My Aston Martin Vanquish has BRICKED itself and is stuck on my fancy car lift!

Danielson's Birthday and Automotive Woes

It's Danielson's birthday tomorrow, and he's received a special gift from his friends - two balls that are naturally uneven. The owner of these balls is unsure why they're not natural, but it's clear that something has been amiss. "Two reservoirs and one's lower than the other," the owner explains, noting that there's enough fluid to get one or two actuations before the pump kicks in. However, as soon as the fluid starts flowing, it becomes apparent that something is off. The pump makes a noise for a second, like it's lost prime, and then it starts doing something else entirely.

The source of the problem is quickly revealed - two balls that are hanging from the center of the car, creating a "golden shower" of fluid. This unexpected spectacle has left everyone in awe, but also worried about what might be causing it. The hydraulic unit is nearby, with hoses and lines stretching out in every direction. It's clear that these components have been damaged by some sort of pressure release, and now they're pouring fluid everywhere.

As Danielson delves deeper into the car, he discovers a mess of hoses and lines that seem to be leaking everywhere. The owner had assumed that this was intentional, providing an easy way for anyone to see what's going on inside the car. However, it turns out that this was just a hasty attempt to diagnose the problem, rather than a deliberate design choice.

The repair work begins, with Danielson carefully removing hoses and lines from the hydraulic unit. He notes that the car has been "wafting" back onto the lift, suggesting that there's still fluid flowing through it. It's clear that this is going to be a difficult fix, but Danielson is undeterred.

A Side Note on the X6M

While working on the Aston Martin, Danielson had the opportunity to check in with his friend who owns an X6M. Unfortunately, the car was barely running and showed no signs of life. Further investigation revealed that the engine had been swapped out for a regular V8 twin turbo, resulting in about 150 less horsepower. However, this wasn't enough to save it - the car was now producing negative horsepower due to its poor performance.

The good news is that there's still work available for anyone who can help fix this X6M. Danielson mentions that his friend has been unable to find a qualified mechanic to tackle the job, and offers his services to anyone willing to take on the challenge.

A Brief Update from the Car Ninja

Danielson checks in with his colleague at the car ninjas, who informs him that there's still no progress on fixing the X6M. The engine has been swapped out for a non-M motor, which seems to be the root of all the problems. However, the car ninja promises that they'll get back to work soon and see if they can't coax some life out of this struggling vehicle.

A Personal Note from Danielson

As Danielson wraps up his work on the Aston Martin, he can't help but feel a sense of satisfaction. He's always loved working with complex machines, and this repair job has been no exception. However, he does admit to feeling a little nervous about the car's tendency to pull start when stuck in gear. It's clear that this is not just an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of a larger problem.

