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Once in a while (believe it or not), we misplace a message. If you do not get a response from us within a few days, please send us your message again!Calling Model Car CollectorsI'm a collector of Volvo model cars. I'm looking for other collectors to exchange information. When you can help, please send a mail to:
With kind regards, Volvo for life I am 19, and a student at the University of Maryland. In June of 1980, in Buffalo NY, I rode in my first car; it was a 1966-1/2 Volvo Amazon. To this day my father and I still have this car. Please put a picture of it up, we spent a lot of time and effort to make her look this beautiful, and I plan to have it the rest of my life. Your page has been so helpful. I am thinking of writing a nice article of how my Volvo has been with me my whole life (I have pictures with the car from age three and up!). Would you be interested in posting?Sean Bernsohn bernsohn@wam.umd.edu You bet! On all counts. Volvo artI drew this in late 1998 as I was first getting into drawing classic autos. This is my 1967 122S, which was my first car at 17 and which I have had for five and a half years now. In that time it's seen a lot of miles put on it -- it's been driven from my home in Bellingham, Washington, just south of the Canadian border, to LA and back several times now, and two summers ago I drove it on a 120-mile round-trip commute every day on the LA freeways. In September it saw a 28-hour trip from Las Vegas to Bellingham, with (it turned out) a very important bolt missing from the transmission. I discovered that ironman road trips are even more fun if you get to crawl under the car and refill the transmission with oil every time you stop for gas.
 I am finishing my time as a graphic design student at Western Washington University in June, and hope to soon have some actual money to throw at my poor, undermaintained old Volvo, especially the suspension. I've only just looked at your site, but it seems as though I could find some useful information here. There are a lot of 122s in your gallery that look an awful lot like I want mine to -- I'd like to put the full sway bars and Bilsteins treatment on it, go for poly bushings, lower it, put wider wheels and much better tires on it, etc, etc. Also, the car is currently Weberized with the 32/36 conversion, and another friend of mine is absolutely itching to help me fuel-inject it instead after it has some rebuild work done on it.
I look forward to further exploring your magazine. Glad you found us, Christopher, and thanks for the excellent pic! Bucks for the bang?[Boris Kort-Packard's "Amanda" was the subject of our road test a year ago... see also the photo in our gallery.]
Boris has located a parts car, along with the parts-locating assistance of Tom Swartz. From here on out, it's essentially a jigsaw puzzle until all the parts can be reunited.
More photos and description to follow...
Regards, BushingsI just finished replacing the upper and lower ball joints, and upper and lower front suspension bushings on my '62 122. Wow! What an amazing difference in how the car drives. I had no idea how bad the old bushings and joints must have been.Anyway, I found your article on this topic very useful, and I wanted to thank you for writing it and making it available. I discovered the freed spring made a nice rest for the brake assembly when it was loose. Overall, it was a very satisfying job, particularly when the long bolts slid right out. Now with new front and rear suspension bushings, I guess the next step would be ipd anti-sways. That will be a bit of a job because I noticed the sleeves over the extensions are frozen. Have you dealt with that?
Thanks again, Nothing a hacksaw wouldn't make quick work of, Jeff -- and new end links come with the bars anyway. Winter in MinnesotaHere is a little story related to a incident that I have recently experienced.You can always tell that it winter in Minnesota. When cars don't start and the exhaust freezes to the roads and bumpers of the cars that have. On my way to work, I had a chance to practice some of my winter driving skills. While driving into the blinding winter sun in my Volvo C70 fitted with snow tires and wheels, I had a chance to test how well the brakes worked, and that little thing called a contact patch. Two times, I had to make quick panic stops and two times I saw cars that had randomly stalled in the middle of the freeway. None of them were Volvos. The first panic stop, I had a chance to practice using my ABS when my wheels began to brake from their contact patch on the icy cement of the tunnel I had just passed through. As I exited the tunnel, I found that the freeway had simply stopped. I pressed on my brakes to slow, then I heard the squeal of my tires losing traction, then a familiar grind of the ABS, once I was slowed enough to check my rearview and react. I pushed the shifter into first gear and pressed the gas to accelerate onto the shoulder to prevent from being rear-ended by a hulking SUV who was shorting the distance between us faster than I was comfortable with. After we all had stopped, I looked over to see the SUV's front bumper sitting next my passenger door. My second brake test was quite sudden and there was no traction loss, thus the stop was quick and relatively uneventful. And people wonder why I have stopped driving my Volvo 1800 as frequently as I used to.
Chris McNary How Not to Build a MotorPhil, great article. I wish it could have been highlighted somehow so more people would read it. It contains the most typical mistakes made by the average enthusiast. I spend many hours each month trying to explain to callers why building an engine the way you described won't give them the performance they are lookin for. Sometimes they just turn away, disappointed that my advice does not agree with their plans.The problem is that there is a whole generation of bored out B18s out there that were built the way you describe. They perform better than a 250,000 mile, worn out, stock B18, with leak down of 10-20%, compression around 90-100 and worn out SUs, but don't perform nearly as well as a B18 rebuilt to stock specs with rebuilt distributor and SUs. And they can't compare to one that has had a proper job done on the head. By the way, I assume you added to the problems by putting new points, rotor and cap on the old distributor and put it back in the rebuilt motor without having it checked. Four out of five distributors I check are junk and have to be replaced. This should be added as point number 6 in your great list for a smarter rebuild. Good work. Keep at it.
John Parker John Parker won both (so far) Vintage Volvo Gran Prix with his 1800S. No, John, I actually learned the distributor lesson on an earlier motor, not the one in the article. Thanks for pointing that out! The article in question is now in the Archive. Maine Forest RallyHi Lee,Claes, Bill, and I were just floored by the article. I think it's the finest bit of rally journalism I've seen! If there were an SCCA Pulitzer... I'm planning on forwarding it to Ed Jacobs who is the media contact for SCCA ProRally. I'm sure he'd like to see what kind of exposure Pro Rally is getting these days. Thanks again, and can't wait until Maine next year! Rumor has it that a Swedish VW Golf F2 car might make an appearance...
Christian Edstrom Back to the Top |
Here are the results of the crash damage. Boris tried to negotiate a slippery hill [ with black ice] and collided with a police vehicle attending to two other cars that had gone off in the same place. Some aches and pains for the driver, and the Volvo suffered major damage. We have unbolted the front of the car to fix and fit the panels back together. The radiator got squashed and the fan blades were jammed around the water pump. The car overall 
did a great job of absorbing the inpact without damaging the unibody structure itself.