Hey guys welcome back to legit street cars. Today we are at o'hare auto body to continue project lexus, so it is now mechanically perfect. All the maintenance is up to date. I drove it here about 20 miles.

It drives like a brand new car. So in this video we're gon na start the process of making it look like a brand new car, and once i mentioned to my friends at o'hare, auto body in bensonville, illinois that i'll be giving this away to someone in need. They were totally on board. So they are a big sponsor in this project and taking care of pretty much all of the bodywork so i'll leave their information linked down below.

They are certified in pretty much everything they've been here for 35 years same owner. So if you have a tesla mercedes, a porsche gm ford, everything under the sun, they can take care of you. So with that, let's kind of take a look at where we're at now and then we're gon na get right into work, removing the bumpers. I got some headlights to fix: let's get right to it all right, let's take a look at what we're getting ourselves into here.

So overall, the is250 is in decent cosmetic condition. The paint and the clear coat look okay for the most part, but there are areas of the car that could use a re-spray, including this front bumper. So some paint is missing. It's been touched up a few times before, and the alignment is way off, so we're gon na have to mess with the alignment.

So this is coming off for new paint and, as you can see here, the car is pretty straight and the biggest concern is this spot of rust right here on the right quarter panel. So we're gon na have to cut this out. They're gon na have to get new metal in here to fix it properly, there's a little dent right there and then like the front bumper. The rear bumper has just been kind of city abused.

So it's not cracked up. I think it's a perfect candidate to be removed and repainted, and then this guy is pretty much falling off on this corner, so we're gon na have to get some new clips as well, but yeah the car is pretty straight. I think it's gon na clean up really nicely and then, of course, after all of this, we'll be doing a complete paint, correction, buff, ceramic coating, all that good stuff and i'm gon na work, my magic with these yellowed headlights and i'm gon na try and actually Fix this, this guy has popped out from the inside, so i'm gon na see what it takes to remove this lens. If not, i may have to replace it.

So the guys at o'hare are doing a little bit of investigation on this rust. And if you remember in the first video the previous owner said, this car had a rebuilt title. But he wasn't sure why, and i was never able to figure out why with the vin, but this is all starting to come together. It looks like this quarter.

Panel has been replaced and the way they were able to tell is there aren't any pinch welds on this quarter, so what they do at some body shops is they just drill a hole through the new quarter panel and the inner structure of the vehicle, and they Weld it, we can see a little hole right here where they didn't completely weld it, and then there are a lot of spots like this, where the weld has kind of just gone over, so they drilled this out filled it and the weld kind of went over And they sanded it down and painted it. So this is a very good indication that this side has been replaced and that'll be verified if we take apart the other side and see some pinch welds. So let's go do that. If our theory is correct and we pull this up, we should have spot welds yeah and we do so.

This is a factory quarter and the other side has been replaced so from the factory. They have a pinch, welding machine that literally pinches and welds. Both sides of the metal like this and you get these little dimples okay. So at this point you know that i'm giving the lexus away to someone in need.

I've already found him he's awesome. You guys are gon na love that video, but these car giveaways are always a legit streetcars family affair. It's a big team effort, so i'll do all the mechanical work and then, for example, o'hare auto body will do all of the body work and i even try to get sponsors involved as well. So this is a current debit card and when i told current about what i was doing, they were immediately on board with this card and 1000.

So i'm super grateful for current sponsors like that that are willing to pitch in and this card is pretty awesome. So current is a mobile, app and a debit card, and it just makes life easy. This is the way banking should be, and i really wish i had one of these when i was younger, so you start your account. Get one of these cards manage it all from your phone.

You can set up separate savings pods and even get points for cash back where you shop. The features of this card are pretty much endless. If you sign up for direct deposit, you can get your checks up to two days faster compared to a traditional bank. You can deposit checks with the camera on your phone right on the app you guys are gon na love it and i'm gon na leave a link down below where you can get current or just go to current.com legit streetcar.

So a big thanks to current for continuing to support automotive content creators like myself and for hooking up the recipient of the lexus with 1 000. I can't wait to give the car away and the card, so this thing is definitely hit in the front. At some point nothing major, but you can see the gap here and then we can see the foam from the inside too. That pushed in so we'll probably get a better picture of this once it's off, but i don't suspect any real damage behind the bumper.

Oh man look at that. This is all broken in here, so it's definitely hit at some point in this area. This crash bar is pretty destroyed. We'll definitely have to get a new one of those.

Oh no. They just straightened out the frame rail extension and welded. It look at that. Ah, that is not cool.

