How the FUCK is this guy able to live from this?

That guy worked his ass off.

Cars are just panels welded together to begin with.
Cut out old panel, weld in new panel. There is no difference from something that just rolled off the assembly line if its done correctly.

>if its done correctly.
That's the thing though

Body repair is expensive as fuck

Cars are largely recycled so, technically, people in factories revive cars every day.

>implying swapped vins don't exist
>Implying it wouldn't be even easier in ruskyland

>Body repair is expensive as fuck

WHOA, NO SHIT SHERLOCK

the point is that it takes literally weeks to get this done and to make this worthwhile he must earn sub-mcdonalds wage

If he's like the bodyshop owner I worked for his home will be attached to the workshop, so this kind of work would be done during downtime (late evenings and Sundays) and would supplement the every-day work that comes to him through insurance authorized repairs, that way he can work at his own pace and the sale of the finished car would also most likely stay off any income sheets, almost like a hobby as mentioned above by

>How the FUCK is this guy able to live from this?
pretty much this . A BMW costs the same in a poor country, but labor is much cheaper, so repair of bigger damage still makes sense. Many poor countries have tonnes of amazingly skilled craftsmen in them, this guy could easily earn 60,000$ a year in europe/us doing industrial machine repair/custom orders

That said though, no matter how nice he can make it look visually, the car will still be a complete deathtrap with all that crumpled metal in it. Even if you straighten it out perfectly, the metal still has microfractures and all sorts of bad things going on.
It's like when you take a piece of cardboard and fold it. It will always be weak as shit after that.

I see your point, but it's not really morally justifiable to sell someone what looks like a modern 5-star euro NCAP car but with the safety of something from the 60's.
1. No they don't get stronger because the additional beams are welded to weak structures.
2. Wouldn't work anyways because making something stronger is NOT making it safer. In a modern car you have many different structures that are all designed to deform and transfer the energy in a certain way. If you change one part then it doesn't work as well.
Wrong. Chassis/frame and panels are two completely different things. Panels aren't structural and not that important for safety.

But the trick is that the buyer doesn't know the repaired car now has a ton of weak spots that can crumple easier. If the buyer is a safe driver that never pushes the car to its limit, then many of the faults of the car won't ever come into play.

>labor and everything related is much cheaper there.
It's cheaper anywhere that repairs don't need a lot of expensive infrastructure.

most of those cars are gonna be haunted

>the buyer doesn't know the repaired car now has a ton of weak spots
that's the immoral part
>If the buyer is a safe driver that never pushes the car to its limit
That's how young and inexperienced guys think until they realize someone else can crash into you no matter how good you think you are.

>religious people
there is no such thing as ghosts, how fucking dumb are you if you believe everyone goes to heaven unless some bullshit happens before they die?
but then i guess heaven itself is far fetched enough why no stretch the idea to even more absurd places right?

>t. guy trying to get rid of his haunted car

n-no that's not it at all

He's not wrong though, the frame is welded, spot welded most of the time at that. My old racecars I'd run stitch welds on it to strengthen certain areas that would twist/move more than I liked.

I don't know where this guy's work stands overall, good overview of what he's doing in the vid but I'm not there to see so no idea if the work is actually any good but he at least has a lot of the concept of what to do.

>old racecars
But that's not an old race car with a tube chassis or whatever, it's a modern BMW. Completely different.
>stitch welds on it to strengthen certain areas
If you weld it solidly to the chassis it becomes part of the chassis, not a panel in the road car sense.
>he at least has a lot of the concept of what to do.
Yes, he's amazingly skilled. That doesn't change that the car is not safe anymore. see

Yes, in Russia (or exUSSR) it something normal to wreck a car completely and weld it somehow and sell it as 'never crashed, old lady driver, non-smoker'.
In fact, when importing japs cars became expensive, people started importing halfcuts and somehow registering it after welding it.
We do not have in car document marking like 'salvage', and we have a lot of people, who know NOTHING about cars and they want BMW, but they have not much money...

when in engineering class we talked about metal and how it's not pure and that enough stress which creates heat can break the metal, technically if the metal is ripped in two and if you use enough stress to put it back together without breaking it then it heals no different than when people melt metal and make swords or whatever.
but i'd rather have an actual mechanical engineer talk about this.