In any case, Danielson is grateful for the opportunity to work on this rare and beautiful machine. He notes that it's definitely not a job he'd want to tackle alone - but with the right tools and expertise, even the most complex repairs can be overcome.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to who he's drawn to the dumbest Automotive channel in all of YouTube and this is my 2003 Aston Martin Vanquish or that's what it was currently it is The Sword in the Stone or basically stuck on this lift right now now this is originally the car trek 2 Car Las Vegas challenge Ed bought it from Columbia the country not to Missouri or whatever state has Colombia in it and imported it uh put a new clutch in it and it barely survived card Trek then Freddy bought it to vars from Ed after car trek did some fixes to it and then never drove it and then he sold it to me and well I let it sit up on this lift up high for the last six months and it suddenly started draining a lot of nasty fluid and then uh now won't go out of neutral so the car is stuck in first gear and because it's an automated manual transmission you know a clutch but controlled with robots I can't get it into neutral apparently there is a release switch in here somewhere everybody says there is uh it's supposed to be under the seats behind the seats whatever I'm looking and I cannot find it so the tow truck is on its way here and we're gonna have to get very creative on how to get this car off basically a car that is stuck in gear the rear wheels will not move so uh we'll see how this goes I'm going to start by showing you guys what I've done to hopefully make this work and we need to move all the cars out of the way that uh could possibly get damaged by yanking this thing off of the lift such a beautiful bricked car right now and yeah there is the fluid it's draining out of both sides actually so yeah that's quite a problem now I've looked all over underneath the seat pulled back all the carpets this rear area where the battery is there is nothing showing to uh put this thing in neutral apparently you can get under there maybe and with a certain bolt you can pop it out yourself the uh noodly appendage but you can't really do that with this lovely lift in the way so I've devised what I think is going to work we'll see if the tow truck driver is going to go for it it's not Dynasty sending one of his uh constituents I have put these lids underneath the tires here so the plastic Lids hopefully will slide off I'm going to lift it up a little bit and get that rug out of the way so it doesn't get caught on that and hopefully the smooth surface with the metal and the garage floor will be enough to get it off and then up onto the tow truck but yeah I need to move the rug I need to move the Corvette and I need to move the SLR for sure because if this thing it's just cables if this thing starts swinging wildly or whatever um yeah it's going to be fun so fingers crossed once we do get it off we can get it up to the car Wizards and then find out well what exactly has happened and whether I should fix it or send it off to England to get a manual transmission conversion done if it broke really bad it may be worth doing but one other thing I did I forgot to show you when I was jacking it up because I'm a complete idiot uh smacked the side of it there and put a nice little Ding and took the paint off right there with the Jack handle yeah lovely day all right I have to lift a little bit in the air just to be able to get the rug out from underneath it but uh here's the issue here because it could easily start pulling the lift with the car you can see it's sort of moving right now those cables they could pull out with it which is why I wanted the SLR far far away from it but hopefully it slides this is going to be interesting tow truck driver is here and wheels are here all right the tow truck is in I'm sure there's some Aston Martin enthusiasts just losing their mind right now the lever's right there just pull it I can't find it and nobody knows uh so here goes nothing we got the tow hook on now wheel dollies you think would be a good idea but uh this lift is ripped for nobody's pleasure so if you had those little casters they would just get stuck I imagine on that and not rule so I feel like this sliding is better but we'll see all right we'll move oh God okay it's moving I came right off it's definitely turning the engine over it started up wow we just pull started a Vanquish all right hey it went into neutral reaction is that fast you gotta be a race car driver uh you you might have fixed it actually yeah now it's in neutral outstanding there you go okay not sketchy at all we just pull started um Jesus Christ she's going in reverse all right so will you go in first now it's going in first now it wants to work now after all of that um all right well foreign about that should still probably go up to the car Wizards but it almost went flying into the Z06 Corvette wow okay now it's acting up yeah it definitely needs to go to the wizard so left is going up you can see it got pulled out a little bit because it's rocking and rolling and there's my burnout from the launch where it tried to fly into the Z06 and the tow truck thankfully I was quick on the brake all right following the Aston Martin up and wizard is wizard is wrenching on a the W12 phaeton's still here huh you got you got an oil pan down transmission pan okay O-rings were leaking on this one oh like Mercedes huh yeah okay so I'll get some new O-rings on there service it and should be the leaks what do you think of this goofy thing uh uh Bentley and a Volkswagen tuxedo I guess or I don't know mullet I suppose right I think everything is that you see it's so hard to work on I wouldn't want to be working on on the weekends on this I mean you might as well have a Bentley Continental Flying Spur and as well have the Bentley rather than uh Volkswagen huh and there's a lot of Bentley in there yeah yeah these control arms are replaced and they came in a box that said Bentley Continental really yeah well so you get the maintenance as well I guess if you want to be kind of low-key but a very strange car for sure so yeah I see you've already started doing a little peekaboo at the Aston Martin but before we go there uh my V12 is on its side so the Ferrari 456 in the last video uh Daniel's son he did a whole video about tearing it down but you've done some more it's on its side