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Finding A Donor Car

Parting out the 2005 Acura RL

After months of searching, a 2005 Acura RL donor with 153k is found.  Including auction and broker fee’s I am into the car $3,448 bucks.  Not bad.  I had not idea what to expect when I went to pick up the car.  Would the car be in neutral to get the car on the trailer?  Would there be enough battery power to get out of Park and into Neutral?  The RL has no “key” per-say so is there a safety lockout I can use to get the car out of park?  I went prepared with a winch, battery jumper, all kinds of tools not really knowing what to expect and then I see this:

Well that makes that easy huh?  The forklift actually just drops the cars on the trailer right in the lot and you tie them down and are on your way. 

It was great.  I get the car home to find the damage on the vehicle to be minor.   The car was listed as “Runs and Drives” so I knew it would move under its own power and that it would start but that doesn’t mean it can actually be driven.   I was able to put a battery charger on the car for a day and the next morning start the car.  To my surprise there was only one check engine light and that was because the radiator fans didn’t work.  I drove the car around making sure everything worked and then pulled in to the garage to park it.

I eventually got a spot all cleaned up for the car in the corner of the garage and started to strip all the parts I didn’t need to re-coupe my cost of purchase.   While I listed the vehicle on some local sites like craigslist, I received only one phone call for parts.  I realized that just wasn’t going to work.  I then started listed all the parts on eBay even though eBay’s pricing has become absurd, but what can you do….they currently have ZERO competition in their market.  As of the date of writing this I have sold $4,678.69 dollars off of the car and I still have a lot to go.  For you math people yes, I have done better than breaking even, and am actually making money from the donor.  Now before you get too excited, understand that parting out a car takes TONS of work, and A LOT of time.  I don’t even want to start adding up the hours I have into it.  Sure maybe removing the radio only took you 25 minutes after removing the 9 other trim pieces to even access it, but you will spend another 10-15 minutes listing it. You need to take photo’s of it, transfer those over to your computer, log in and set up the auction, type out a description, set your prices and shipping settings, and blah blah blah blah.  Could money be made parting out cars?  Yah I think so, but don’t expect much unless you have large operation pulling it off and people willing to work for $7 bucks an hour stripping and listing the parts.  Lets not even get into what it took me to box and ship things like trunk and doors!

Eventually though I stopped pulling parts off the car that I was selling and started pulling parts off the car I was actually going to need for the swap:

So this is where I am at.  I really need to start pulling all the parts off of the civic that I am not going to need anymore before I can go too much further.  I am going to start at the front and work my way to the back.  I want to try and keep the sub frame and all suspension components just as they are on the RL and swap them over, but honestly I’m not really going to know what is going to work till I get in there and start hacking away.