I Took a Chance on This F-250 From Copart

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So, I purchased a 2001 Ford F250 with the 73 Power Stroke completely sight unseen from Copart.

[00:00:16]And if you're not familiar with Copart, it's a huge online auction site where you can purchase anything from wrecked vehicles, flooded vehicles, repossessions, and even clean titles.

[00:00:24]But here's the catch. Usually, you're going off of a handful of photos and a really short description. and that's it.

[00:00:30]So, it's a bit of a gamble. Now, this truck specifically caught my attention because it's a fairly low mileage 73 Power Stroke. And if you know anything about these trucks, they have the reputation for being some of the most reliable diesels Ford ever made. These engines are simple, they're tough, and when they're taken care of, these things will run forever. It's not uncommon to see 400 500,000 mi out of these things.

[00:00:50]And having worked on quite a few of these before, I know that it's not very common to see catastrophic failures in these engines. So, that gave me a little bit of confidence that this could turn into a really good flip. But, if you've ever looked at auction vehicles before, you already know that pictures can lie.

[00:01:04]Descriptions don't tell you the whole story, and you really don't know what you purchased until it shows up in your driveway. And that's exactly what this video is. We're going to be going over how much I paid for this truck, what the condition was whenever it arrived, and all the repairs needed to get this thing back on the road. And in the end, we'll see if I actually made some money on this flip or not. So, with all that being said, we're going to hop over on the computer here. We're going to check out the auction page, see exactly what caught my eye and what information I had to go off of, and most importantly, how much I paid for this thing.

[00:01:36]So, we're over here on Copart and we're on the page for the listing of the truck. And I'm not going to go into extreme detail on the process of purchasing a vehicle from Copart. Uh, and if you're interested in learning more about that, like the fees, delivery, and all that good stuff, I've made an entire separate video on that.

[00:01:52]So, I'll go ahead and link that in the description of this one. So, just a couple notable things to check out here.

[00:01:57]So, this was listed as a run and drive from Copart. And this gives a full description of what exactly that means to them. But basically, it just means that they were able to get the thing started and put it in gear. So, uh, and then right here you can see engine starts and transmission engages, but all that means is that it starts, doesn't guarantee, doesn't have a horrible knock or, you know, any major damages like that. So, and probably the most important thing is this title code here.

[00:02:22]So, this is showing that it has a clean title without any brand. So, not a salvage title or anything. So, this was a clean title truck. And then the odometer was 184,641 miles. So, you know, that was really the big selling point for me on this truck.

[00:02:36]It's pretty low mileage for a 73. Then, yeah, you can see 73 there and diesel.

[00:02:41]So, no questions about that. And like I said, there's not much information really here. Uh, we have 12 pictures of the truck. And I'll go ahead and click through those real quick. We won't spend a lot of time uh you know digesting those or anything. So, but yeah, if you want to pause on any of those pictures and check it out, uh you can. You know, I definitely knew this truck wasn't showroom uh worthy by any means, but no uh you know, apparent major damages. So, now we're going to navigate over to the payment history here. And that's really what we're here for. We want to see how much I actually paid for this truck. So, right there, you can see the number. 5,888.

[00:03:29]Yeah. So, you can uh go ahead and see here at the top that sell price is actually going to be what I won the bid on this truck with. So, $4,150 is what I actually won the bid with. And then you can see the fees just stack up here, but that's expected. Uh, if you're not familiar, that is very common on a lot of these auction sites. And there's plenty of resources out there where you can kind of guesstimate what exactly your total cost is going to be. So, now that we know how much I spent on this truck, we can go ahead and start our tally for the amount that I spent on this flip. And that 5.88 88 also included the delivery fee, which was $600, as well as a couple fees for the title. All right, so now that we've seen the auction page and we know kind of what this truck looked like online, let's go ahead and do a walk around of the outside and see exactly what it looked like when it showed up.

[00:04:20]All right, so at this point, I just got this thing off the trailer and settled in the driveway and finally had some time to take a look around.

