VulvaDipper
Member
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2015
- Location
- Waterford, CA
Okay, I have had my car for quite a while now, and I've been needing to start a build thread.
I'll try to keep a few very up-to-date pictures here at the top along with a link to my PhotoBucket below it:
http://photobucket.com/user/maxlopina/library
Until I catch up to present day in this build thread, all updates will be edited into this post. I figure if I just start one like I am right now, and start from the beginning, I can catch up to present day quickly enough, even if I just post once a week.
So, I was 14 years old, and looking for a Volvo.
I knew I wanted a wagon, and I knew it had to be Silver or Black, and as time went by I got more picky. So I was looking for a silver or black pre-86 245 turbo, that was manual, and had black interior.
I had a few that popped up but they would always be auto, and I knew even if I ended up with an N/A, I could +t or turbo motor swap it easier than I could manual swap it. I checked Craigslist religiously, and ended up seeing this one day:
So after convincing my friend to give me and my dad a ride to Sanger(a town we'd never heard of):
I landed not too far from home, looking at this:
Got some gas, and that's my friend Sammy's Bugeye in the background. I'm so thankful for him giving me a ride to get it.
Got home without a hiccup, and here is what she looked like!
1985 245 GL, with an m46, b230f, black leather, lh2.2, no dome lights, broken taillight, some damage by each taillight, a spare tire, a corona where the spare should be that was flat and had a bent iner barrel, it didn't leak a drop of anything, it had some crappy 20-year-old respray, and the rear hatch didn't stay up.
After some inspecting, I found out the problem stated in the craigslist ad was just some very bad u-joints, and I ordered some from rock auto.
Along with other things there was also an order sent in to IPD and a couple eBay things too:
-Ball Joints
-Tie Rod Ends
-Strut Mounts
-Saab Struts (for lowering)
-Cap and Rotor
-Spark Plugs
-Air Filter
-Sun Visor Clips
-Shift Boot
-Quick Disconnect Battery Thingy
-Rear Hatch Struts
-Timing Belt & Tensioner
-Accessory Belts
-Cam, Crank, & Aux. Shaft Seals
-Brake Pads & Rotors
-Brake Lines
-E-Brake Cables & Shoes
-Carrier Bearing
-Motor Mounts
-Exhaust Hangers
-Taillights
And I think that's close to all of it.
After those parts came in, I did the U-Joints and Carrier Bearing Bushing and it drove great... For a 30 year old Volvo Wagon.
Then I installed some of the parts from that list, including my new tails.
Before:
After:
I ended up at the part where I needed to make the short struts. So I pulled the drivers side strut and started disassembling it..
Then cut two inches out of the housing above the seat, and welded the top back on.
Then we realized that the Saab struts are just barely too big. So we ground off the paint, greased them up and shoved them in.
We made a spacer to take up the difference in height from the housing to the insert and then we started cutting coils. We started with two and I wasn't happy with the height so we did one more, ending with this. The pictures accidentally got watermarked when I was editing other photos, lol.
Now we move on to the rear, the springs bolt in so I just cut three coils and called it good, and I'm glad I did because any lower and I wouldn't have been able to drive it because I later learned that my driveline hits the tunnel due to it needing an adjustable pahard bar to center the axle, and a bunch of bushings probably need replacement too.
So my car was at the height I liked and it was at my dad's shop while I finished up the brakes and whatnot. when I got a picture message from my friend who is in on our little "dipper" thing. It was a picture of my car with the banner on it. So at this point the car looked like this:
My birthday was coming up and me and my brother were killing time at a Best Buy waiting to meet up with a guy from Craigslist for some parts my brother was buying. We found a radio that I really liked and my brother decided he'd pay half for my birthday present. So I put that in and I love it.
I now had my license and all that good stuff and my car was all ready to drive and bring home. The last time I had been at the shop I had started my car to make sure the battery didn't die and when I tried to rev it, it would die, unless I barely eased onto the throttle. I thought maybe it was because it was SUPER low on gas, and didn't bat an eye about it. Then comes the day I'm supposed to take her home, I get to the shop, throw 5 gallons of gas into it, and fire it up. As soon as I rev it up, it dies. So now I have some weird problem that just popped up, and the last thing I had done was the timing belt, but it was fine after that and it drove fine to the place it was parked when I found this problem. It was a very long process to figure out what was wrong with it and it ended up being the AMM. So I put a new(to me) AMM on it and it ran fine, but seemed to run rich, and use a lot of fuel. I didn't care, I HAD MY VOLVO. I tried a few different AMMs and they all did the same thing, one or the other, where they would make it die, or run rich. the one I have now seems okay, but I don't get great gas mileage. Meh, whatever.
