P1800

Volvo: the Best Japanese Car, Ever

So, this picture takes some explaining:

A few years ago, I bought a Subaru Outback (LL. Bean edition with the 245 HP horizontally opposed 6... a very fun car and great on trips). Subaru used to sponsor the ski team I was on, but other than that I had very little exposure to them. Growing up in rural NY, the nearest Subaru dealer was about 50 miles away and the only thing I really knew about them was that all Subaru's were 4WD.

So, since my ski team was sponsored by them, and they're all 4WD, I somehow got it in my mind that they were Swedish. I figured Saab was known for front wheel drive, Subaru (known for 4WD) must be from the same snowy, cold place.

Fast forward to when I bought my Outback. I went to work the day after I bought it and started looking into the owners clubs locally and just learning more about my car and the company. I went to Subaru's web page and noticed they were owned by Fuji Heavy Industries (I think). So I lean over to one of the network engineers I worked with and said "don't you think it's odd that a Japanese multi-national corp owns a Swedish car manufacturer?". He informs me that Subaru's are Japanese. After I express my surprise at this... well, basically everybody I worked with gave me crap for weeks about it. "let's go out for some of that fine Swedish food, sushi" and stuff like that.

So, I get my 1800... an actual Swedish car, and one of my "friends" sends me this shirt... "Volvo: the Best Japanese Car, Ever".

Right. 4 years later, and I still can't live it down.

At some point I'll tell you the story about when I figured out Bruce Wayne is Batman.

Got the Seats out

Well, I worked from home today. Had a lot of documents to review and haven't been able to get time at work to do it. No really.. I worked from home.

For the first time in a long time it wasn't incredibly hot in the middle of the day. So I took an hour out to go pull the seats out of the 1800. This was the first real big "bag and tag" fest I had, so I probably was a little too anal about things. I've now got:

- bags and/or boxes of all the parts of the front seat with each part labeled inside each bag
- pictures of basically every part as it came out (at 7 megapixels no less)
- a notebook with diagrams of each part to help me remember what goes where. This is particularly important for things like the seats that have spacers in the mounting hardware. Knowing what side the spacers will go on will likely become pretty important.

So, here's the fruits of my labor:

This picture was taken about 15 seconds before I smashed a wrench through the passenger floorpan to prove to Shmoo how rusted the car is. Yeah, the wrench went right through.

So, now T has something to do next time we're working in the garage on the car: clean all the parts I just took out. The screws are all nasty and the seat rails are worse. I bought him a scrub brush and some 409 tonight. He's excited about the prospect now. We'll see how he is in a week.

Also, I made the swank new graphic for the top of the page. w00t!

Rust? What Rust?

Just to avoid any confusion, there is some rust on this car.

Yes... "some" rust. The horizontal rails are about gone, the jack points have totally disappeared, and all the wheel wells are pretty messed up. Yes, "some" rust.

I was reading a book the other day on how to restore cars (OK, it was the Complete Idiot's Guide to Restoring Classic Cars) and it had a lot of indicators on how to tell if a car is too much trouble to buy:

Lots of bondo on existing body work (check.. I have lots of bondo)
Large amounts of visible rust on the underbody (check... see pic above)
Extra parts welded to the main frame (check.. have a whole second frame, actually).

So, I clearly have "maybe you shouldn't by this car" car. However, no where in this book is there a GOTO statement that says "if you're totally emotionally invested in this car and are going to restore it anyway, GOTO Chapter 6". But I eventually figured it out on my own and stopped depressing myself with the first 5 chapters.

Terran and I spent the evening photographing the car. Since huge parts of the car are about to be dissassembled, we figured it was a good idea to take pics of how everything was put together to make sure we had basically the same car when we're done with it. So far we've done the body and the engine compartment. Need to do the suspension and interior tonight. We just got a new 7 megapixel Sony Cybershot. We took 120 pictures of the car last night for a whopping 400 MEGS of photo's. Thank god for the external 300GB drive I have on this Mac.

Getting Ready

So, I've quickly realized that my garage is a pig sty compared with how clean it needs to be to tear this car apart. I started taking the carpet out of the car and noticed a) I didn't have any real way to store the carpet and b) the floor pans were well beyond repair. I actually managed to dig a hole through the driver side pan, but the passenger side doesn't have "holes" But is is really thin.

