It seems that the hose between the Ford power steering pump and the Volvo steering gear was sturdy enough to hold together for all of the LeMons SF '08 race, plus about 15 laps of practice today, and it chose to let go during mid-high-speed chicane. Hello, concrete barrier! Before you could say "Salvage Title Collision Repair," everyone got to work with implements of destruction, while team member Stratocastrator headed into town to get the tractor shop to fab up a new pressure hose. 45 minutes later, back on the track! Yes, the V8olvo has a new paint job now; I'll put up a gallery of its new look later on.

Meanwhile, judging is going quite while; the Chief Perp is subbing for me while I do some practice laps (which involved some serious- if ungraceful- throttle-steering hoonage on this track) and write a bit for y'all. Check back later for some judging highlights!

The Black Metal V8olvo had just one mechanical failure its first time out: the power steering belt came off the pulleys a couple times during the course of the race. That's because we were using a grab bag of scrounged accessories on '84 Volvo DL's 1986 Ford 5.0 engine, and… well, those of you who work on small-block Fords know all about the maddening lack of compatibility between components used on various flavors of the Windsor engine. After the race, we messed around with spacers, shims, new brackets, and so on, and got the pump's pulley more or less in the same plane as the pulley on the balancer, but we needed insurance.


Next stop, the junkyard! I grabbed an idler pulley off the serpentine-belt-equipped V6 in a mid-90s Chrysler Concorde and brought it back to Hellhammer. About 10 minutes later, this Space Shuttle-grade rig was in full effect. All it does is push down slightly on the outside of the power steering belt, preventing it from flying off the pulleys at high speed. Works great!

We masked off the original Volvo blue paint for the vaguely Boss 302-influenced stripes and shot the rest of the car with black rattle-can paint.


Thanks to AFX Digital, we got some nice decals for the car, including these BØSS 3Ö2 emblems.


The car came with "Happiness Is A Scruffy Dog" license plate frames (front and rear), so we decided to keep the front one on the bumper.


And here's the car in action. I'll post a gallery of the Black Metal V8olvo in all its battle-scarred glory soon, very soon. That car brushed off some ludicrously hard hits that would have put flimsier machines out of the race for good, and it shows it.

As we told you earlier, the V8olvo's got a bunch of fancy new decals as the team finishes getting it ready to run in just a short while at the 24 Hours of LeMons at Altamont. Here's our favorite. Now wish 'em luck in the comments below.

All the cars we saw were quite well-prepared, with the full complement of safety equipment. We didn't see anyone busted for blowing past the $500 price ceiling, but we only saw a handful of the 90 entrants go through the inspection... so we'll see how that plays out.


Plenty of Swedish steel at the race this time, including this Volvo 244. Yes, it's a 244! We counted at least five Volvos besides our own (including a 780 Bertone with a Swedish flag on the roof), plus several Saabs, and most of the cars haven't even arrived yet.


This 242 Turbo was at the Thunderhill 24 Hours of LeMons race back in December.


Hey, is that a Merkur XR4Ti?

You see, we'd been inspired by Team Two Wheels Too Many and the rear-radiator setup they'd put in their '85 Cavalier, and we figured we'd do the same in our Volvo. Well, actually, I was the one who thought it would be a good idea, if we're going to be placing blame for ensuing badness.



Just get the biggest truck radiator we could find at the junkyard, put it in the back seat, and add some big electric radiator fans. Run some muffler piping forward to the engine, cut some holes in the trunk, and we become invulnerable to battle damage!



Piping through the firewall bulkhead and along the passenger side, inside the rollcage. The whole setup was ridiculously cheap, and seemed like it should work well.



I picked up a couple of fans from early-80s Mercedes-Benz sedans, and grabbed another from an 80s BMW 7-series.



Cut out a template from cardboard to make a nice aluminum shroud...


...and a third fan in the trunk, blowing air out through a reverse scoop cut into the trunk lid.



Should be airflow aplenty here!



Seal up the gaps between the passenger compartment and trunk with aluminum tape and Foster's cans.



Cut some holes in the doors and add some Toyota MR2 side scoops for added cooling. What could go wrong? Nothing, or so I thought.



So, the car gets to the racetrack, and everything seems fine.



But after a few laps, the water temperature kept climbing past the danger point, regardless of speed or number of fans operating. At this point, the primary theory among the team members was that the 302's tired water pump wasn't moving enough water, since the three German fans moved air like a hurricane. But there was no way of knowing.



And no way of testing, because at that point disaster struck! Team member Jesse (you might know him as triple-DOTS owner WhatWouldJesseDo) was behind the wheel on the track when the engine suddenly died and wouldn't restart. Track adventures ceased at that point.



