You can't help but smile when you get in this seat.

The car is now gutted from the B pillar back. We also did a little with the doors, and some stuff up in the dash. I ordered some cables from www.traqmate.com so we can use my Traqmate data acuisition system. At the very least it will give us a speedometer via the GPS, and allow us some baseline performance info.

We are still looking for 2 more team members. So if you, or somebody you know may be interested please let me know.

This car is quite funny to drive. I put too much oil in and this video proves it.



I hope to get cracking under the hood and start selling parts to add into the budget. We should have more than just Eric and I working on it this weekend.

Getting in to the swing of things.

It's been a while, but we have been steadily kicking ass. It took three weeks longer than I had hoped to get the Volvo on the road. It lived in the driveway for that time, developing a flat tire and a dead battery. Eric and I had to do a bunch of cleaning and organizing in the garage before we could even think about starting on the car.







This is what the garage looked like after a few days of work. Between fixing the previous owners "handy" work, moving in and other random jobs around the house we barely touched the car until last week.






This little "nook" in the garage is pretty sweet. Nice storage area for all of the extra crap.























Most of the way done. At least enough to be able to start on the car.

Here's your problem.

This picture may be a little confusing, so let me explain what you are looking at. The 240's had dual master cylinders, so there are 2 rubber brake lines that come down and turn into 2 hard lines. This car weighs 3000 lbs, makes 100 hp and has 4 piston calipers!

The flare just broke off in the caliper, so I bought a new caliper and Eric flared the existing line. We have gone about 100 miles on the street without incident, aside from some oversight on torquing a bolt or two (whoops.)


Look forward to some more pics and video in the next couple of days. Now that the weather is nice and the garage is empty we can start getting this thing rocking.

We picked up the car today!

I found this car on Craigslist Madison WI. I contacted the owner who was a nice guy, who said he would hold the car for me until Sunday when we could pick it up. It is a 1986 Volvo 240 DL wagon with a manual trans. These are really tough to find with a MT and with a couple exceptions it is in good shape for a 24 year old car.

Maybe it is because of the great success we had last year with the '93 740 wagon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq4DzzuxpaI
I just seem to have a soft spot for these cars, so I was hoping to find one like this. The brakes are toast, but we were going to replace them anyway. There may be a problem with the drivers side front line, but that's an easy fix too. The passenger side door won't open, but who cares? It has a new battery, started up great, and seems to just need a tuneup.

I am pretty sure that we would not be able to build the fastest car out there for $500 so I figured that we better have one that can hope to go the distance. Or at least make it easy to transport tires and tools.

I am going to order some front brake stuff tonight, and maybe some tuneup bits. I will also register it this week and hope to get it out on the road for next weekend.

We are live!

Like almost anybody that has ever heard of The 24 Hours of LeMons, I and many people I know have wanted to do it. Well this is it. I have $1000 to get this project going. I am now actively looking for a car, so if you know of any sub $600 cars laying around let me know! I guess we need to start officially creating a team, and driver lineup. I hope to update this page very often as a means for all involved to stay up to date, and communicate, as well as keep a detailed and accurate log of the build process. We can probably even use it to help prove our case about staying under budget.



As always you can check out www.24hoursoflemons.com for rules, and stuff.