Now I was beginning to start driving it, the tires were pretty worn, and I could only afford two tires. So I bought two 60 series tires for the front, fixed the messed up corona for the front(putting the spare back where it belongs, IN THE TRUNK), and got an alignment.
The car stayed like that for a while, I did a couple "photoshoots", and it eventually developed a minor oil leak.-_-
So, when made my short struts and I cut the spring on the passenger front, I had been up for more than 48 hours, and apparently I cut half of a coil less than the driver side so the drivers side was lower.. Well one night I cut the other half coil off the passenger side and it not only fixed the unevenness, but it lowered my car more.. I didn't drive my car home that night because we had to take home a customers car to see if it acted up after sitting all night and getting fully cold.. So this was the first time I drove it at this height other than my test drive around the complex by my dads shop to get the springs to settle the night I leveled it.. And then the next day, my dad asked me to take him to the bank when I came to get my car since he didn't want to drive his flatbed tow truck for obvious reasons, I said no problem.. We went there, and I started to realize just how much lower my car is now than it was before on the short drive over there.. On the way back we were coming up to a railroad crossing that I know is messed up and have been over probably 10000 times (a shut down one luckily, and it is only paved over on the side I went over on the way TO the bank, not that it matters because they did a very ****ty job) so its a two-lane road each way, and I got in the right lane so that people could go around me as I went slow over the tracks, I was going about five, but then I heard the loudest noise, and realized we had stopped, and I immediately figured out what happened, and tried to back up, wasn't happening, so I shut it off.. Looked what the problem was and I saw that my crossmember had not only hit, but it bent down into the crack between the road and railroad track..
Luckily, we were about two blocks from my dads shop so my dad ran over to the shop and grabbed his tow truck and brought my car back to the shop. So now I needed a new crossmember and steering rack.
I lucked out, and a member here told me that he had a crossmember about an hour & a half from me that I could have for free! I went and picked it up! So I kept up on my local Pick-n-Pull's inventory and waited for them to have a car I could grab the rack out of. I ended up getting the rack from a burgundy 244, and I snatched the mudflaps, grille, license plate frame, and dash cubby from it. OH! And a set of horns off a BEAT 264. AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF: It was a Half-Price weekend so I got the rack for only $20.
So I have my car all torn apart, a little extra money, and I decide to buy an oil pan gasket to fix that minor oil leak it has. Then, I get to that stage and (in true TurboBricks spirit) decide to not put it on like the lazy dumbass that I am. SO as I type this, my car is out front staining the street. LOL.
Since we had the new crossmember handy, we decided to heat it up and bend up the edges so it slides over things rather than hit them and bend the other way like it did with the train tracks.
Anyway, I get it all fixed and done but now my steering wheel is crooked, and I'm sure the toe isn't 100% perfect.
The mudflaps drug constantly for like the first month of having them, it was great.
One day before school, it was raining and I messed around a little bit on my way to my girlfriend's house and when I got out of the car I found out one of the ****ty condition tires the car came with was leaking, so now I was back to the spare.
I refused to buy tires for these ugly-ass, small wheels. So I had four dirty coronas and a spare.
Then one day I guess I felt like doing something and I decided to clean my wheels!
Not too long after that, I was at the shop one night, and decided to see what my car would be like with no rear springs since I've never been happy with the rear height because it has bigger tires back there.
The driveline was touching the tunnel constantly like this, but it was worth it for the picture and the exhaust dragging drive around the block.
It'd now been a couple months since that and nothing has really changed with the car until one day I am on here, and see this:
I was ecstatic about this because I had a few hundred to spend on wheels/tires and these were just too good to be true. I started PM'ing with the seller and ended up making a deal. I sent half through PayPal to have him hold them for me, and I just went yesterday(6/20/15), after staying up all night at the shop, and picked them up 2.5 hours away from me. They have good tires, no cracks/bends/rash, and they came with more than enough lug nuts for them, and they came with some stock lug nuts too! Which was nice because my car has always been missing one.
So now we are here:
Oh! In-between me seeing the ad for the wheels, and going to get them I bought a bolt that fits my shift knob, cut the head off of it, then welded it onto my shifter which I cut down, so now I have this:
HOLY CRAP! It's 4am, but my build thread is now up-to-date and the next update will be a new post about something in the future! Who knows?
