From SUBMARINE To SPORTS CAR: Here's How Much It ...

On today's episode of WatchJRGO, we are here with my $3,500 Corvette, and one of the most asked questions in the comments in the last probably four videos is, but it's not $3,500 anymore. And you're right. And today, we're going to dig into how much this car cost to rebuild. What is going on, guys? I am WatchJRGO, and like I said, I am here with my 2000 Corvette Coupe in a beautiful white, I think it's arctic white, with this epic red interior. What some people are calling the Unicorn Corvette because of its red interior, I think it looks really good. And there's also a few more things to fix in there, like the perforated leather on the seats that is ruined. That shouldn't cost too much. We're just going to just keep $300 in your mind for that after we're done with everything else. So let's get on to the actual build and what happened, how we got here. This car was driven into some water under a low water bridge. All the bridges here for trains in Kansas, they're like concrete walled and they dip down like this and they come back up in all the small cities and the trains run right over the top. They're always super low height bridges that are sketchy, like a box truck will probably get the top ripped off if you go under them. And a lot of them have really bad drainage. There's drain gates on each side off to the edge and they just fill up and you'll end up with, you know, that much water in them. And this Corvette was driven through that, of course. I never really explained the bridge or how it got wet and people just didn't seem to understand that it wasn't a flood car, but also it wasn't like driven under a ton of water. It was just some standing water and it's a C5. It's literally a doorstop. So the air intakes in the front, water comes right in, sucked it up in the engine and that's it. Hydro-locked. So that is how the old LS1 died. As we know, it was only actually down like a cylinder. We assume it was the rods, but who knows? It's still hanging out over there and that is about to head off to the original owner of the car because he wanted some LS parts. So we got it here. We got busy and a subscriber reached out to another friend that's rebuilding his C5 and he said, hey man, I've got my engine that's in my car. I'm about to rip it out and do a big build. Do you want it? And I said, absolutely. How much? $2,500 shipped is what we came up with on the engine. So we're going to throw that up here right now. We've got our whiteboard out. Anyway, I had the purchase price up here. $3,500. So we've got $3,500. It's really hard to ride on this thing. And then our engine, $2,500. Wow. This is some professional riding. It's because this doesn't have a pin. So you have to use your finger and it is what it is. LS6. And the new engine is, it was, you know, in an LS1 car just like this, but it had been upgraded to an LS1 block. I'm sure it still has a stock rotating assembly in it. It has Patriot heads. It has some unknown cam in it and it came with a new intake, injectors, a throttle body because the throttle body was bad on the old engine. So we literally won the lottery buying this engine. It had everything we needed except for everything that we needed. So after that, we got the entire drivetrain out of the car. You guys remember that? Uh, it was a ton of work. We dropped the whole, you know, the torque tube transmission engine assembly out the bottom, lifted the car off of it. And we got to work swapping the engines out after it came in. And as we started switching the new engine onto the drivetrain, we found lots of little issues that we needed to knock out. Now the engine was shipped in with a normal, like a truck pan and the C5 uses the Batwing oil pan. And we needed a new pan gasket for that. So of course we picked one of those up and we picked up a front cover gasket. We picked up the water pump gaskets. So right there, I mean, just the pan gasket by itself is like $50, $100 in gaskets. So we'll add a hundred to the build immediately for gas. We'll just put gas. So it's confusing. And then we added a, let's see, we got an oil filter in there. We'll call it seven bucks Wix XP. The belt tensioner on the AC compressor, it has its own like a single belt that drives the compressor off of the crank pulley. Uh, that was bad too. I think that was about $63. And that was pretty much everything we did to get the engine, I think back in and kind of buttoned up. Once we started getting the thing back into the car, we found a bunch of problems. So of course I had to fix the vacuum lines with that, uh, that air T that we picked up from Freightliner truck center here. And that was a 1115 out the door. We'll round it down. Of course we had to put a new radiator in it because the steam port broke off the old one. So that was one 43. We'll put rad because it was rad. I guess it wasn't really rad because it wasn't broken until we took it out of the car, a sway bar end link. So we ended up with four of those at $62. And then the suspension all had to be put in the car. And I have to pull up my eBay here. Uh, ABS sensor, wiring harness, $20 straight from AC Delco there. And I mean, hard to find that without going to a dealer and getting a stock part there. O'Reilly's didn't sell it. Actually a kind of a part you have to go hunting for the Z06 suspension from the C5 and the C6 $367. It looks like free shipping. We had to fill the entire car with fluids. That was about a hundred dollars. You figure oil and a freeze power, steering fluid, transmission fluid, everything had to be refilled quite a bit. And just the oil itself is probably about $80. So I'm saying there's a hundred right there. Uh, we've got what C8 wheels, the rest of the build here. Those were actually free. A guy bought a brand new C8. It was supposed to come with black wheels. It came with silver wheels. The