They could have just replaced that and it's a bolt-on piece too. These are actually really nice because it saves the main frame rail, but they just decided to pull it and they didn't do the best job. Because that's why the bumper didn't line up and they just welded it up and reused, this nasty crash bar salvage rebuilt title cars, people, you never know what you get. I recommend you get them inspected at a body.

Shop have them take some stuff apart, because this isn't that uncommon to see people hack, stuff up and the state inspections are so lax. They would never have looked at this. I swear when i brought my tesla in for the inspection. I could have built the frame rails out of putty and they would have passed the thing they looked at nothing yeah.

This was hit in this area here, who knows what happened on the side and then they replaced the quarter as well. The previous owner bought this, like, i think, four or five years ago, and it already had the rebuilt title. So this happened a long time ago and was fixed and you know for a cheap car, okay, but at that time this thing was probably worth a decent amount of money and they still hacked it together. So pretty much all these headlight tabs are broken, that one's broken this one's broken.

These things are basically just being wedged in there and held in by the bumper for the most part, not even not even right, the bumper snaps in there. That's why the light's still fit oh man, maybe a good candidate for some new headlights. I was gon na try and buff these out and take them apart, like i said, but with all the tabs broken as well see what i can find probably aren't too bad. All right, so we can take a really good look at this frame.

Rail extension here i mean they just basically just beat this thing up sort of tried to straighten it and then welded it up to a bad crash bar. You see you, people want free cars. People in the comments are like: how do i get a free car? These are the free cars all right. They come with stories all of them.

It's never easy. It always costs way more to fix and really what they're worth in the end. But once you get started, you kind of can't stop i've already fixed this thing up mechanically and i am dedicated now to making this a good car, so we're gon na fix it up all right crossing my fingers here that we don't have any hackery in the Rear does that look pushed into anyone, or is that normal hang on? Oh thank god that looks normal unless both sides are pushed in looks a little weird, but no that looks that looks factory all right. I like to see a little bit of rust here.

That means it hasn't been touched in a little while at least crash bar looks to be in good shape. Vince final verdict: yeah yeah, you probably put the port around yeah. They did a quarter for sure all right, yeah and the pooper vents all nice. Well, if i can get an from vince, that's good enough for a car like this.

They use like some of the right hardware right, yes, cool all right, so it's about a week later and we have all of our parts we're replacing the front and rear bumper cover. We have the new crash bar and the new frame rail extension, some brand spanking new headlights. These things look amazing, going to save me a ton of time trying to fix the other ones and vince is going to town he's not wasting any time. We're attacking the crash bar first gon na get this guy off.

Replace this frame. Rail extension very little work that they could have done, but they cheaped out and here's the illinois state inspection it passed. I just this is just beyond me guys beyond me. Well i'd say you got your money's worth out of that disc vince.

Oh, i always do what do we got everything's stripped out right? Well, oh nice! It's inside here, though, the wall the nut, so they had this thing off and then put it back on and destroyed everything great great, because we only got the one side frame. Rail extension, unfortunately, the threads are in there yeah, and this one's dripping out. These aren't coming out either nice good stuff. Oh, it is uh.

What do we got? Oh, come on vince uh you're, getting a new washer tank, whoever you are that's gon na eventually get this car, or we could probably fix that right. This is the side that's not stripped out and the other one is what is going on. I mean what why'd they even bother like what was the point? Look at this. It's just cracked all the way around there, it didn't even penetrate, so this extension is right from toyota.

These kinds of parts i don't like to get after market it's best to get frame parts right from the manufacturer and uh yeah. Just another look at the the hackery here compared to our nice new one and literally all they had to do - was spend about 50 bucks. That's all this thing costs about 50 bucks. Retail, i think, is a little bit more, but at the body shop it's around 50 60 bucks, that's it.

You put it on bolt it on new crash bar and you fixed the car properly, at least in this area. Unreal. Look at that skill right there, so he welded the nut on the inside because it was just spinning in there right right there. The threads are built into the extension and it broken free.

So that way, we got our bolt out of there right if the body shop or the random guys in the middle of an alley who did this work originally are watching. That's all you needed to do 100, bucks, four bolts and you're done. You have a safe frame at this point. Look at that nice and shiny.

I swear i'll get the hood struts before we give this car away uh they still haven't come in yet so we have this little guy, although this is this - is pretty sweet. The old hood strut tool vince is uh, no stranger to bad hood. Struts he's even got a specific tool to hold these up. I've never used this, though the fact that there's a market for tools to hold up people that don't want to buy hood struts is amazing.

Look at that now. We don't even need that, and this isn't in the way. This is awesome. I'm gon na buy one of these i'll put a link down below.

