How To Inspect A Salvage Or Wrecked Truck

April 14th, 2010 admin Posted in Articles | Comments Off

How To Inspect A Salvage Or Wrecked Truck. Using these tips you will succeed at inspecting a salvage car for purchase. These how to steps explain it all. When you are ready to view a salvage vehicle for possible purchase using a few common sense tips will get you far in making the right decisions. Yes, the vehicle is damaged, but documenting the damage and avoiding large costs will help you turn a larger profit, and avoid "money pit" trucks that are not profitable.

If you are not sure you can hire a third party to inspect a vehicle and usually they will provide a 50 - 100 step inspection for a small fee. These are beneficial as experts can document a large checklist. However, some inspectors check minor obvious things on working vehicles. Some will not inspect damaged vehicles.

In that case, your best bet, especially if you want to succeed in this business is to create your own documentation and learn how to identify potential unprofitable damages, or when a vehicle is beyond repair and should only be bought for parts.

The best documentation tools are pen and paper, and video documentation. You should create your check list of the important items to check for. Some of them include: exterior(bumpers, fenders, body damage, frame damage), engine, fluids, airbags, interior, radio etc. For every mechanic, different points are important based upon your strong points in car repair, your resources, and tools available for repair. Before you even go out, create an excel spreadsheet, or word document with all your inspection points, a way to rate condition and any other notes you need.

Next, let's talk about video. The great thing about video documentation is you can refer back to it if you can't remember something about the vehicle, or just want to try and spot things you may have missed after the fact of the inspection. Verbally speak what you notice about the vehicles damage.

Below is a great example on how to do proper documentation(rest of article below the video, so read on!):

Example of using video documentation to inspect a wrecked Toyota Tacoma

Another indispensible tool is a check engine code scanner tools. These little babies hook up to a jack underneath the dash on newer vehicles and give you engine codes that you can later look up online to discover what ails the car.

So documentation is the first and most powerful step. Next is asking the seller pertinent questions like title information, background info on the car, # of owners, etc.

After you have documented the vehicles broken points, don't forget to document good aspects of the vehicle. These can later be selling points and can help you not get discouraged in the process.

Finally, research. Call junk yards, auto shops, and the like and get quotes on repairs or parts. Look online to save money, look up the codes, and make a sheet of estimated repair costs. You can then more closely see if the truck is worth repairing.