ones we have sitting in the boxes over there that are literally delivery miles. I think there's 10 miles on that set of wheels. He took the car to the dealership. They swapped out the wheels. He drove it to his house and back to the dealership and gave us the silver ones. Eric was over at his house working on a contracting job. And the guy, I guess, came outside and said, I put a bunch of wheels in the back of your truck, haul them off to the trash for me. Brand new C8 wheels. So of course we're going to put my free C8 wheels on the C5, even though they don't fit at all, they were free. We're going to turn them. We're going to machine those things and make them fit and have C8 wheels that actually fit instead of the hacky stuff other people have done. So I guess I don't have to write anything on the board. They were free wheels. So we've got quite a few things on here, but there's plenty more to add at this point. Once everything was back in, of course, Chris from Chris Johnson Tuned came over and tuned it. That was a 250 if I can. And he actually charges more than that because he usually has to buy credits. I already have HP Tuners credits. So he did not need to do that. He was like, just 250. So we'll put tune on there. We're going to, my brother's disregard that. He came over and welded up the air outlets on the brand new exhaust, which we'll get to in just a second. That was a lot of work. He was probably here for four hours, five hours. I thought he was going to just knock it out in 15 minutes. I didn't really care what it looked like. I was just like shove some hot glue gun metal in there with the welder and, you know, seal it. But instead he welded it up and then ground it off until it was flush and then grabbed a file and made that thing look absolutely stunning. So it's really cool. If somebody ever wants air back, you can just drill it and it works again. So a good way to do that. I think who knows what that would cost like five hours of work from a fab guy, probably a lot. So just forget about that, but the exhaust itself, those hooker black heart shorty headers, I think they're about $949. If I over here and our flow tech exhaust was about $1,100, which is a, I mean, it's pretty fancy. It's definitely bling. Then we have our MSD blaster ignition coils in black on this thing. I think it looks pretty cool. We have red ones on like everything else. So we've got black ones on here that comes as a set for $588. One of those eights looks real. One of those looks fake. And the other one is the Excel 9,000 wires. I think that might be the last thing we have on the car. Those run about $120. So we'll put one 19. I think that's the actual price on those as well. So let's add some stuff up here. We have to right here, $6,873 so far. And then we'll add the tune to 50 7,100 something went terribly wrong halfway through. I erased all my math. I'm going to add this up one more time and we'll get a solid number. So remember there's plenty more we can do to this C5 before it's completely finished. Obviously it's still dirty. It needs detailed, but if you take a look at the phone, that is our number right there, $9,879 all in. So that's starting with a $3,500 car. And there's a lot of stuff you don't have to do. We knew we had an exhaust. We didn't have to throw all this stuff at it. And obviously that all would have been fine, but it needs to sound cool. I want to drive it. It needs to be fun. So we took it all the way from stock old C5 new balance, jean shorts, white Polo Corvette hat, C5 Corvette hats around here somewhere. And we took it all the way to like something that I would drive for $9,879. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this build. And when there's plenty more to do on it, obviously I'll show you fixing the seat. We're going to detail it very soon. We're going to try to figure out what happened here. This whole section of the paint is absolutely destroyed. Like why is there no clear coat on the fuel door at all? And why does it have sanding marks that are all the way down to the SMC, the sheet molded compound that C5s are made out of. Once it's detailed, I think it's going to look pretty good. Once we get the wheels on there, it's probably going to look pretty good. We'll of course need five, $600 in tires that'll need tacked on there, but all that style choice, honestly, we could have completely got this car done for about $7,000. And that's a great deal, but $9,900, which was rounding up there is also a great deal because every C5, as far as I'm concerned, in the hundred thousand mile range sells for about $13,000. So if I go to sell this today, I think I'll have no issue getting $13,000 for it. Once the tune straightened up, Chris is coming back over, just taking the car and he's going to go do a little bit more tuning and I'm sure he'll have it solved. Nothing flat. So there you have it from wet vet to, I guess, dry vet with a brand new drivetrain. I'm pretty pumped about it. I think it drives great, but $9,900 is the number you guys were looking for. That is it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to head on over to ShopWatchJetPro.com for cool shirts, not like this, and please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you want to do, and I'll talk to you next time. Honestly, I think I should just buy a real whiteboard or figure out what the pin is for this because it's so hard to write and it like wears the your finger down trying to use this thing and it's so slow, but it's so cool. I do love it. It does keep track of all the projects. They're all on here. If we click current projects or watch JR Go or something like that, we've got to take it out of full screen. There you go. There's all of our projects and back to Corvette Coupe, full screen. Well, we better hear it roar for once. See if it still starts the next day. Yeah, it's probably good.