[00:04:28]Starting up front here, you can see there's some damage. Paint chipped off in a few spots and a little bit of surface rust, but nothing too serious.

[00:04:37]Moving over to the driver's side though, honestly, this side of the truck's pretty clean. Both doors look good. No major damage there, which is definitely a win. Now, the side steps, yeah, those are pretty ugly. And then coming around to the bed here, you start to see some more wear. Uh there's quite a bit of paint missing in a few spots here. It's not too terrible, but there is a pretty concerning rust spot here that's uh almost all the way through this fender here. And then looking inside the bed, it was actually kind of interesting.

[00:05:03]This thing showed up with a bunch of random stuff in the back. There was some ratchet straps, coil springs, some grounding rods. I also found some of the paperwork back here. And after looking through it, it turns out this is actually an electrical company's work truck. So, that definitely explains the condition and some of the wear we're seeing.

[00:05:20]It's kind of cool to get a little bit of history on this truck, though. If there wasn't all this stuff left in here, I may have never actually known this. So, it was uh pretty neat to see. And from what I found on the Carfax, it looks like it was a one-owner truck bought in 2001 and used by this company the whole time. Now, back here on the tail lights, you can see they're pretty beat up.

[00:05:38]Definitely something that will need to be replaced, especially since uh water's just going to get in there and make it worse. And then the tailgate, this thing's taking a hit. It's pushed in pretty bad in the middle. My guess is something maybe like a fifth wheel wasn't hooked up properly and hit it, but honestly, who knows? Moving around to the passenger side, the bed has similar wear as the other side with this little rust spot. Then you can see this tire completely flat. When I got it off the trailer, I had to air it up because they were about to drag it off on the rim and I didn't want it to get bent up.

[00:06:05]So, and I also popped the hub caps off to check the wheels underneath and yeah, they're pretty ugly. So, these definitely won't be staying on the truck. And then up here at the front of the bed, you can also see it's bent in too. So hopefully we can get that straightened out.

[00:06:19]Then again, the passenger side doors uh really clean. No major damage here. So that's another positive. Then we'll take a look at the interior here.

[00:06:28]And coming into the interior right away, you can see some rust down here on the weather stripping, which is pretty common on these trucks. Nothing too surprising. Inside though, it's pretty much what you'd expect from a work truck. Got the full bench seat across, all leather seats, and a pretty simple setup. But honestly, it's in really good shape. No rips in the seats, which I was really happy to see. And we got a little radio upgrade here. So, we could probably hook up some Bluetooth to that.

[00:06:52]And then one thing was kind of funny. I opened this glove box and found, you know, about an inch of water in there.

[00:06:57]So, I'm not really sure how that got there, but I got a good laugh out of it.

[00:07:01]Other than that though, there was really no signs of water damage. So, I'm not really sure how this got in there. And then the back seat's the same story.

[00:07:08]Bench seat, it's just dirty. Really, the biggest issue here is just the dirt everywhere. No tears in the leather or anything like that. Overall, the interior condition I was really happy with. Now, hopping in the driver's seat, this is the big one here. There's the 184,000 mi. So, everything checked out there. And honestly, that's the entire reason I bought this thing for a 73.

[00:07:28]That's fairly low. Now, under the hood, this is what really mattered. This is the reason we took a gamble on this truck. Starting with the batteries, you can see they're from 2020, so about 6 years old, and there's a lot of corrosion on the terminals, but that should be easy to address. And I checked the oil. The level was good. It didn't look too bad. And you know, there's no signs of coolant mixing in it. So, everything there was uh good.

[00:07:55]I checked the coolant as well. It looked really clean. There was no oil contamination, which is exactly what you want to see. And I don't know why, but I also just love seeing old trucks running this green coolant.

[00:08:09]Now looking down into the valley, you could see some oil residue, but honestly that's pretty typical on these trucks.

[00:08:14]So not anything alarming and a lot of times it's just coming from the PCV and the turbo. Then yeah, you can see it here on the side just kind of covering the valve covers, but you know, again, not a big problem. Now, one of the bigger issues, the brake fluid reservoir is completely empty. And that makes sense because whenever I was unloading this truck, it had no brakes.

