My Black Brick

Before the V8olvo rolled over, it slammed into a spinning TR7:

Jalopnik has been documenting 24 Hours of LeMons for some years now and participated with a Ford 302 V8 powered Volvo 244 last year. The car has gone through a number of different paint jobs over the past couple of years. First was black and blue, then came white with black text. Lately it’s been a “Mustard Yellow Volvo Doing 45 in the Fast Lane” and this summer it won first place. Unfortunately this week there have been a few minor disasters, including the t-boning of a TR8 and the spectacular rollover while passing a Plymouth Fury. See video below.

According to reports, the roof didn’t even crush down to the rollcage. We wish V8olvo a rapid recovery and look forward to more races!

The ipd Sport Springs are installed now and they ride great. At left are the driver-side springs, new and old. I can’t believe how much shorter the new spring is when they’re unsprung. It made installation easier than removal because we didn’t need to compress the coil. The new spring was so much shorter that it slipped right in without much compression. On the ground the car now rides only about 2″ shorter in the front, not nearly as much difference as these uninstalled springs look.

New springs on all four corners took a little more than 3 hours with 2 people. My buddy Andy has a good set of jacks and stands and we used his dad’s impact wrench to tighten up the coil compressor. It was an uneventful installation; luckily there weren’t any stripped nuts or rusted bolts to contend with. I shot pics and video.

I found an interesting anti-sway bar FAQ, posted on swedishbricks.com in 1992. A writer asks about upgrading the sway bars on her husband’s new 245:

So, we bought the ’92 240 5 spd wagon. My husband, to whom I regularly deliver hardcopy of Volvo-net wisdom, wants to know about the best width swaybars for improving cornering. He feels it is ironic that my ’76 240 wagon seems to do better without sway bars(?), and that the new car could use an upgrade. I have the general list from Volvo-net Who’s who, but would appreciate elaboration.

The answer she gets is the same as anyone would get on the Brick Board 18 years later:

For a recent car, such as your new 245, I would suggest the following “improvements” :

Tires : replace stock 185R14 Michelin with 205/70HR14 tires (see tire chart) less important on a new car, very important after 40k miles

Dampers : replace stock shocks with iPD “specially-valved” Bilsteins only then

Sway-Bars : replace stock sway bars with iPD sway bars

Since this was posted online in 1992, all of the email addresses are colleges, including the new 245 owner at harvard.edu.

On the TV show Scrubs, Zack Braff’s character J.D.  owned a brick that blew up in the first episode of the fourth season.

I had a friend whose 1970 Pontiac GTO blew up in front of his apartment. We were hanging out in his place when one of his neighbors stopped by and said “Dude, your cars on fire.” We ran out the door and saw the goat spitting flames from both edges of the hood. My buddy  had worked on his carburetor earlier in the day and there must have been a leak somewhere in the fuel line.

When the fire department got there they immediately tried to puncture the radiator, because the heat from the fire could cause it to explode. They swung an axe into the nose of the car over and over again until radiator fluid gushed to the ground. They sprayed the car w/ foam and let it smolder. All we could do was sit on the curb and watch the tires pop from the heat. The car was totaled.

Via IMCDB

The next installment in our 240 student film festival is the surreal “Enzo“. The action is about as slow as their brick, which is up on blocks. Craptacular!

This three minute film, dedicated to “first car of my life”, is a bit long but oh-so mooody and deeep.

The grandiosity of the narration in this video is hilarious. It’s a 10 minute film documenting the design and testing of 1949 Fords. It’s no ordinary car. It’s “Designed From the Inside Out”:

Here is the idea, a motorcar, conceived as a space for the riders, space that is to be enclosed and powered…

Yup, that’s a motorcar alright.

I love how @6:30 the cars get handed to the marketing guys and angels in heaven sing their approval.

In this Disney film from the late 1950s we are introduced to the highway of tomorrow. I look at this and wonder if they could possibly have been that naive. An atomic reactor melting rock to tunnel through mountains? Complete robotic control of your car? Rocket powered cargo ships? Everything works smoothly and cleanly in the world of colorful cartoons. In real life I think there’d be problems with highways cantilevered on the side of the Grand Canyon.

Disney obviously hated the clutter, chaos and decentralization of the city. He dreamed of a centrally planned world where there were no conflicting interests, everyone agreed that his vision was ideal, and we could be whisked away from dirty reality and concentrate on shopping. No thanks, Walt.

From the Daily Show, more unfortunate consequences of the Cash for Clunkers Program.

Save the Clunkers!

More from Time Magazine:

There’s at least one group of people who are happy Cash for Clunkers is over: demolition-derby drivers. Participants in these events, in which drivers smash into one another until there’s only one engine left running, don’t enjoy the sight of old cars going out of commission without making a pit stop at the county fairground. “Obama is an anti-demo-derby guy,” says Tory Schutte, head of the Demolition Derby Drivers Association. “He’s targeting the cars we’ve been using.”