In reponse to all this, Heidi went out and bought a bunch of rubbermaid containers of various sizes to stash stuff in as it comes out of the car. They stack really nice and should allow us to keep things straight.

Then, in a fit of spending too much money, we found a rolling tool chest for sale at Sears on Saturday (one of their "one day only" sales). It's a 5 drawer rolling base with an 8 drawer top. Since we moved into our new house last year, I haven't had any place to put all my tools. While the garage is fairly large, there was no place to stash everything. There's just been this organic pile of "tools and screws" on top of the workbench that really does not help productivity at all.

Today Terran helped me clean up the garage a bit (including vacuuming the piles of rust that had fallen out of the car) and put tools away. I can actually see the workbench now, and all my screwdrivers/wrenches/sockets/air tools have a home. I'm very excited. It's a bit silly, but I think it's a critical step to being able to actually get the car apart.

Next step: take the seats out. That will let me get the rest of the carpet out and finally get a good look at the floor.

It's like going to a funeral and bringing home the body

Or so my dad commented upon helping with picking up the 1800 this weekend. On saturday, the family, beetle, and I went to upstate NY to pick up the car. The owner wasn't home, but I had the registration already. It was simply a matter of getting the car onto the trailer and hauling it away.

First off, there's a bit more rust than I though there was initially. The floorpan will likely have to be replaced, along with the trunk bed. the surface rust isn't that bad, actually.. but the bondo seems to be protecting it. There was no battery, so the car wasn't going to get motivated under it's own power. Further, the two front tires were totally flat. One we managed to get air into long enough to work... the other one was basically destroyed. Thankfully we had a spare, so after a quick change we were basically ready.

We ended up using a 12 volt winch powered off a battery charger my dad had supplied to get the car up onto the trailer. Heidi had to sit in the car a few times and steer while we manuvered it into place. She wasn't really keen on the fact, though in truth she was more worried about snakes in the car than the car itself.

The car is now in my garage in MD. The car is a couple feet in the air and the wheels are off so we can start to get an idea of what's really wrong with the car. Some things of interest so far:

- Lots of bondo
- VERY clean interior with no tears in the seats
- lots of rust in the trunk
- the front rotors barely turn at all
- it's impossible to get in and out of gear with any degree of assurance

Basically, it's time to tear the car apart and figure out what we're going to work on first.

Pictures can be found at the 1800 gallery.

My New 1972 Volvo P1800E

Some back story as a way of introduction. I'm originally from a small town in upstate NY south of Buffalo. My neighbor down the road collected volvo's of various states of disrepair... While everyone in town didn't know his name, everybody knew who the "volvo guy" was.

When I was about to turn 16 (1993, for a point of reference), he bought a 1972 1800E. I was instantly in love. Now, I need to warn you, this isn't a standard looking 1800. It's got a huge aftermarket non-functional hood scoop, a big aftermarket front airscoop, and a huge red racing stripe on a body of white. So, the lines were nice, but it had some non-standard 1800 character.

I saved up most of the summer to buy it.. I figured I'd be getting my license soon, and that would be a great car. Now, it had some problems at the time (the biggest is the frame was pretty rusted... so the owner had a second parallel frame welded in place) but I really wanted it. My father on the other hand, didn't share the same view of the car. He thought I needed reliable transportation. So, ultimately he won out, and I ended up with a 91 Pontiac Sunbird (yikes!).

Years pass... I go of to school, get married, have kids,etc. Three weeks ago I was driving back home to see my folks. As I drove past the Volvo Guy, I saw a for sale sign in the window of the 1800. I basically slammed on the brakes of the car I was driving, got out, and told me wife I was going to buy the car. She knew how I felt about the car already (I explained it to her years ago) so thankfully she didn't try and stop me :)

After a very short negotiation process (and me not spending the time looking at the car that I should have), I bought it for $50 more than I was going to buy it for in 1993. I figured the increased cost of inflation was damn near offset by the fact that the car hadn't been garage stored for 3 or 4 years.

So, I'm going back up in a week with a friend to haul the car down on a trailer. I'll keep you posted here on how things go with the car, pictures, and stories of what are sure to be a bit of a disaster at times.