I'll try to update this thread as much as I can! Thanks for reading!
I'll try to keep a few very up-to-date pictures here at the top along with a link to my PhotoBucket below it:
http://photobucket.com/user/maxlopina/library
Until I catch up to present day in this build thread, all updates will be edited into this post. I figure if I just start one like I am right now, and start from the beginning, I can catch up to present day quickly enough, even if I just post once a week.
So, I was 14 years old, and looking for a Volvo.
I knew I wanted a wagon, and I knew it had to be Silver or Black, and as time went by I got more picky. So I was looking for a silver or black pre-86 245 turbo, that was manual, and had black interior.
I had a few that popped up but they would always be auto, and I knew even if I ended up with an N/A, I could +t or turbo motor swap it easier than I could manual swap it. I checked Craigslist religiously, and ended up seeing this one day:
So after convincing my friend to give me and my dad a ride to Sanger(a town we'd never heard of):
I landed not too far from home, looking at this:
Got some gas, and that's my friend Sammy's Bugeye in the background. I'm so thankful for him giving me a ride to get it.
Got home without a hiccup, and here is what she looked like!
1985 245 GL, with an m46, b230f, black leather, lh2.2, no dome lights, broken taillight, some damage by each taillight, a spare tire, a corona where the spare should be that was flat and had a bent iner barrel, it didn't leak a drop of anything, it had some crappy 20-year-old respray, and the rear hatch didn't stay up.
After some inspecting, I found out the problem stated in the craigslist ad was just some very bad u-joints, and I ordered some from rock auto.
Along with other things there was also an order sent in to IPD and a couple eBay things too:
-Ball Joints
-Tie Rod Ends
-Strut Mounts
-Saab Struts (for lowering)
-Cap and Rotor
-Spark Plugs
-Air Filter
-Sun Visor Clips
-Shift Boot
-Quick Disconnect Battery Thingy
-Rear Hatch Struts
-Timing Belt & Tensioner
-Accessory Belts
-Cam, Crank, & Aux. Shaft Seals
-Brake Pads & Rotors
-Brake Lines
-E-Brake Cables & Shoes
-Carrier Bearing
-Motor Mounts
-Exhaust Hangers
-Taillights
And I think that's close to all of it.
After those parts came in, I did the U-Joints and Carrier Bearing Bushing and it drove great... For a 30 year old Volvo Wagon.
Then I installed some of the parts from that list, including my new tails.
Before:
After:
I ended up at the part where I needed to make the short struts. So I pulled the drivers side strut and started disassembling it..
Then cut two inches out of the housing above the seat, and welded the top back on.
Then we realized that the Saab struts are just barely too big. So we ground off the paint, greased them up and shoved them in.
We made a spacer to take up the difference in height from the housing to the insert and then we started cutting coils. We started with two and I wasn't happy with the height so we did one more, ending with this. The pictures accidentally got watermarked when I was editing other photos, lol.
Now we move on to the rear, the springs bolt in so I just cut three coils and called it good, and I'm glad I did because any lower and I wouldn't have been able to drive it because I later learned that my driveline hits the tunnel due to it needing an adjustable pahard bar to center the axle, and a bunch of bushings probably need replacement too.
So my car was at the height I liked and it was at my dad's shop while I finished up the brakes and whatnot. when I got a picture message from my friend who is in on our little "dipper" thing. It was a picture of my car with the banner on it. So at this point the car looked like this:
My birthday was coming up and me and my brother were killing time at a Best Buy waiting to meet up with a guy from Craigslist for some parts my brother was buying. We found a radio that I really liked and my brother decided he'd pay half for my birthday present. So I put that in and I love it.
I now had my license and all that good stuff and my car was all ready to drive and bring home. The last time I had been at the shop I had started my car to make sure the battery didn't die and when I tried to rev it, it would die, unless I barely eased onto the throttle. I thought maybe it was because it was SUPER low on gas, and didn't bat an eye about it. Then comes the day I'm supposed to take her home, I get to the shop, throw 5 gallons of gas into it, and fire it up. As soon as I rev it up, it dies. So now I have some weird problem that just popped up, and the last thing I had done was the timing belt, but it was fine after that and it drove fine to the place it was parked when I found this problem. It was a very long process to figure out what was wrong with it and it ended up being the AMM. So I put a new(to me) AMM on it and it ran fine, but seemed to run rich, and use a lot of fuel. I didn't care, I HAD MY VOLVO. I tried a few different AMMs and they all did the same thing, one or the other, where they would make it die, or run rich. the one I have now seems okay, but I don't get great gas mileage. Meh, whatever.