[00:08:37]So, that's definitely something we're going to have to figure out.

[00:08:42]And then underneath the truck, overall, it's not bad. There's some rust for sure, but the frame looks pretty solid, which is huge.

[00:08:49]And it was nice to see a Wix oil filter on there that looked fairly new. So, it's good to know that they were at least doing basic maintenance on this thing.

[00:08:58]And then there was some oil residue around the bell housing and transmission pan, but that's something we'll have to keep an eye on and just see how bad it really is. So after that initial walk around, I was pretty happy with the truck. You know, there wasn't any big big concerns. So really the biggest issue right now was just the brakes. We needed to sort that out so we could actually drive this thing and make sure everything else was working. And the other issue was we had to jump start it to get it off the trailer. So we'll have to charge these batteries and see if they're still good.

[00:09:42]>> [laughter] >> And one big thing to note here is whenever I was backing this truck off the trailer and into my driveway, I did see some fluid dripping. Once I got the thing parked and could shut it off, I checked out what it was dripping and it was pretty obvious that it was brake fluid. It was too far away from the engine to be anything else and it didn't match the green coolant that we saw on this thing and it wasn't oil. So, this early on gave me a really good place to start troubleshooting the brake system.

[00:10:16]So, the first thing I wanted to do was just get these batteries charged up and see if we could get this thing to start under its own power. And we just needed to know if these batteries were going to be salvageable or not. And these 73s run two batteries. So, we were looking at about $600 if these batteries were shot.

[00:10:35]And this was some random pretty cheap battery charger I picked up from Harbor Freight just to see if we could get these batteries back to life. And needless to say, I ended up taking this thing back and buying a Noco one. I definitely wouldn't recommend this Viking one. Just spend the extra money.

[00:10:51]And while I waited for those batteries to charge up, I started trying to hunt down this leak I saw earlier.

[00:10:58]All right. So, I just got in here with a light and it looks like we just found where our brake line is leaking from.

[00:11:04]You can see it's just wet right there and it was just dripping down the frame and that's where I originally saw it just dripping off the frame here. So, only problem is, as you can tell, this thing runs [laughter] the entire way. So, there's really no good spot to disconnect it and just pop a new one on.

[00:11:28]So, have to figure out what we're going to do about that. And the next day, I was out here trying to clean off these battery terminals. And whenever I was removing one of the connectors, it completely broke because the bolt was just seized up. So, I went and picked up one of these Durass battery terminal connectors for eight bucks. And I went with this type specifically because I don't have the big crimper for a battery cable. So, this one you just bolt it down and it holds it in there. So, all I did was just take some bolt cutters to that old cable. And then there was just a small ground cable that went straight to the frame that we just also hooked up into this.

[00:12:16]And then we just stripped it back to the wire and cleaned it off pretty good.

[00:12:31][snorts] Yeah, you can see all that green there.

[00:12:34]That's just corrosion. So, we just grabbed a wire brush and did the best we could with that.

[00:12:54]And then we just took this negative battery cable and then that small ground cable, put it in here and then tighten this thing down.

[00:13:20]And also, it's important to know that I just went around and cleaned off the corrosion on all the other terminals.

[00:13:25]This is the only one I had to replace because it broke whenever I was trying to remove it.

[00:13:37]And so there's our finished product. And this is making way better contact now.

[00:13:41]So this should definitely help with getting this thing started.

[00:13:46]All right. So I got the batteries charged up and replaced that cable.

[00:13:49]Cleaned everything off. And we're going to see if this thing will start under its own power now. I've had the uh block heater plugged up for about 20 minutes. So we'll see.

[00:14:11]All right, let's see.

[00:14:17]There it is. Fired up under its own power.

