Update 8/17/2016 - Car Show Prep!

Hey hey out there! My big news is that I'll be attending the Volvo Club of America Nationals at Road America in Wisconsin next month! Very exciting, this will be my first Nationals, and really my first Volvo-specific event since Carlisle 2011!! Crazy right?

So I've been doing a lot of prep to the car to get it ready to actually sit on a show field! Mechanically, it's pretty sound now (though I do worry about the impending doom of the ETM). However, the cosmetics leave a lot to be desired. It's a nice looking car, better looking than most C70s out there no doubt, but it's not up to my standards. So most of the work has been to correct that. Anyways, onto the work that's been done:


The big news right now is some rust has developed! This is 100% my fault and I am not happy at all about it. It's happening in the seal around the rear window.. The weather stripping dry rotted away years ago, and the bare metal underneath finally succumbed a bit to the tin worm. But my stupid ass decided to take matters into my own hands by putting in some silicone caulk to stop it... I did apply some rust proofing before i laid down the silicone, but water has still been getting in and speeding up the rust a lot!! Luckily I noticed it before it got too bad, and have an appointment with a local body shop next week. They will be removing the window, sand blasting all the rust away, and then refinishing the metal around the window and then reinstalling the window properly. Unfortunately, the new weather stripping costs almost $400 from Volvo!!! Absolutely ridiculous, so they will just be painting the metal and leaving it like that... Not an OEM look, but it should get the job done just fine.

This is something that has annoyed me for a long time, the badging on the rear. Once upon a time, I had the whole rear de-badged, but then some idiot taxi driver went and rear ended me. When the car came back from the body shop, the "C70" badging had magically reappeared! So I'm in the process finally of removing that, since I love the clean look of a de-badged car. Most of the residue is gone now, but it needs a bit more work to go away all together.

Next comes the wheels. The Cassiopeia wheels that are on the car are fairly rare, and I think they suit the car brilliantly. I got them off Craigslist years ago for $150. They were straight and not curbed at all, but the clear coat was coming off in places and they were badly corroded. Presentable I guess, but certainly not show worthy. Over the years that I've had them, I've tried Plasti-Dip a couple of different times, but it never looked good obviously. Now, I'm stepping it up slightly and actually painting them. The process to do them properly, aka powder coat and diamond cutting, is just too expensive for me at this point in time. So I'm just giving them a quick coat of Duplicator Hyper Silver to make them look a bit more presentable. Only have one wheel done so far, and I'm happy enough with how it's turned out. I had planned on repainting the calipers silver, but I actually think the red gives it a much needed bit of contrast.

Last but not least, the last remaining bit of the high school version of my car, is the awkwardly placed aftermarket boost gauge I installed 6 or 7 years ago... It just looked awful and the pod was actually starting to come dislodged from its mount. That was my cue that it was time for it to go. So here it is now, a nice clean stock dash, save for the swapped in V70R gauge faces and blue Dave Barton steering wheel overlay.

That's it for now!