recently got this top-down diagnostic tool off the TikTok shop, so let's see if this can tell me anything. Okay, please ignore the annoying Ford chime, but pretty cool here. We got a bunch of monitors logged in here. We're about to record some data. We have camshaft, we have clutch pedal. You can see, sometimes if you don't depress the clutch pedal all the way, and it thinks that the clutch isn't depressed, then it won't start, but you can see here, clutch pedal status, clutch fully depressed. So that's pretty cool. You can see it actively working. Then we have fuel-related stuff, fuel rail pressure. We're going to record all this data and see what we can find. Well, there's nothing super promising on the scan tool, but I did see something on the fuel pump. Let's limit that out. So we're just kind of going through a bunch of different things and testing to see if one of those is showing signs of fault, and then we'll swap it out. So we have a test light here. We're going to check the fuses, and then you just pop this test light alligator clip onto the negative terminal. Now we're just going to go through on the fuses and use our test light to see if we get... Let's go through each fuse and check. You can see the light is lighting up here, and then we're going to check every fuse. All right, let's try this out. We got the intake tube removed from the filter. So we have some starter fluid. We're going to spray a couple of squirts of starter fluid in there and see if that works. That should indicate that spark is all working, and then it would just be fuel-related. So let's just see if that does anything for us. So we got two dead cylinders. We got 120 in these. 120 in two cylinders and zero on the other two.