Once we got the car back to the shop, it turned out that the oil pump had seized and snapped off the roll pin holding the distributor drive gear in place. We were actually fortunate that the Ford engine drives the oil pump from the distributor, because that meant that the engine quit immediately (rather than continuing to run at full throttle with no oil pressure). But at this point we were worried that our worn-out well-seasoned engine might not be able to handle the rigors of a long endurance race (especially after seeing the Sin City Lemons LTD throw a rod in its 302 at the Thunderhill race in December).



Anyway, the weekend became a grueling all-out, bloody-knuckled wrenchathon. We had to get the engine out of the car, swap in an oil pump and distributor from one of Crew Chief Hellhammer's collection of old Ford 302s, then convert the car from a radical rear-radiator setup to a standard front-radiator rig... all with a week to go before the race! Oh yes, and paint the car if we had time (cue madhouse laughter).


It's not trivial pulling an engine and swapping an oil pump while it hangs on a lift, but Hellhammer has the chops to get it done pretty quickly.



All the work on that nice shroud, discarded! That stung, bad. We probably could have made it work, if we'd had time for more testing... but we didn't. Off to the junkyard with me, to search for a V8 radiator that would fit in a Volvo 240, preferably with the inlet on the passenger's side of the car.



Hmmm... a great big Mercedes-Benz 560SEL should have plenty of cooling capacity, eh?



The width was just right for our car, but the height was about 3" too tall. But we had a workaround planned for that issue.



First, a frame to support the new radiator, tied into the strut tower brace we'd already built out of square tubing.



We rigged the Mercedes mounts to work with our frame, and it's all nicely isolated with rubber bumpers.



The pair of Mercedes fans we'd had in the rear of the car (and, of course, new wiring to control them from the existing circuits) go in the front now, along with an engine-driven fan. Perhaps the engine-driven fan would be enough, but we don't want to take chances with overheating at the race.



The Benz used a remote radiator tank, so we had to find a place for it.



As for hood clearance, we just cut a big slot for the radiator and upper hose. Folks who swap V8s into street-driven Volvos usually use Corvette radiators (because they're short and wide, like the radiator space in a Volvo 240), but we weren't going to find a Corvette in Pick Your Part with the clock ticking.



Is this right out of the Lord Humungus' motor pool or what?



Hellhammer broke out the welding gear again and fabricated this cowcatcher-esque radiator-protection cage that goes behind the grille. Not quite as indestructible as a radiator in the back seat area, but still pretty tough (especially with that huge Volvo bumper in place).



Looks pretty good! Note the Volvo seat belts as hood hold-downs.



A solid 3-day weekend of 12-hour days for us, reminiscent of the panicky last hour's thrash you'd see teams doing in the old Junkyard Wars... only ours went on and on and on, for day after day. I considered trying out for that show, back in 2001 or so... even talked about putting a team together with a cubemate at a dot-com job who had a part-time gig as a welding instructor, but- as usually happens- we never went anywhere with the idea. Well, we got laid off from the job and went our separate ways... and next thing I know, she's on the Metal Maidens, winning The Great Race (that's her on the left). The jealousy! But now I think I know what that sort of fabrication-against-deadline adrenaline feels like!



The out-of-town team members are here, and we're ready for some wheel-to-wheel, Scandinavian black metal-inspired action at Altamont this weekend. From left to right: Necrobutcher, Mr. Blöödwrënch, and Count Chocunakh (aka Señor Loverman, yours truly, and Jack Baruth). I'll be pretty busy at the race, but will try to get some live coverage for y'all. Oh yes, our Black Metal V8olvo Mission Statement (cue Opeth): Most Grim and Frostbitten Necrowrenches Bloodlustfully Blaspheming the Forbidden Forsaken Fjord Sacrilegiously Perched Atop the Unholy and Inverted Mountain of Altamont.

As it turned out, this is a ridiculously easy swap (well, by the standards of weird engine swaps, that is). The 5-speed shifter even lined up perfectly with the hole for the Volvo's automatic shifter. A bit of crossmember modification and it was in place.


What really had us worried was the potential nightmare of rigging up clutch linkage. We grabbed a Volvo clutch pedal and cable assembly out of a manual-trans 244 at the junkyard and settled down for what threatened to be agony-packed days of fabrication.


But no! The Volvo cable hooked right up to the Ford transmission and worked fine. We were stunned. Of course, all the time we saved on this project was promptly eaten up by a thousand other details, but we aren't complaining. We forgot to grab a shift boot in the junkyard, so we fabricated a crude bracket and zip-tied a piece of inner-tube rubber in place. Now if we can just keep from breaking U-joints and differentials at the track...