If i find it all right so at this point we can go ahead and mount up this side headlight with that crash bar in the headlight will go in before the bumper and man. This is gon na shave like 10 years off the car. These things look phenomenal. Now we just have to pray that they line up because the other ones had broken tabs for a reason and nothing lined up, but we might be all right.

I'm waiting for the click when this thing clicks in that's, that's a good sound all right, so these are factory adjustable uh headlight brackets, oh yeah, not bad, not bad! At all. These aftermarket headlights don't actually come with bulbs. Unfortunately, we uh just figured this out, but they look good we're gon na ceramic coat these two, so they don't get all yellowed out good as new all right. We got a headlight and we got the bright.

Everything works so yeah. These are regular halogen bulbs, but they're in a projector. So this is a perfect candidate to get an led and look like you have those from the factory. I don't know if that was an option in o6 on these, but this looks great like how is that? Not broken, they had to have replaced that right, no just got lucky all right, so we're already going uh way over budget on this car needing to order all those parts so got to save money somewhere.

It's just a washer tank. Its only job is to hold fluid, so we're going to fix it up a little bit of plastic welding, maybe some epoxy. If we want to get fancy, we should be good. This thing already took kind of a hit in the accident, so it'll be a reminder of what this car was before you can see.

This tank has already been kind of smushed in and this is going to be the strongest washer tank ever. Is this like? What is this panel bond? Plastic? Okay, if you haven't seen a quarter inch thick washer tank before now. You have look at this bad boy and it's the next day at o'hare, auto body and we've moved the lexus over a few bays and we ordered up another front frame extension for the driver's side after having to weld the back of this one. To get the bolt out of it, and this looked a little tweaked us, we just decided to just get rid of this guy and get a brand new one, and i'm glad we did because you can see this is twisted right here.

It's kind of facing up. So yeah for another 100 bucks. Why not we're already going this far? Let's get two of these guys in here, and do it right just like that, there we go and right now, vince is swapping the old bulbs into the new headlight. That way, we don't have to do it on the car yeah a lot easier, all right, so we're installing the crash bar on our new rails.

This should go on nice and easy look at that before this thing was basically just like tweaked on here. It was pretty bad. You had to like rip it off, they must have forced it on before, but with our new extensions we're good to go. This is all they needed to do about 300 350 worth of parts to make this right here, yeah.

We don't have to take the bumper off again for this, so we'll triple check it here, but shouldn't have any issues, definitely not from there. It might leak from somewhere else, but not there. Let's say we're good. It's been restored.

Okay, get this guy back in here there we are all right, got this guy bolted in connect the hose and we're good to go. So surprisingly, the is-250 uses brake ducts in the front. So it's got another one of these. On the other side to cool off the front brakes, it's pretty nice for a base model, and now we have the driver's side headlight going in and this front end is starting to come together, starting to look complete and proper.

I don't think this side was as off as the other, so this one should fit in there pretty close yeah this side's fitting a lot better than the other side. The fitment was nicer on this side makes sense. It was hit mostly on that side. We know this frame.

Rail extension was a little bent up, but that's where the brunt of the accident was on the passenger side, and this is looking really good all right, and here we are is-250 looking good. The front end is just missing the bumper cover and that's it it's going to be complete. This is going to look so so good. So at this point i want to try something i've never done before, which is getting plasti dip off a wheel.

I've just never plasti dipped anything in my entire life, so i've already pre-soaked this in some wd-40, so we're just gon na put a little bit more on a paper towel and just kind of get it all over the place here. This is hopefully gon na loosen everything up and then we'll hit it with a pressure. Washer. Okay, that's not doing anything at all.

Let's see here, i guess they did a good job plasti-dipping these wheels. It's coming off my fingernail here. Let's try something there. We go just needed to open it up a little sweet all right.

This stuff is being a pain in the butt and not wanting to come off, not the best pressure washer in the world, but uh. I thought this was gon na, be much much easier. Yeah. Okay, well, anyway, we'll do that in the next video so comment down below what is the best way to remove old plasti-dip from wheels, because i want them all to look like this one.

This one wheel was not plasti-dipped. I believe he had damaged this wheel and then replaced it and not recoded it. So anyway, it's gon na look like that, and not this nastiness right here, so we're gon na make these wheels look great, and i have brand new continental tires for the is-250 and in the next video we're also gon na be finishing all of the cosmetic repairs. So the rust and the quarter panel will be fixed and painted we're gon na paint both front and rear.

Bumper covers assemble everything clean it up a bit, and this lexus is gon na look awesome, so that'll do it for today's video. I hope you really enjoyed this. I hope you now look a little closer at rebuilt and salvage title cars before buying them get them inspected, please. So if you like, this video, give it a big thumbs up share the video subscribe if you're new and, most importantly, have an awesome day i'll catch all of you in the next video you.