The Kid's 1988 244 brick - a father/son "project"
 

As I said in my intro, I found a low mile 1988 244 for my son. It is a fairly clean slate to work with:
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...c5d5867a92.jpg

There is some paint correction that needs to get done, and a hack head unit job that needs to get fixed, and the rear lights are a mess, but the car has no rot, low friggen miles (26k)

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...7113c41702.jpg

We gave it a complete detail on Friday, and the wheels almost look brand new again.

We have a few things on order, a few things to research and a few things on hand. First things first - safety New tail lights come in Wednesday, and it has a complete inspection/run through by our local Volvo dealership. It will probably need new tires - the ones on it are cracking.

After that - Sound. The plan is to put in an active 2 way front stage and a 12" sub. I have an Arc Audio xDI 850.5 amp on hand, some Morel Ultimo tweeter and some PPI air moving tweeters, so all I really need is a set of 5-1/4" woofer drivers for the doors. I am open to suggestions for tweeter placement other than cutting another hole in the door card.

BNE Shop 5.25" speaker brackets (ordered)
Auslander 3 head unit (ordered)

Anyway, either me or my son will update this thread as we go along!

I'm looking for an innovative - non cutting solution to mounting the tweeters - and am open to suggestion!

I'd be careful with all the mods. If this is indeed a 26k car, it's a rare find and it'd be a bit sacrilegious to load it up with modern electronics. Originality is paramount!

I agree.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...182f52dac0.jpg

Car failed NH state inspection yesterday. Simple stuff:

1. window tint
2. Rear signal/brake light covers had cracks/holes
3. All 4 rotors need replacing.

no worries here. Now looking for blank mirror sail panels for tweeter install...

What's wrong with the rotors?
Odd how some states can be so anal while others don't have ANY such inspections, as it apparently makes no difference safety wise...
I guess we gotta support our parts suppliers and shops.

NH would probably fail it if it had ZERO miles on it straight from the showroom! my kid lived there for awhile and used
to say inspections were always a bear....even worse than Mass.
other than that i can't stop drooling over your find, indeed a rare bird. good luck with it!

It's a good question. Tech said the rotors were extremely rusted - which blows my mind considering there is only what I would consider to be "patina" rust here and there on bare metal items in the engine bay. The window tint rules in NH just pisses me off. The rear right tail light has a hole in it - and the boy wanted different tail lamp covers, so win-win

It's actually location dependent. I'm sure if I hit DTM Autowerks it would have passed on the tint

So the kid ordered new tail light lenses, and they are in. But we are waiting for red tail light bulbs, because he got these:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...5ca0f23167.jpg

Speakers came in - We went with a Morel Maximo Ultra component set. Right now we are trying to figure out how we are going to mount the tweeters.

um, the bottom row is all red for parking, brake... you want YELLOW bulbs for the turn signals on the outside of the top row, but I thought the other top row lamp was the reverse ?

oh, ok, the rear fog lamp is int he inside top, I guess. that one is a meh, its not really very useful here as most cars don't have rear fogs and most american drivers don't know what they are

the bottom row, from outside to inside is brake, reflector (no lamp), and parking/tail...

now, if you put LED 1156 bulbs in there, you definitely want RED LED's behind the red plastic... if you use white LEDs behind red plastic, they come out looking pinkish because white LEDs have so much blue in them

This is a GREAT response, thank you!

Rear lights
 

Today we put the rear light lenses in. They're really sharp, but the boy took all the bulbs out before I could write notes on what goes where! Gotta love his enthusiasm. Anyway, I believe we should have probably ordered new circuits for the lights, as well as new bulb holders. There seems to be an issue with the driver side brake light now.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...e6e3f5d9c9.jpg
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...1845d2adde.jpg
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...bafe174ff2.jpg

I think we will probably vinyl the chrome on the light trim (and a lot of other chrome). Tomorrow we go to my cousin's shop for body input.... The very lower one piece rocker panel trim needs to either be re attached or all the plastic rocker trim needs to be removed, holes need to be metal filled, primed, painted and wrapped.

not sure what shops he went to but they were in salem, nh

pretty sure, the left top & bottom rows are...

turn ... reverse .... rear fog
brake.... (reflector).... parking light

and the right light is the mirror of that, but the fog isn't wired.

edit: ok, I might have brake and paking reversed here.

We took it to Lovering Volvo for the initial inspection.

DTM is in Milford. When I had my A4, that's the only place I would take it to.

It wasn't a matter of the order of lights, that was easy enough. It was a matter of the bulb holders - some are 2 contact, some are 3 contact.....

you should be able to see how many contacts are on the flexi circuit board that the bulb holders go up against.

brake and turn signals use brighter lights, and to do this, I think they use the brighter filament on a double filament bulb.

Thanks! I transferred the circuit board over, but maybe shouldn't have. I ordered new ones.

I ordered new manual mirror sail panels to make tweeter pods with. They won't be here for a while, and neither will the arc Audio amp I wanted to put in so I picked up a Planet Audio 800.4 to hook up to the crappy JVC head unit to power the Morels. I also made a temporary tweeter deck. It's pretty hack.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...6559d214be.jpg


​​​​​​All the power and wiring except for the doors is done - hopefully we can wrap this up after he gets home from work.

huh. when I replaced the tail lights on our 87 240 sedan, the new ones came with the sockets and flexistuff and everything, ready to be plugged into the harness and go.

These lights didn't come like that (unfortunately).

We got the amp & speakers installed, with a little bit of sound deadening. The placeholder amp (Planet Audio 800.4) might end up being his permanent amp - it powers the speakers fairly cleanly - and was a snap to tune the gains with the Steve Meade Designs DD-1 tuner. We have some fine tuning to do for when the sub comes in, but I think we are pretty solid. everything needs to be cleaned up and mounted properly (the amp anyway). Once the Auslander 3 comes in, we'll re-tune the amp to the new head unit. We are tuning/setting gains using a 1kHz tone at -5dB and a 40Hz tone at -5 dB. We also found that the JVC head unit has HP and LP settings in it - that we may utilize later.

The boy got a very close and intimate look at how interior body panels come off, and how they can be a pain in the ass to put back on if you aren't paying attention. He did all of the disassembly and re-assembly, I walked him through soldering and how to do a clean wire termination without stupid but splicing. I'll be honest though, I've never seen him take such an interest in WORKING on something before, and the way his face lit up when Rush's Spirit of Radio came through the Morels was just awesome.

After we do some clean up, I'll take some pictures (I was too busy and forgot to take some during the install)

A couple of observations - there is so much room in the dash, it's ridiculous!
The staging of the tweeters isn't too bad on the dash plate.
The Morels really put out some good sound. I have Morel Tempo Ultra 692s in my Tacoma front doors pushed by an AudioControl LC 6.1200 and love them - and was surprised how close the Maximo Ultras were in sound pushed by a cheap amp.

I had an old JL Sub I was going to put in there, but the box it was in was huge, and the speaker itself was dry rotted (guess I should have oiled the rubber before storing it) and is now useless. I'm, going to throw a Kicker 10" that's preloaded in a vented box and call it a day.

Phase 1 complete.
 

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...fcc61f16e1.jpg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...1eb2a95c49.jpg
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/volvofo...2803f6843b.jpg