[00:14:23]In case anyone out there is not sure what's going on here, this is a simple blowby test. What we're looking at here is crankcase pressure caused by combustion gases that's sneaking past the piston rings. Normally the rings seal that pressure in the cylinder, but as they wear, more gases slip past and pressurize the crankase. So by removing this oil fill cap while the engine's running, we can get a quick visual of how much of these gases are getting by the piston rings. So as you can tell, the cap stayed right where it was, and there wasn't any smoke coming out. So that gave us a really good sign that this engine was healthy.

[00:15:02]So, now that we had this thing starting under its own power, it was now time to put our focus back into this brake line.

[00:15:09]So, I was able to get both ends of this brake line disconnected. But, this is where things kind of took a turn. So, this brake line that had the hole in it ran pretty much the entire length of the truck along the frame. And there's a bunch of these little metal clips that hold it in place. And conveniently, there were about three right in between the frame and the fuel tank.

[00:15:37]So, this led us to the decision of dropping the fuel tank or removing the bed. One of these things had to get out of the way so we could get this fuel line replaced.

[00:15:52]So, at the time, I decided I was going to remove the bed to be able to get to this brake line. In theory, to remove this truck bed, it's only eight bolts and two tail light connectors. But if anybody's worked on their vehicle out there, you know, it never goes that simple. And looking back, I can tell you that was not the correct decision. And yeah, that's me holding two broken Torx bits. First one I broke was a Craftsman.

[00:16:14]And then I went and picked up a dieh hard one and that one broke instantly because somebody at Ford thought it was a great idea to make these bed bolts a Torx.

[00:16:24]Let's just say removing this truck bed took way longer than I thought it was going to take. The first thing I tried was just using a drill bit to drill down all the way to the head of the bolt and then just knock it off with a punch.

[00:17:23]Yeah. So, it turns out this didn't really work very well on this big of bolts. So, I just got an angle grinder and cut every single one of these off.

[00:17:38]And believe it or not, the fifth wheel was also seized completely.

[00:17:43]So, we had to cut off every single bolt on that as well.

[00:17:48]So, we'll go ahead and add up about the five cutting wheels I went through to the cost of this flip.

[00:18:01]And yeah, I definitely slacked on recording during this whole period. It actually took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit to get all these off. And during that time, we got hit with some pretty gnarly weather.

[00:18:14]And then I also fled the cold weather and took a twoe vacation. So yeah, it took a while. Let's just say that. So I apologize for not having any great clips of sparks flying. And then one more thing of this time period of me just not picking up my camera. I guess I was able to score these wheels off of Facebook for 500 bucks. And man, I was stoked for these. And then we were also able to sell off our old ones. So, we'll subtract that from our cost.

[00:18:39]And then the new tires on. And I was able to recruit some help from my dad and brother-in-law. And we finally got this bed off.

[00:18:51]And look at those bolts. Half of them were still stuck after we took the whole bed off. We lifted the bed up and over some of these bolts.

[00:19:01]And now you can see the brake line and finally kind of understand why exactly we needed to make some space.

[00:19:20]And now that we had the bed off and had the space, I'd already had the replacement line for a couple of weeks.

[00:19:26]So now it was just a matter of getting underneath this thing and hooking this new brake line up.

[00:19:42]And then once we had that line hooked up, it was time to fill this thing back full of brake fluid.

[00:20:01]And now it was finally time to start bleeding the system and double-checking for any leaks. And since we replaced the entire line, there was a ton of air in this system. So I went ahead and picked up a vacuum pump to make this a little bit quicker.

[00:20:21]Wow, that's pretty satisfying.

[00:20:23]And yeah, it turns out we had a little guest appearance while I was bleeding these brakes.

[00:20:31]And now that we had the brakes bled and checked for any leaks, it was time to get this thing fired up and actually drive it for the first time.

[00:20:49]And yeah, there was no shot. I was waiting to get the bed back on before driving this thing.

[00:21:05]And just like that, a little brake test and we were feeling good.

[00:21:09]Heat.

[00:21:26]Heat.

[00:21:47]And now that all the fun was over, it was time to start putting this thing back together.

[00:21:51]And naturally, these bed bolts had to keep putting up a fight. On majority of these bolts, I had to cut them all the way down to the frame and then remove the clips underneath that hold them.

