It's time to rescue the Volvo....I'm going to haul a load of scrap metal up to Tucson today, and try to bring the Volvo home.
The Volvo has been in my life in one form or another since the mid 60s when it was new. It started life as a 1964 544, bright red, it was owned by one of my father's co-workers. I remember seeing the car in front of the house in Tucson before 1967 (that's when we moved to the other side of town). The guy who owned it wrecked it in 1972, and it sat for a while at my dad's work place, with the front end caved in. My dad bought it from him for $25, and we went to a local import junkyard and bought another red front end for $65, got the radiator fixed, bought a used fan blade, and us kids put it back together. I was about 11 at the time.
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My folks used the Volvo for transportation, we took it to Mexico with us when we lived there for a year in 1973/74, and I learned how to drive a manual transmission in it when I was 14. We had a 1/4 mile long dirt driveway, so I'd drive up and down the driveway every day.
My older brother was driving it in 1980 when it got rearended. The body shell was ruined, but we found a parts car for a few hundred bucks, and I swapped the good parts from ours into the other one. I think the replacement was a 1966 model, could have been 1965, I'll look at the numbers on it later today and verify. The parts car was light blue, and many of the parts we put on it were red, so it looked like crap. My dad decided it needed a paint job, so he bought a bunch of spray cans of white paint, and had at it.
My twin brother David had an Opel in the early 80s, which he wrecked coming down from Mt Lemon in 1984. He needed a car, so he got the Volvo from my dad, and drove it for quite a while. By 1994 it was tired, so I got to fix it. I got another parts car, this one a 1969ish wagon, from a friend who ran a machine shop. The engine was out and apart, but it was the later bigger B20 model, and we decided to hot rod the old 544 by adding 200 CCs displacement. I gave the B20 engine a complete rebuild, and David soon swapped the Su carbs for a single Weber 2bbl, which is on it now. He drove it off and on for several years, then decided to fix the brakes about 10 years ago, and there it has sat since.
The recent pics below are from 2008.
The Volvo has been in my life in one form or another since the mid 60s when it was new. It started life as a 1964 544, bright red, it was owned by one of my father's co-workers. I remember seeing the car in front of the house in Tucson before 1967 (that's when we moved to the other side of town). The guy who owned it wrecked it in 1972, and it sat for a while at my dad's work place, with the front end caved in. My dad bought it from him for $25, and we went to a local import junkyard and bought another red front end for $65, got the radiator fixed, bought a used fan blade, and us kids put it back together. I was about 11 at the time.
. My folks used the Volvo for transportation, we took it to Mexico with us when we lived there for a year in 1973/74, and I learned how to drive a manual transmission in it when I was 14. We had a 1/4 mile long dirt driveway, so I'd drive up and down the driveway every day.
My older brother was driving it in 1980 when it got rearended. The body shell was ruined, but we found a parts car for a few hundred bucks, and I swapped the good parts from ours into the other one. I think the replacement was a 1966 model, could have been 1965, I'll look at the numbers on it later today and verify. The parts car was light blue, and many of the parts we put on it were red, so it looked like crap. My dad decided it needed a paint job, so he bought a bunch of spray cans of white paint, and had at it.
My twin brother David had an Opel in the early 80s, which he wrecked coming down from Mt Lemon in 1984. He needed a car, so he got the Volvo from my dad, and drove it for quite a while. By 1994 it was tired, so I got to fix it. I got another parts car, this one a 1969ish wagon, from a friend who ran a machine shop. The engine was out and apart, but it was the later bigger B20 model, and we decided to hot rod the old 544 by adding 200 CCs displacement. I gave the B20 engine a complete rebuild, and David soon swapped the Su carbs for a single Weber 2bbl, which is on it now. He drove it off and on for several years, then decided to fix the brakes about 10 years ago, and there it has sat since.
The recent pics below are from 2008.
lol.
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