The quest to find a great Bugeye, online.

Bring a Trailer is an amazing phenomenon that moved about $900 million of classic cars and stuff in 2021. There are lots of new competitors wanting a piece of that action, so we will be seeing even more online auctions in the future. And like any modern online universe, it comes with some unique challenges. All the information on a typical BaT auction is largely crowd-sourced, so the discussion about each car is generally directed by the audience and that audience is often striving for credibility.

Thus posters often cite their memories, history, blood, sweat and tears, etc. to gain a toehold in the group discussion. Occasionally, viewers chime in with praise for the seller, EG, “I have seen every car this seller built and they were all excellent.” Occasionally, you’ll hear from folks who have gone to inspect the car, so you’ll see in the comments, “I’ve been to see this car and it’s everything it was represented to be, and looks even better in person.”

Note the bleed screw in the horizontal port of this slave cylinder. Because it comes this way new in the box, the installer didn’t think to move the bleed screw to the upper hole so the air can escape. Thus the clutch could never be properly be bled in this configuration. Odd clutch action was the first clue, and a new hard line properly installed will fix the problem.

The red car pictured here and shown in the video below is just such a car, that came with high praise and sold for top dollar. (And nothing against the seller at all, they did a lot of awesome work.) But this car, and in fact, every Bring a Trailer car that has come here (a total of four as of this writing) has had issues that were not revealed by the crowd, and issues that cost the new owner some money to have us fix.

This is a home made spring plate, which is the first clue that something might be off with the spring alignment – which is why the radius arm bushing perished catastrophically (shown below). We will replace relocate the leaf spring and plate to the proper position in order to fix this rear end alignment problem.

This is way too much fuel pump for the job and it was also way too loud for the car. Plus the regulator is one more thing to leak and fail, so rather than step down a high performance pump, we just used the right pump and made it much more tidy. We put in the fuel pump kit we sell in our catalog and got rid of all of these extra connections.

The original gold drain plug is always a clue that you’re working with an original fuel tank. This one started leaking when we filled it up and given the rust inside because of it’s age, we went with one of our new fuel tanks (which we also sell in our catalog).

A disclaimer is needed here… all classic cars need stuff, no matter where you buy them. The cars we sell need stuff all the time. Cars we’ve sold don’t always leave our shop with every single punch list item repaired. Budget, timing, skills of new owner… these are all considerations.

We live in a universe of broken things, so there is no such thing as “perfect” or even “finished.” So this is a post not to attack or criticize sellers past, but simply to emphasize that if you want to know what you are getting up front, buy a car from a specialist.

On the green Bugeye shown in the video, a crude check with a level made it immediately apparent that this car had negative camber on the driver’s side…

…and positive camber on the passenger’s side, which made driving very unpredictable (note the air gap between the level and the sidewall at the lower portion of the level on this side, and the top of the level on the driver side).

We strive to form a collaborative partnership with each and every one of our customers so we can acknowledge the current reality of each and every car, and work together to address or otherwise make a plan regarding whatever issues the particular car may have. This way, surprises are minimized.

Ebrake rods generally rattle too much, and this custom turn buckle isn’t helping, so we’ll weld them to the proper length.

I’ve been swept away by auction fever myself on many occasions (I am always shopping for the next new crop of great cars). But unless you have a specialist in your back pocket, be ready for a reality check once the auction dust settles and you are the winner. Both of the cars featured here came with some surprises, as you can see in the video tour below.