now have you I guess the Pan's not off yet to look you want to check all the uh tightness on everything on this thing now right at this point yes so anything else weird that you found well I found that one Woodruff key from that uh timing gear that I showed in the video like the pulley gear yeah you can see that they put the wrong wood roof key in there this is like a wood roof key for advancing timing on like little small engines I looked up the part number and yes this is wrong this is not the right key for it they just jammed it in there and said that'll do I guess so they found it on the parts bin or something wonderful what no damage just other than that so we can replace it and call it a day yeah it's amazing that I track this thing in car track I mean just rev the bejesus out of it many many times drove it hard so I imagine the bottom ends okay should we mention that how dumb the head gasket comment was oh yes yes somebody did mention that that the uh the head studs could have pulled away because it overheated like a Cadillac Northstar or something which that's that's not true well it could have but not the ones exactly the ones that were already failing right that would have happened how is it only these three or four pulled the rest of them are perfect right no that's not how it happened everything else was tight as a tiger right you had to fight him to get them off those those ones on the bottom they just saw wrench I went yeah just a normal regular wrench well and another thing to mention we are down one mechanic right Magic Mike no longer works here he has gone on to do his own thing so wizard is look at his mitts he's a little more I'm getting scuffed and dirty and is he a good mechanic he's the fast one it's a quick draw yeah so you're back to wrenching and running a whole shop now yeah until we find someone new I have another one in the works oh okay we reveal him when he starts here well obviously I mean things are still going because uh yeah you already got the Aston Martin up in the air so quickly so have you taken a look yet yeah Danielson actually to put it up on the lift and took a look and we found out what it was so you've got another video on the 456 to drop as well right yeah it's coming in a few weeks all right still working on it subscribe to Danielson it's his birthday tomorrow that's what the cake is here got it for me there's two balls and you notice they're naturally uneven that's not natural here we go again yeah so why does it have two reservoirs and one's lower than the other one's kind of like an emergency it actually feels into the top of the other one so it's more capacity okay but uh they're both empty that's why you go to shift it into gear there's just enough fluid to maybe get one or two actuations and then it quits and the pump makes like a noise for a second like it's normal then it starts doing like it's lost prime or the pump was failing it's getting air in the system because it's literally empty ah and since the two balls are empty we have a golden shower going on over here in the center of the car yo you do have to use oh yeah terms like I mean you could there's professional ways to describe this rather than two balls that are hanging okay oh so it's it's a gusher yeah there's these hoses here this is the hydraulic unit I've done worked on several of these where the hydraulic lines were leaking especially this one it has two going into one uh-huh that one's known to fail as well but we're gonna have to pull this uh under sheet off yeah metal yeah go through all the hoses and lines so yeah they put a lot of holes in it because they assumed you would need to see what the hell's going on here and you're right it is a shower of fluid which I did see it from the lift I assumed because it was kind of an oil color like engine oil that and it was towards the front that I was leaking engine oil but no it's gushing F1 or whatever they call it for Aston Martin it's uh transmission fluid yuck definitely yuck yeah but it all makes sense now right but you know I didn't tell you getting it off the lift was a thing because it was stuck in gear is there a neutral release that I wasn't seeing or do you do something on the transmission to get it into neutral because you know the computer if it can't do it it you know it's stuck in gear yeah on various different models they'll have a release I don't exactly know I looked and Googled and looked and looked they said under the seat they said in the back I looked everywhere and it's luckily we didn't have to even find it because it did work a little bit to get it on the list no it actually it pull started came to life almost flew into the tow truck because it did a little burnout revved I almost crashed the dang thing it could have ramped over and gone on the new Z06 as well if it really got pushy and I wasn't quick on the break that should have been that's in flaw that you can kill I don't think any British engineer ever thought that that would happen that you would need to pull it off the lift stuck in gear and it would pull start like that so looks like it's is that just probably wafting back from there yeah you can see the stream here it's blowing back okay well so it's a gusher it's a gusher it's a shower it's an expensive fix since you've done it before um no we might have to pull that hydraulic unit down and get all the hoses and things off but it's not too bad okay well there's a car that is too bad and that's the x6m which oh I've heard stories about that you dodged the bullet there I was fun to go check on next but uh that the Aston Martin is fixable because if it was too bad then I'd probably just send it to England and have it manual converted but I mean I already have a lot of nice manual cars and four five six things so if it's an easy fix or easiest fix we'll do it but yeah it definitely is the x6m well unfortunately I checked at the car ninjas and there's no progress on the x6m or it's not an M anymore either unfortunately that car showed up barely running and after digging around we discovered that there it is not an M motor anymore it had been swapped with a regular uh V8 twin turbo so about 150 less horsepower but right now it's a negative horsepower because it just runs like absolute garbage but uh the car ninja hasn't been able to touch it because uh he's down a mechanic as well so I guess if you're a good mechanic and want to come to Kansas we can have lots of work