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This is an interesting video on a side-hustle that I used to have when I was in college. Basically, I would go to the junkyard with a few specific parts in mind. Find as many of them as I could, and then pull them for resale.
In this video I discuss the advantages of having a junkyard parts side hustle.
I also discuss some of the parts that I have focused on in the past, and how I determine whether a part is worth picking or not.
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0:00
Hey 36 Fanatics, Steven here. Today I got a really cool video for you about
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basically going to junkyards and getting used parts and old parts and such and
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flipping them or flipping individual parts. I'm gonna talk about what I used
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to do in undergrad when I used to go to a junkyard in Wilmington when I was in
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school there to make some extra dough on the side for basically for beer money
0:26
and different things like that and show you some tips and tricks that I learned, what kind of parts
0:32
to look for and generally just what I learned from doing that. Now I'm in front of a Mercedes today
0:38
and I'm going to be mainly talking about BMW parts and the reason for that is you know if you saw one
0:45
of my older videos a couple months ago I had a part out my old E36 and I live in DC now so I don't
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have a car and then my brother's car right there i'm changing the clock spring on it which i'm
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gonna post a video on that like next week on clock spring replacement video and so that car can't be
1:05
moved right now i got the steering wheel off of it and the clock spring replacement is the whole
1:10
reason i got the idea to make this video so i was looking around for a clock spring and they were
1:16
selling them for too much money that i felt like paying for on ebay so i was like you know i'm gonna
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run up to the junkyard and go see if they got a decent condition one that I can pop in there
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because his is really, really bad. So while I was there, it was reminding me of parts I used to pull
1:31
when I was living in Wilmington to resell. And I wanted to make this video for y'all
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So first I want to talk about some of the advantages of basically pulling parts and
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reselling them from junkyards. The first advantage that I really liked about it was that if you're
1:48
pulling parts you pick exactly what you want so I picked nothing but small parts generally unless
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because I was living in an apartment I didn't want any fenders I didn't want any doors or bumpers
2:00
sitting in my apartment I only picked small parts climate control modules instrument clusters
2:07
tail lights headlights stuff like that you know smaller parts the other thing is you get to really
2:13
if you're interested in doing this as like a side gig or just making some extra money from time to
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time it you can really figure out what parts sell for what and what sells fast and once you find
2:25
parts that are really hot in the market on like ebay or facebook marketplace or something you can
2:30
have a nice little lucrative side gig where you're paying like i think instrument clusters and climate
2:36
control modules go for like 15 20 bucks usually at the junkyard and for bmws the older ones that I was focusing on they sell for like a pop So how did I find the parts that I was looking for Well I had already parted out a car beforehand a couple actually BMW E36s
2:56
So I already knew off the top what parts kind of sold quick on eBay
3:00
and what parts sold for a decent amount of money relative to their size
3:05
So basically what I found with BMW E36s and E46s, instrument clusters climate control modules steering wheels clock springs
3:17
taillights and outside mirrors sold really well and sold really quickly i
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might be paying 15 bucks for a climate control module or 20 bucks
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i'd drive it to the i drive a pick up a couple of them take them to the back to my apartment go test them out on my car
3:34
if the all the lights shown up and it works perfectly then I'd list it right then and there maybe clean it up a bit. Now here's the kicker if they don't
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work my junkyard that I went to in Wilmington they would let you replace the part within it with
3:49
another comparable part in the junkyard. So you know maybe half of them would work out of those
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five to ten climate control modules and instrument clusters I would get but out of those half that
4:01
didn't work I just take them back and swap them out with other ones. Now doing this as a side gig
4:06
partially depends on where you actually reside whether you're living in a bigger area a bigger
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metropolitan area or a little more rural area so out here i'm back out in a rural part of north
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carolina and the junkyard that i've that i go to around here for parts from time to time
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they have a lot less bmws available than welmington where half the damn junkyard was bmws and mercedes
4:33
bins just part of living in you know a beach city like wilmington so there's a ton of available
4:40
inventory to pick from there are a lot of good quality cars here here on the other hand like the
4:47
options aren't as nice and it'd be a lot easier if somebody was interested in picking parts from
4:53
like honda civics toyota camrys and chevrolet's or something like that so it matters where you
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live to some degree if you're looking to if you know there's a bmw channel so if you're looking
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to pull bmw parts if you're not necessarily stuck on bmws then there's a lot more options available
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i personally just like to really niche down on the cars that i'm working with on the car parts
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i'm working with another thing to keep a little keep in mind is that one of like i said one of