[00:22:13]And then I went ahead and purchased some new bolts with clips as well. And the big takeaway here is these are not Torx clips going in. So we shouldn't have this problem ever again with this truck.

[00:22:26]So you can actually see pretty easy here how this works. So, these clips have the threaded nuts on them, and then they just slide onto the frame here.

[00:23:06]and then after this one, I went around and put on the other seven.

[00:23:12]Then we just had one more thing to address before we put this bed back on.

[00:23:15]And that was the front of this bed being bowed in.

[00:23:23]So, I got this idea to just put a 2x4 against it just as kind of a guide to know where we needed to straighten it out to.

[00:23:35]And then I used another board just to kind of even out the force I was hitting it with the hammer.

[00:24:07]And I'd say it worked pretty good. You know, it looks a lot better than it did before.

[00:24:17]And then after that was sorted out, I recruited my really strong helpers again and we got this bed back on.

[00:24:36]Once the bed was back on, I started cleaning this thing out because it was about to be home for the new bed liner we found on Facebook.

[00:25:40]Yeah, you have to admit it's pretty satisfying to watch.

[00:25:56]Now that everything was washed out and clean, it was time to put this new bed liner in.

[00:26:04]This is actually kind of difficult and got a little frustrating, so I would definitely recommend getting a second pair of hands here.

[00:26:46]It looks like it's seated in here right now, but actually had to get it up under the lips of the bed, and that's where it got really difficult.

[00:27:02]So, I ended up stuffing a bunch of stuff under the middle just to flex it, and it worked pretty well.

[00:27:12]And then once it was seated in there, I just took some selftappers and put them around the back of it.

[00:27:18]And please, if you're going to use selftappers, don't use Phillips head.

[00:27:21]Just use a hex because trust me, I had to cut all of the old Phillips ones out.

[00:27:26]They were all stripped.

[00:27:33]And finally, the last thing I did was go find some replacement tail lights for this.

[00:27:47]That's not to do it without breaking it, you know.

[00:28:02]And these tail lights I pulled from a junkyard definitely weren't perfect, but they were much better than the ones we had.

[00:28:20]And just to make sure these didn't get any water in them, I put a little bit of epoxy around the edges where it was cracked.

[00:28:27]This might not look the prettiest, but it's very functional and will keep the water out.

[00:28:40]Well, I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for this project.

[00:28:44]And after a couple months of procrastinating and putting off couple weeks worth of work, we finally got this thing done.

[00:28:52]Now, all we needed to do was clean this thing up, take some good pictures, and sell it.

[00:29:16]Heat. Heat.

[00:29:23]Wow.

[00:29:47]Wow.

[00:29:55]>> [music] >> Hey, heat.

[00:30:23]So, once I got the truck all finished and cleaned up, it was time for the moment I've been waiting on. It was time to see if this whole gamble would pay off. I got some really solid pictures of this truck, threw it up on Facebook Marketplace, and I also parked it outside of a gas station with a couple signs in it. And before we officially total everything up, there were a few last expenses we need to address. The first thing was a full service. So, we did the oil, oil filter, fuel filter, and air filter on this truck. And that total ran us about $180.

[00:30:52]And then the very last expense was the sales tax and registration, which came out to be right around $600. So, now that we have those last two things, we can get the final number for this flip.

[00:31:01]And that total came out to $7,430.

[00:31:06][snorts] Then came the waiting game. And really, it wasn't too bad. After about a month of having this truck posted, we found a buyer through Facebook. This buyer was really excited about the truck. it was going to be a great purchase for him. He was looking for a good work truck for some land he had just purchased. And that brings us to the final moment here. So, how much did we get for this truck? And we can go ahead and slide over on the spreadsheet here. And right there, you can see the total $11,500.

[00:31:30]Which means after the repairs, fees, parts, and everything else involved in this project, we ended up making a profit just over $4,000.

[00:31:38]That's not too bad for a truck that was sitting wrecked on a Copart lot just a couple months earlier. [snorts]