Evening everone,
As my 1st full year of driving approaches, I would like to fulfill an ambition - that being taking a 'rough' car and make it road worthy. Through research, I discovered that formus are a great place to find cars from enthusiasts alike. Growing up and developing a particular passion for them, I feel a Volvo would be a great learning experiance to build my knowledge from. As I am sure everone is aware, money is tight at the moment so would be looling at the sub £1000 mark. I am open to everything. Please feel free to contact meregarding this.
Thanks
F

 

Being able to drive and "making a rough car roadworthy" are pretty much unrelated, much like eating and being a chef or being able to read and being able to write Moby Dick.
Your abilities and knowledge will be the determining factors regarding your choice of project car. Unless you have more than passing knowledge about electronics I wouldsuggest as old as possible- certainly something pre '98 and even older. a 7 series car maybe, and the fewer options the better, no turbo either. less stuff to confuse you. Reading the forum(s) should, if nothing else, show you that S80's, S60's, S40, XC's, C70'sare not easy for first time diagnostic work. They also will likely require cash for diagnostic tools/software.
I'd suggest a 740 withouta turbo and no 16 valve or diesel. I would prefer an automatic - manuals tend to have more frequent service needs, ie the clutch.
Remember that those are 30 year old cars and even at that 1000 bucks may be low unless it's rough.

Personal experience here - in 1970 I bought an E Type that I could afford - except the engine was beyond repair and it had sat in a back yard with the top down so there was a fair bit of rust in the floor. It was cheap but I still overpaid (as I learned when I sold it). I moved right into an Austin Healy Sprite that need a complete engine rebuild. I got it out and disassembled but then had to enlist a real mechanic. After that I got a 4 YO Mercury - a real cream puff, I then had time and money for girls which I discovered were a lot more fun than spending all my free time in a hot or cold garage covered in grease and trying to understand a service manual.

 

There are several ways to look at it. I look at as there's a "sweet spot" in the USA between the adoption of OBDII (generally 1996) and the adoption of VIN-checking across the CAN bus. Before the VIN checking, any computer goes bad, you could just slap on another one from the junkyard. On volvos, they did away with the cable throttle in 1999, and that is not good for the old-age car. They had unusually good pre-OBDII diagnostics, so the "good" years were more like 19whatever to 1998. Those are OLD cars now, but I certainly would believe you could buy one for 1000, and you can certainly get parts.

One exception to this is internal parts for the 850 manual transmissions. Not sure about the other manuals. Manual transmissions are really not difficult to repair, but in this case you cannot get any parts.

 

I really liked working on my 1995 850 Turbo. I could always find parts (at least here in the states), plenty of cars in breaker yards, lots of internet documentation on how to's. Car predates OBD2 but has the nifty OBD1 diagnostics port with LED/button to do scans. manual tranny cars were pretty much limited in the US to the NA cars or an uber-rare manual R model. I think if I were do do an old Volvo project car resto-mod, I'd go for a C70 coupe (hard to find) with the HP turbo...