Now I was beginning to start driving it, the tires were pretty worn, and I could only afford two tires. So I bought two 60 series tires for the front, fixed the messed up corona for the front(putting the spare back where it belongs, IN THE TRUNK), and got an alignment.
The car stayed like that for a while, I did a couple "photoshoots", and it eventually developed a minor oil leak.-_-
So, when made my short struts and I cut the spring on the passenger front, I had been up for more than 48 hours, and apparently I cut half of a coil less than the driver side so the drivers side was lower.. Well one night I cut the other half coil off the passenger side and it not only fixed the unevenness, but it lowered my car more.. I didn't drive my car home that night because we had to take home a customers car to see if it acted up after sitting all night and getting fully cold.. So this was the first time I drove it at this height other than my test drive around the complex by my dads shop to get the springs to settle the night I leveled it.. And then the next day, my dad asked me to take him to the bank when I came to get my car since he didn't want to drive his flatbed tow truck for obvious reasons, I said no problem.. We went there, and I started to realize just how much lower my car is now than it was before on the short drive over there.. On the way back we were coming up to a railroad crossing that I know is messed up and have been over probably 10000 times (a shut down one luckily, and it is only paved over on the side I went over on the way TO the bank, not that it matters because they did a very ****ty job) so its a two-lane road each way, and I got in the right lane so that people could go around me as I went slow over the tracks, I was going about five, but then I heard the loudest noise, and realized we had stopped, and I immediately figured out what happened, and tried to back up, wasn't happening, so I shut it off.. Looked what the problem was and I saw that my crossmember had not only hit, but it bent down into the crack between the road and railroad track..
Luckily, we were about two blocks from my dads shop so my dad ran over to the shop and grabbed his tow truck and brought my car back to the shop. So now I needed a new crossmember and steering rack.
I lucked out, and a member here told me that he had a crossmember about an hour & a half from me that I could have for free! I went and picked it up! So I kept up on my local Pick-n-Pull's inventory and waited for them to have a car I could grab the rack out of. I ended up getting the rack from a burgundy 244, and I snatched the mudflaps, grille, license plate frame, and dash cubby from it. OH! And a set of horns off a BEAT 264. AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF: It was a Half-Price weekend so I got the rack for only $20.
So I have my car all torn apart, a little extra money, and I decide to buy an oil pan gasket to fix that minor oil leak it has. Then, I get to that stage and (in true TurboBricks spirit) decide to not put it on like the lazy dumbass that I am. SO as I type this, my car is out front staining the street. LOL.
Since we had the new crossmember handy, we decided to heat it up and bend up the edges so it slides over things rather than hit them and bend the other way like it did with the train tracks.
Anyway, I get it all fixed and done but now my steering wheel is crooked, and I'm sure the toe isn't 100% perfect.
The mudflaps drug constantly for like the first month of having them, it was great.
One day before school, it was raining and I messed around a little bit on my way to my girlfriend's house and when I got out of the car I found out one of the ****ty condition tires the car came with was leaking, so now I was back to the spare.
I refused to buy tires for these ugly-ass, small wheels. So I had four dirty coronas and a spare.
Then one day I guess I felt like doing something and I decided to clean my wheels!
Not too long after that, I was at the shop one night, and decided to see what my car would be like with no rear springs since I've never been happy with the rear height because it has bigger tires back there.
The driveline was touching the tunnel constantly like this, but it was worth it for the picture and the exhaust dragging drive around the block.
It'd now been a couple months since that and nothing has really changed with the car until one day I am on here, and see this:
I was ecstatic about this because I had a few hundred to spend on wheels/tires and these were just too good to be true. I started PM'ing with the seller and ended up making a deal. I sent half through PayPal to have him hold them for me, and I just went yesterday(6/20/15), after staying up all night at the shop, and picked them up 2.5 hours away from me. They have good tires, no cracks/bends/rash, and they came with more than enough lug nuts for them, and they came with some stock lug nuts too! Which was nice because my car has always been missing one.
So now we are here:
Oh! In-between me seeing the ad for the wheels, and going to get them I bought a bolt that fits my shift knob, cut the head off of it, then welded it onto my shifter which I cut down, so now I have this:
HOLY CRAP! It's 4am, but my build thread is now up-to-date and the next update will be a new post about something in the future! Who knows?
I'll try to update this thread as much as I can! Thanks for reading!
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