for you but he promises he'll be looking at it soon uh sure that's all thank you so much for watching and I'm so glad I didn't crash the Aston Martinwelcome to who he's drawn to the dumbest Automotive channel in all of YouTube and this is my 2003 Aston Martin Vanquish or that's what it was currently it is The Sword in the Stone or basically stuck on this lift right now now this is originally the car trek 2 Car Las Vegas challenge Ed bought it from Columbia the country not to Missouri or whatever state has Colombia in it and imported it uh put a new clutch in it and it barely survived card Trek then Freddy bought it to vars from Ed after car trek did some fixes to it and then never drove it and then he sold it to me and well I let it sit up on this lift up high for the last six months and it suddenly started draining a lot of nasty fluid and then uh now won't go out of neutral so the car is stuck in first gear and because it's an automated manual transmission you know a clutch but controlled with robots I can't get it into neutral apparently there is a release switch in here somewhere everybody says there is uh it's supposed to be under the seats behind the seats whatever I'm looking and I cannot find it so the tow truck is on its way here and we're gonna have to get very creative on how to get this car off basically a car that is stuck in gear the rear wheels will not move so uh we'll see how this goes I'm going to start by showing you guys what I've done to hopefully make this work and we need to move all the cars out of the way that uh could possibly get damaged by yanking this thing off of the lift such a beautiful bricked car right now and yeah there is the fluid it's draining out of both sides actually so yeah that's quite a problem now I've looked all over underneath the seat pulled back all the carpets this rear area where the battery is there is nothing showing to uh put this thing in neutral apparently you can get under there maybe and with a certain bolt you can pop it out yourself the uh noodly appendage but you can't really do that with this lovely lift in the way so I've devised what I think is going to work we'll see if the tow truck driver is going to go for it it's not Dynasty sending one of his uh constituents I have put these lids underneath the tires here so the plastic Lids hopefully will slide off I'm going to lift it up a little bit and get that rug out of the way so it doesn't get caught on that and hopefully the smooth surface with the metal and the garage floor will be enough to get it off and then up onto the tow truck but yeah I need to move the rug I need to move the Corvette and I need to move the SLR for sure because if this thing it's just cables if this thing starts swinging wildly or whatever um yeah it's going to be fun so fingers crossed once we do get it off we can get it up to the car Wizards and then find out well what exactly has happened and whether I should fix it or send it off to England to get a manual transmission conversion done if it broke really bad it may be worth doing but one other thing I did I forgot to show you when I was jacking it up because I'm a complete idiot uh smacked the side of it there and put a nice little Ding and took the paint off right there with the Jack handle yeah lovely day all right I have to lift a little bit in the air just to be able to get the rug out from underneath it but uh here's the issue here because it could easily start pulling the lift with the car you can see it's sort of moving right now those cables they could pull out with it which is why I wanted the SLR far far away from it but hopefully it slides this is going to be interesting tow truck driver is here and wheels are here all right the tow truck is in I'm sure there's some Aston Martin enthusiasts just losing their mind right now the lever's right there just pull it I can't find it and nobody knows uh so here goes nothing we got the tow hook on now wheel dollies you think would be a good idea but uh this lift is ripped for nobody's pleasure so if you had those little casters they would just get stuck I imagine on that and not rule so I feel like this sliding is better but we'll see all right we'll move oh God okay it's moving I came right off it's definitely turning the engine over it started up wow we just pull started a Vanquish all right hey it went into neutral reaction is that fast you gotta be a race car driver uh you you might have fixed it actually yeah now it's in neutral outstanding there you go okay not sketchy at all we just pull started um Jesus Christ she's going in reverse all right so will you go in first now it's going in first now it wants to work now after all of that um all right well foreign about that should still probably go up to the car Wizards but it almost went flying into the Z06 Corvette wow okay now it's acting up yeah it definitely needs to go to the wizard so left is going up you can see it got pulled out a little bit because it's rocking and rolling and there's my burnout from the launch where it tried to fly into the Z06 and the tow truck thankfully I was quick on the brake all right following the Aston Martin up and wizard is wizard is wrenching on a the W12 phaeton's still here huh you got you got an oil pan down transmission pan okay O-rings were leaking on this one oh like Mercedes huh yeah okay so I'll get some new O-rings on there service it and should be the leaks what do you think of this goofy thing uh uh Bentley and a Volkswagen tuxedo I guess or I don't know mullet I suppose right I think everything is that you see it's so hard to work on I wouldn't want to be working on on the weekends on this I mean you might as well have a Bentley Continental Flying Spur and as well have the Bentley rather than uh Volkswagen huh and there's a lot of Bentley in there yeah yeah these control arms are replaced and they came in a box that said Bentley Continental really yeah well so you get the maintenance as well I guess if you want to be kind of low-key but a very strange car for sure so yeah I see you've already started doing a little peekaboo at the Aston Martin but before we go there uh my V12 is on its side so the Ferrari 456 in the last video uh Daniel's son he did a whole video about tearing it down but you've done some more it's on its side now have you I guess the Pan's not off yet to look you want to check all the uh tightness on everything on this thing now right at this point yes so