Gambled on a $1000 prius! bad hv battery and motor knocking

I purchased a $1000 Prius on marketplace from a seller that need it out of his driveway. It has the red triangle of death and was involved in a collision. Seller tried his best to fix the collision by stitching the bumper and replacing the broken fender and headlight. Headlight wasn't HID so it's not a direct plug and play. Fender wasn't painted and the bumper has zip tie stitches. It runs but it's knocking/misfiring very bad and very underpowered with all the warning lights on. The codes showed that it needs a hybrid battery replaced (p0a80) and misfire on cylinder 4. The misfires actually makes the engine sound like it's knocking. The 12volt aux battery is also dead, I have to use a 12 volt standard battery to test drive it longer since the Prius will not work with a dead 12 volt battery even when running.

Fixed the misfire by replacing the boot on one of the ignition coils which is a $6 fix. A dielectric grease could have made the fix on the cracked boot.

I finally was able to restore the 12 volt aux battery and since I saved $250 from doing that I decided to buy a grid charger and try reviving the hv battery. It didn't go well, a bad module is a bad module, grid charging can't fix it. I bought 2 good modules online and replaced the 2 bad modules registering 6.5 volts even after charging. Load balance them with my grid charger and it's back to life again.

 

me checking the ignition coils.

 

158k miles and the interior is very clean. This is my 3rd Prius and this one got low miles compared to my 1st which has 247k miles and still running (I sold it to my friend) and the 2nd one got totaled from a collision with 200k miles (also sold to my friend both of them!)

 

xtool a30d

 

replacing my tail lights, a very easy DIY.

 

completing my HID to LED conversion, driver side HID is actually flickering and I have to use the extra H4 LED bulb that I used on my passenger side. Due to the collision repairs, I have a driver side HID assembly and a Halogen assembly on the passenger side. The LED on the passenger side doesn't have a good light distribution, it seems to have some scattered reflection but it still is ok for me. For the HID conversion, the H4 LED will not fit without trimming the holder, the correct LED should be D4(S or R) To make the high and low beams work on an H4 on a HID assembly, re-wiring is needed which means cutting the ballast connection and tapping into the shutter + supply (for high beam) Overall I'm satisfied with the conversion since I don't like the HID suddenly turning off randomly while driving.

 

Painted and fixed the bumper. Have to do it twice since the 1st base coat mixed by Oreilly was a shade darker. The store gladly accepted how I complained that the color is just way off. It will never match since the existing paint is 15 yrs old but looking at the results it was just too dark. They found out that there's another shade for the same paint code and tried that one out. Also I painted the clear coat too dry (newbie in spray painting) initially and was able to fix it on the 2nd try. Overall the paint materials cost me roughly $200 but I still have the tools and left over clear coat for other projects.

 

they do, you can have it in spray can or in a pint size regular can. Previously they have a guy that uses an instrument that can match the paint instead of paint code but they don't do that anymore.. maybe because it can't really match (defective)