Literally all you have to do is heat the metal and let it cool naturally for it to regain its strength.

>heat the metal and let it cool naturally to regain strength
Cooling naturally is the opposite of forced fast cooling. Ahh, so that's why armsmiths forge swords and armor by beating it and then rapidly cooling it by quenching. They want to make weak swords and weak armors. Japanese katana are also made to be weak as they are cooled by quenching.

Hard=strong now

A sword is hard and brittle...

georgia user here, ill explain for you how ex soviet countries are car wise.
people buy totaled cars on auctions, get them shipped, do that what guy did in op vid and drive them/sell them. me and my friend crashed opel astra, whole engine bay was wreck, i barely opened door, but his dad repaired it and still runs.
selling repaired cars as never crashed is totally normal too, probably 1/4 of cars being sold online were crashed, probably more than 1 times even. also op asking how he is living off it. faggot people who do that here make some mad bux. probably same as doctors if not more (some actually do make more)
there is no such thing as totaled car here lol, because labor is pretty cheap and nobody gives shit how wrecked frame is, it just has to look good from outside, doesnt matter what mechanical side is like.
whatever lads, ill explain more if u want to

>nobody gives shit how wrecked frame is, it just has to look good from outside, doesnt matter what mechanical side is like.
also
i-i s-swear im not like that

if you want it to regain its strength you have to heat it to such a temperature so the crystal structures inside it reallign which reinforces it and then cool it with just the right speed to finish the process
this is why some metals are water cooled and some oil cooled (here is a graph that shows it but I left my engineering book in my car else I would give you more detail)

fuck me this shit is nightmare fuel
those things are unsafe even stationary

>tfw a rusky repaired bimmer is still safer than the average shitbox

After I got tboned my drivers door looked way worse than that.
Only injury was a gash on my head from the door trim. I didn't even notice till I got home from the hospital and took my hat off to shower.
>no side impact airbags

Protip: the damage in OPs video is mostly just cosmetic, except maybe the pillars. Almost everything on a car can be repaired, even the frame (to a point) and still be structurally sound enough to comply with whatever standards the manufacturer intended. All manufacturers have repair manuals that show what can be replaced, where to remove and how to replace damaged body parts, what tools to use, etc. Not every bodyshop has access to these however as most are manufacturer specific and modern cars use all kinds of different materials.

>Protip: the damage in OPs video is mostly just cosmetic, except maybe the pillars.
Yep it's just a scratch, except for the part where the roof, A, B, and C pillars are folded in half, other than that no big deal. Nobody would touch that car in the US and no manufacturer is going to recommend repair on a car with both the rocker and roof folded. With the use of HSS on modern cars especially on the A pillar repairs that used to be possible aren't anymore because you can't apply heat to HSS. That 7 series isn't structurally sound anymore, just because Russians can cob something together doesn't mean that's the norm.

that roof is glued in place.

the monocome can come apart, and be welded together.

its structurally weaker. I would like to see one of those fixed cares have a crash test done.

>With the use of HSS on modern cars especially on the A pillar repairs that used to be possible aren't anymore because you can't apply heat to HSS.

You can, by replacing the whole pillar.

What king of stupid ghost going the hunt a fucking car
I guess Veeky Forums will hunt it car.

Quenched to harden, then followed by a tempering process to normalize the metal while maintaining most of the hardness
>blacksmithing 101

He probably doesn't do it full time for a living (there are probably more minor repairs that he does for an actual living), but labor rates and costs are significantly cheaper in Russia.
A lot of the techniques are actually legitimately used in body shops in the US from what limited information I have about them from restoration threads and such on various forums and YouTube videos. There are definitely a few places where I think that he should have done the job differently though, like at the front where he hammers that bent frame rail into shape.
If you look at the roof on the donor panel, you can see that it is also glued into place, and he cuts the adhesive. I believe that the roofs on the 7 series is aluminium while the rest is steel.
That being said though, I can't really say that this car is safe because I don't have formal experience in this field.