Pretty sweet video of some bricks racing in Germany. But can you stand the German techno? Tragedy at 1:50.
Doing it in the dirt
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Category Archives: Other People’s Bricks
Time Lapse Red Brick Bath
The Bailey washes another 240 in Washington, this time an ’85 four door. Total transformation in less than a minute.
Time-Lapse White Wash
I just joined Vimeo and found this cool vid documenting a drive around Spokane Washington in a white ’88 245. It’s a nice, jerky time-lapse and shows two car washes over the span of about 1/2 hour. The first wash was touchless, so the second wash actually cleaned the car.
The Bailey’s “Fridge” looks pretty sweet. 5 speed manual, contemporary mags and clean white paint. Slick.
WTP: 240 Pickup
Jalopnik’s roving band of auto flaneurs always manages to find the oddest vehicular creations. This pickup-junk was a 244 stripped of its rear seat and the rear hatch of a wagon was morphed into the back window of the now two-seated… thing. Creative.
Via Jalopnik
Fueled By Ramen Red Brick
See the inline-six turbocharged engine pictured above. It’s from a Toyota Supra. See the engine bay it’s shoe-horned into? It’s a red Volvo 245. I’ve heard of Detroit motors being dropped into Bricks, but never Japanese. WTP (What’s the Point?). More photos at Jalopnik.
242 Drifts
IPD released its February Rear Wheel Drive newsletter and they feature a sweet 242 “drift car” from Rob Prince.
I upped the boost to 25psi at SE 6.0 in the fall of 2007, and dynoed 280whp and 305 wtq, in a dyno room that was 114 degrees F!!! It felt much faster, of course, but I had to wait for cooler weather back home to find out what it could really do. On 255 width street tires, I ran a 12.5 @ 116 in the quarter mile. Once I installed a set of Mickey Thompson ET Drag slicks, that dropped to a 11.8 @ 114 mph! It was so much fun to drive at that point, and kind of hairy to drive on the street.
I bet.
Fishy Brick
The “Sashimi Tabernackle Choir” is an 80’s 240 that was outfitted with two hundred fifty “Billy Bass”-type automated rubber fish and lobsters. Built in 2001, the choir syncs the reverse engineered robots to orchestrate music for parades in Texas.
With wry humor they document the process here, including this comment on why they used the 240:
Volvos make the best Art Cars because (A) they have nice thick metal to bolt things to, (B) they last forever, and (C) when bystanders start throwing stuff at you, you need a nice solid car around you.
The Lobster conductor at 1:03 in this video is kinda’ frightening.
Check out more parade cars here.
Photo from SashmiTabernacleChoir.org
Unimpressed with a 240DL
The Car Lust blog has a post by Chris Hafner showing he’s not a big fan of the Volvo 240, even (or especially) after covering more than 150k miles in one. I love this observation:
The car made up for that lapse of refinement with an almost utter lack of power. Brand-new, the four-cylinder engine pumped out 114 horsepower. After more than 300,000 miles of abuse, I’d be surprised if it generated anything close to that lofty figure. This, when powering a two-ton steel safety cage, resulted in a car able to drive out of a paper bag only if that bag is properly moistened.
Vintage Volvo Owners from SF to DC
The San Francisco Chronicle has a short column by a DIY Volvo owner where he documents 37 years of driving and fixing pre-1970s Volvos:
In those 37 years I have spent countless hours in both frustration and triumph. I like to say I’ve broken down on the road probably a hundred times and have never really had to be towed, always relying on both an intimate knowledge of the car and a complete set of tools and spare parts in the trunk.
A couple years ago the NY Times had an article about vintage Volvo fans fans of vintage Volvos and interviewed Colin Powell about his collection of 100 series:
“At one time I had six, stashed at various places around the post so the M.P.’s wouldn’t find them all,†he said in a recent interview. “My usual pattern was to fix them mechanically and then do enough body work to get them through a quick Earl Scheib paint job.”
I suppose the key to keeping a running brick is to have a stash of parts cars to pick from whenever something goes wrong with the daily driver. Word on the Brickboard is that junkyards are scrapping 200 series now because they don’t pull in enough $$$ from pick-and-pull. But they’re easy enough to pick up for little or no cash… so long as you can bring a trailer to tow one home.
One person’s POS is Another Person’s Scrap Metal
An ’83 Volvo wagon on Craigslist is on the verge of being dumped for scrap. The description is pretty funny:
…though it always starts right up, if it has been running and you turn it off and restart it, 9 times out of 10 you’ll have to keep your foot on the gas or it’ll conk out… but once you get it going again it wont stall and leave you stranded or anything like that. oh, you must let it warm up for at least 2 to 5 minutes or it has no power and it will leave you stuck putting through an intersection at 2-5 miles per hour with on coming traffic and it can be a little unnerving…
and lastly, it is a little loud. not illegal loud, as i haven’t been pulled yet and i have pulled up along side cops and got stopped and waived on at check point once, but people look for sure when i’m coming down the road and if you embarrass easy, this is not the car for you. i have been told the noise stems from a leak where the exhaust pipe meets the engine, and that the knocking is this hole and not anything more serious. i think the muffler is also shot, but from the inside out (if that is possible?) because it appears to have no holes… though i did slap some goo on some holes i found in the pipe and the very end of it, the tail that exits the exhaust out after the muffler is rusted off and so the noise resonates against the underside of the car.
It’s a shame, because it’s a turbo… but the turbo doesn’t work, and neither does the overdrive.