5:22
the advantages of going to junkyards is that you have the option to just focus on smaller parts
5:27
Now if you've got a big area, a big garage or something, and you know fenders off of like I don know a 2004 BMW 330i is selling like hotcakes on Facebook Marketplace or something or sells really easily then hey go ahead and pick some bigger parts But if not I strongly
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recommend to focus on smaller parts because they're easy to ship, they're easy to store
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and if they don't sell, they're a whole lot easier to get rid of
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Okay, so here's what I do basically to figure out whether or not a part of the junkyard is really worth my time
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So I'm here on eBay Advanced Search. All you have to do is hop on Google and type eBay Advanced Search
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It'll take you to a bar, to a page like this. So I only look at sold listings
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That basically tells me whether something has actually been sold and how many are being sold
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I usually only look at buy it now. You can look at auction too, but most used parts are buy it now, so I usually just do buy it now
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And then for conditions specifically used, you're not looking for new parts
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You're not selling new parts. And then here, this is just an example, 1998 BMW instrument cluster
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I could give it more general range, but it's not going to give me specifically 1998s anyways
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So let's see what we got. Okay. So here we are, and you're going to have some that don't really match your product that you're actually selling
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or your cluster, or whatever part it is. So here, obviously, this isn't an E36 instrument cluster
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I don't know what instrument cluster that is. That's wrong. I don't think that would fit
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Let me see. This is not a full instrument cluster. Here we go, here's an instrument cluster $161
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And it doesn't look like they even Let me see And the other thing I do, make sure that it's from the United States
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When you're looking at comps Because sometimes they'll have stuff that's shipped from out of the country
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And those are usually a whole lot cheaper I see a lot of parts shipped from like Romania or something like that
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So here's one that's a lot cheaper for like $70 bucks. This guy had a lot of trustworthiness, trusted EP. So it's also harder to get started
8:01
doing this if you've never sold on eBay before. But if you have and you have a good star rating
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then it makes it a lot easier to get started. If you haven't, then you just got to accept that
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you're going to have to sell stuff a little bit cheaper. Your margins aren't going to be as good
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immediately because people aren going to immediately trust you This guy top rated plus selling his instrument cluster for his used one And as I mentioned before instrument clusters of the junkyard go for about
8:34
And most of these are not going to be in perfect condition. You know, a lot of these will have
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dimmed out lights. If you click the description, a lot of them will say that, you know
8:44
let me see if I shot there we go electronic display fades away time to time
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and this guy still sold it for like 80 bucks plus shipping
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so oh no free shipping okay so and then you have you have other specialty niche
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ones that you want to be aware of like this one is for an M3
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only and it's selling for more than double what the rest of the
9:13
instrument cluster is in its class sell for. I've noticed that before if you can find M3 clusters
9:19
and you're going to be doing good because they sell for a lot more money. So this is how I
9:24
basically figure out whether something is worth picking or not because I want to see if there's
9:28
an actual market for these parts. And then we can go back to a... And I'm just typing
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climate typing BMW here because most of the used parts you're going to find for
9:42
BMWs in the 90s and early 2000s are going to be 3 series anyways
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Here's the climate control module, $92. Let's see. Another 92
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100 bucks. 80. So there's a good market for these. They're selling quickly
10:22
You also want to check the dates on these things, too, and make sure that these are actually selling in a decent time frame
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You don't want the last sale to have been months ago. And then you check the availables and there's dozens of them available online
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It means nobody's buying these things. So you want to basically, this is a good way to get an idea of how frequently these parts are selling
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how much, what your price profit margin is going to be, and how quickly you can sell it
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So advanced search is a really good tool to use. So I want to mention, I hope y'all are staying safe with the coronavirus and everything going on
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I know I ain't had a haircut in like three or four months. I'm starting to look rough over here
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but I hope y'all are staying safe and I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did
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please like and subscribe and y'all have a good one
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