Dates from October 2008For quite a while, the nearside load bay side window had been leaking, badly.  The steel panelwork immediately below it inside the boot was separated away from the lip that holds the seal, and the base of the quarter panel was rotted out.  In fact, it was completely and utterly shot.  The arch had gone, the inner arch was holed into the boot, the lower valance was damaged, the base / floor inside the quarter panel, above had disintegrated, the list goes on......As much as I'd love to learn to weld, even if I had the equipment ...read more

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Dates from August 2008A while ago, I saw a photo on the internet of a white estate on wide slot mags, and it looked so right.  Ever since then, I was on the lookout for a similar set of wheels, and I finally found a set on eBay.  As soon as I'd arrived home from collecting them, I couldn't resist trying them on the car!The guy I bought them from had taken them off a recently imported '63 Ford Galaxie that he was returning to standard.  Fortunately the wheel sleeve nuts were included in the sale, as these turned out ...read more

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Dates from April 2008Approaching MOT time, and alongside rejigging the exhaust & fitting the correct estate over the axle pipe for the Simons system, it was finally time to sort out the manky front bumper.When my father first bought this car in '94, the front overriders were already missing.  Since then, daily use in London had taken its toll, and the previously straight bumper was an utter mess.  I had been slowly acquiring good bumper sections and finally had enough to make a good front bumper, complete with overriders.This was fitted in between sorting out the exhaust.  In the end, ...read more

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Dates from late summer 2007Whilst stripping out the interior to enable the seatbelt mounts to be repaired, I discovered that the rear floorpans were also shot.  They had already been patched before, and even where not holed, the metal was badly pitted so they ideally needed replacing completely.  There are two rear floorpan repair sections available from Brookhouse Classic Volvo Parts - one is very cheap (about £30 a side) but also crude, the other was much more expensive (about £85 a side) and looked right but Simon didn't know how well they fitted as he's only sold one pair ...read more

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Dates from late summer 2007The front inner wing lower sections were looking somewhat icky - a light prod with a screwdriver revealed that in some areas just the underseal was holding it together....  This was an area where Volvo had spotwelded a reinforcement to the inner wing to help triangulate the chassis rails to bulkhead.  However water gets in between the double skinning with predictable results :-(When it came to rebuilding this, Lance suggested replacing the double-skinned section with a single skin of thicker guage steel, to replicate the original look, but without reproducing the rust trap, and true to ...read more

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Dates from late summer 2007

The rust was slowly talking hold, and taking a screw driver to some slight bubbling around the lower rear seatbelt mounts revealed a lot of fresh air.....  The rear floorpans & some lower areas of the front inner wings weren't much better either.

The seat pan was badly holed, and the inner arch structure to seat pan and inner sill was heavily corroded too.  This was all cut out and fresh steel let in extremely neatly.

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