anything else weird that you found well I found that one Woodruff key from that uh timing gear that I showed in the video like the pulley gear yeah you can see that they put the wrong wood roof key in there this is like a wood roof key for advancing timing on like little small engines I looked up the part number and yes this is wrong this is not the right key for it they just jammed it in there and said that'll do I guess so they found it on the parts bin or something wonderful what no damage just other than that so we can replace it and call it a day yeah it's amazing that I track this thing in car track I mean just rev the bejesus out of it many many times drove it hard so I imagine the bottom ends okay should we mention that how dumb the head gasket comment was oh yes yes somebody did mention that that the uh the head studs could have pulled away because it overheated like a Cadillac Northstar or something which that's that's not true well it could have but not the ones exactly the ones that were already failing right that would have happened how is it only these three or four pulled the rest of them are perfect right no that's not how it happened everything else was tight as a tiger right you had to fight him to get them off those those ones on the bottom they just saw wrench I went yeah just a normal regular wrench well and another thing to mention we are down one mechanic right Magic Mike no longer works here he has gone on to do his own thing so wizard is look at his mitts he's a little more I'm getting scuffed and dirty and is he a good mechanic he's the fast one it's a quick draw yeah so you're back to wrenching and running a whole shop now yeah until we find someone new I have another one in the works oh okay we reveal him when he starts here well obviously I mean things are still going because uh yeah you already got the Aston Martin up in the air so quickly so have you taken a look yet yeah Danielson actually to put it up on the lift and took a look and we found out what it was so you've got another video on the 456 to drop as well right yeah it's coming in a few weeks all right still working on it subscribe to Danielson it's his birthday tomorrow that's what the cake is here got it for me there's two balls and you notice they're naturally uneven that's not natural here we go again yeah so why does it have two reservoirs and one's lower than the other one's kind of like an emergency it actually feels into the top of the other one so it's more capacity okay but uh they're both empty that's why you go to shift it into gear there's just enough fluid to maybe get one or two actuations and then it quits and the pump makes like a noise for a second like it's normal then it starts doing like it's lost prime or the pump was failing it's getting air in the system because it's literally empty ah and since the two balls are empty we have a golden shower going on over here in the center of the car yo you do have to use oh yeah terms like I mean you could there's professional ways to describe this rather than two balls that are hanging okay oh so it's it's a gusher yeah there's these hoses here this is the hydraulic unit I've done worked on several of these where the hydraulic lines were leaking especially this one it has two going into one uh-huh that one's known to fail as well but we're gonna have to pull this uh under sheet off yeah metal yeah go through all the hoses and lines so yeah they put a lot of holes in it because they assumed you would need to see what the hell's going on here and you're right it is a shower of fluid which I did see it from the lift I assumed because it was kind of an oil color like engine oil that and it was towards the front that I was leaking engine oil but no it's gushing F1 or whatever they call it for Aston Martin it's uh transmission fluid yuck definitely yuck yeah but it all makes sense now right but you know I didn't tell you getting it off the lift was a thing because it was stuck in gear is there a neutral release that I wasn't seeing or do you do something on the transmission to get it into neutral because you know the computer if it can't do it it you know it's stuck in gear yeah on various different models they'll have a release I don't exactly know I looked and Googled and looked and looked they said under the seat they said in the back I looked everywhere and it's luckily we didn't have to even find it because it did work a little bit to get it on the list no it actually it pull started came to life almost flew into the tow truck because it did a little burnout revved I almost crashed the dang thing it could have ramped over and gone on the new Z06 as well if it really got pushy and I wasn't quick on the break that should have been that's in flaw that you can kill I don't think any British engineer ever thought that that would happen that you would need to pull it off the lift stuck in gear and it would pull start like that so looks like it's is that just probably wafting back from there yeah you can see the stream here it's blowing back okay well so it's a gusher it's a gusher it's a shower it's an expensive fix since you've done it before um no we might have to pull that hydraulic unit down and get all the hoses and things off but it's not too bad okay well there's a car that is too bad and that's the x6m which oh I've heard stories about that you dodged the bullet there I was fun to go check on next but uh that the Aston Martin is fixable because if it was too bad then I'd probably just send it to England and have it manual converted but I mean I already have a lot of nice manual cars and four five six things so if it's an easy fix or easiest fix we'll do it but yeah it definitely is the x6m well unfortunately I checked at the car ninjas and there's no progress on the x6m or it's not an M anymore either unfortunately that car showed up barely running and after digging around we discovered that there it is not an M motor anymore it had been swapped with a regular uh V8 twin turbo so about 150 less horsepower but right now it's a negative horsepower because it just runs like absolute garbage but uh the car ninja hasn't been able to touch it because uh he's down a mechanic as well so I guess if you're a good mechanic and want to come to Kansas we can have lots of work for you but he promises he'll be looking at it soon uh sure that's all thank you so much for watching and I'm so glad I didn't crash the Aston Martin\n"