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1971 145 Express Competition Service Rally Car Restoration Project

Some updates:
I picked up this little spot blaster from Harbor Freight. It's cheap, but does the trick pretty well. I'll be using it to restore smaller rusted parts off the car. Here I'm starting with the roll bar that had some pretty bad rust at the base. You can see that this little blaster does a good job. I'm just using a little compressor here as well. Hope to find a vintage monster cast iron made in USA compressor at some point:



 
Also, I continued the stripping of the interior - removing the foam that was glued to the roof. You can see that there is a lot of good metal underneath:





Under the foam was some of that thin black sound deadening matting. It's glued on there pretty good, so I have to figure out how that's going to come off. Suggestions? I'll have to be careful with a heat gun - don't want to warp anything.
 
jack8745 said:
to get that stuff off use a small torch, scraper knife and lots of goof off or acetone. The heat gun will take an eternity.
heat up a small area until you see it bubble then imiedeatly start to scrape it off - 3-4 square inches at a time

see page one of my "resto" http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=262585
Click to expand...

Wow! Nice work. That's definitely an inspiration for what I'm aiming for. I'll have a heck of a lot more rust repair on my hands than you had with that wagon. But hopefully after a while I'll get good at it with all the practice and it'll go faster! Thanks for the tip.
 
Some more progress to report. I finished stripping the paint from the fuel tank bay. Then I sand blasted with the spot blaster to get all the rust out of there. I highly recommend this Harbor Freight spot blaster for small jobs like this where you need to work in close quarters and blast rust out of tight corners. It worked well. Here are some pics of the prime/paint and fuel tank install. This is an early tank with the smaller fuel sender, but I'll use it for now. Eventually I'll probably swap back to the correct later tank with the larger sender. In many ways, this was really a practice run at some of the body work that lies ahead.



 
Looks much nicer now, and it's really an inspiration to see what this car could look like if all goes well. Here's a pic with the trunk mat in place. Looks so much better than before.



Just gotta keep chippin' away.
 
The garage is starting to clear out a little bit, but still so much to move. So buy all my parts!
 
I hear that, I need to stop buying parts until me and the lady get our own place. The parts here are in piles I can't control anymore. Did you find the info I had sent you?
 



The grill is NOS. Thanks to Ian I found it on Ebay Germany. Original NOS late model 140 GT grill - it's dated 10/72. Can you believe it's been on a shelf for 40 years? Makes you wonder what other goodies are out there gathering dust. I can't imagine how rare it is. Sure, I could have cut a stock grill, but who knows how many I would have hacked up before I got it "right". The fog light brackets are obviously not NOS, but they are the correct brackets for this GT grill. They will clean up nicely with that rust remover I mentioned early on. It's scary to think that with shipping, just these parts cost almost what I paid for the car!
 
Awesome find (the car itself, and the grille)! I've been watching this one with interest. It would be sweet to put that roof stamping on a 245 as a camping vehicle; seems there are more and more off-roady Volvo builds these days. You could even integrate a pop-up camper section like a VW Westfalia van. Anyways, I digress...carry on...
 
^ Is that Swedish craigslist?

^^ There were some 245s made with the high top. Don't know much about them, but they do exist!
 
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