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wiltj

New member
Joined
Oct 31, 2017
Messages
2
I have been searching for a Leaf for over a year, I have been watching the market, and waiting for something good to come along, one came up locally that I wound up buying for $2,400, which included a travel charger and an L2 station that I moved from the sellers house to mine, registration/tax and breakers/wiring for my house added up to 600. bringing my total cost to just under 3k... this seems like a good deal but let me tell you about the sweat equity and elbow grease.

I don't think this car was ever cleaned, inside or out before I bought it. I tried to have a detailer come out, but he took one look at the car and was like "hell naw" made it quite obvious he did not want to work on the car and then left. So I put a lot of work into cleaning the car myself, let me lay the process out...

[*] I started by washing the car 4 times, first just with water to remove loose dirt and leaves, then twice with simple green degreaser-cleaner to attack the years of baked on buildup, then finally with some turtle-wax soap. I am happy with the final paint, considering what It looked like before. I may at some point clay bar/wax and buff out some scratches but there still is body damage on the passenger side and front bumper, this car was never going to be a looker.
[*] onto the inside I started with a hand clean, I had to do this by hand as the debris in the car was clogging my shop vac hose.
[*] once I picked big things out by hand I ran the vacuum over all carpet and seats, Multiple passes, this included beating the removable carpets against a fence to remove deep seated dust.
[*] This led me to try to suck dirt out of the rear seat-belt holes in the seat, I decided to remove the rear seats to make this easier, that is where I had my first real OH CRAP moment... I found an active mite colony, which I cleaned from under the seat.. at this point I decided to remove the front seats as well so I could clean under them properly also. I found a dead mite colony under the front passenger seat.
[*] After the car was mostly trash, dust, and mite free, I borrowed a Bissell LGM from a friend and went to town on the seats, spraying the fabric down and letting it soak, before making cleaning passes with the spray/suction head of the LGM. most of the stains were reduced by 90% id say. this is acceptable for now. I parked the car in the garage and placed a box fan inside to force circulate air to aid in drying time with the windows down, 24 hours later the seats were dry.
[*] during the drying process, the soft removable carpets were outside the car drying and got caught in the rain, which was a good thing in the long run, as when I moved them more brown water poured out of them so I hung them up and just took a hose to them, spraying with some shout to hopefully remove any remaining yuck.

now the carpets are dry and back in the car, I have cleaned the windows and and mostly happy with the condition of the car. the only thing that I want to do is do an Ozone shock on the inside, I could not find any friends who had an ozone machine so I bought one for lite duty use for about the same price as a commercial rental, this should pay me back in the long run.

any way, here are some pics, https://imgur.com/a/XcAf6
 
LeftieBiker said:
IF the car has seat heaters there is a good chance you broke them if you kneeled on the seats. What year is it?

its a 2012, 26k 11 bars,

Good Idea on checking the heated seats, I know the driver seat is working as I was using it!

I did some verifications to check and make sure the other three seats were working.

https://imgur.com/a/ZX4RK
 
Cool camera :cool:
I've always wondered if the back of the back seats was heated(it feels like it is but I wasn't positive) but your IR photo shows the heating element only goes up the back of the bottom of the seat, nice to know.
I can't imagine someone treating a $40k vehicle like that, crazy good price for a vehicle with only 26k miles, at that rate if they paid $40k they paid over $1.5/mile just for the cost of the vehicle :shock: not including any electricity or that $700 EVSE you got for free!
 
Interesting story, and nice work!

Personally, I would have thrown the old carpets out and bought inexpensive replacements without the Nissan logo but the other work was smart.
 
Wow the pics you posted tell a story. A before and after of the outside would also be cool.

Great salvaging operation. I hope this project works out well for you and you are able to get good use out of the car.
 
What a transformation! You probably don't want to go through that all again, but I bet you could get closer to $5k for it now. Not a bad return on investment for a few days work!
 
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