I haven't seen very many restoration threads or project threads on this forum. It occured to me that maybe we Volvo owners aren't really into that. OR, maybe no one has had the courage to show what all they're doing to their cars. I don't know....

Anywho... then it occured to me that I had painted my car a while back and even I didn't make a thread out of it to show what Volvo owners can do to keep these old bricks alive. I now figure that there is no time like the present. So here is my paint thread and a little information on the car.

I am the third owner of this car we call the "Blue Brick." It had 134,000 on it when I bought it in 1994. It had been run into a ditch and the right front strut was bent up. Fortunately, there was no body damage at that time. I paid $1200 for the car and it cost me another $90 to have the strut straightened out.

Now it's 2018 and the car has over 520,000 miles on it. I'm still driving it on the original engine but I did replace the AW70 trans in 2014.

Here are the photos of me explaining what few mods I've done to the car and my journey through the paint work recently. First, I'll show you a few photos of the car before I did the bodywork. And BTW, I need to point out that I am NOT a professional body and fender man. This was literally a learn as I go project.

First, I need to show you what the car looked like in 2010. This photo was taken before I put all the IPD suspension goodies on it. You can see that it has not been lowered. The Virgo wheels are pretty skinned up, they are missing their center caps, some of the chrome is missing along the roof line and so forth. Also, the tires in this photo are oversized because they were the closest size that the used tire place had. The rubbing was driving me CRAZY! You can't really see it in this photo but the original headlights here were also pretty yellowed and no amount of using headlight restoration products was doing any good.

 

Here is a list of the goodies I got from IPD:

Sway Bars - the guys at IPD asked me if I prefered the car to have a little oversteer or understeer. I chose the oversteer. I'm very happy.

Sport springs - these will lower the car slightly ... about 1.75" in front and about an inch and a half in the back. The fronts are just short enough that I no longer need a spring compressor to take the struts out or put them back in.

I chose IPD's adjustable panhard bar and adjustable torque rods because I didn't know if lowering things would put any of the rear axle's geometry out of whack. Plus the bars came with poly bushings already.

Poly bushings and Bilstein shocks finished up the goods.

Somewhere along this time, I also scored a set of E-Code headlights from FCP Euro.

 

Here are a few photos showing just how much the car was in need of some TLC. The paint was failing in several places. The Virgo wheels, which I scored off of Craigslist, were in terrible shape. One was even bent and not holding air very well. All were missing the center caps.

Somewhere, on a parking lot, someone put a nice friendly crease down the side of the car low on the rear door.

 

About a week before I was going to begin the bodywork, I got rear-ended on the interstate in rush hour traffic when I was down in Nashville. I'm so glad this happened BEFORE I started on the work and not after. But the idiot didn't have any insurance so I still had to come up with some more coins. I was very glad the damage wasn't worse.

 

By the time I got around to doing the body work, the right front headlight didn't want to come out. I must have overtightened something and it just wouldn't budge. So, I left it in and decided to work around it.

When I sanded the paint on the right rear fender, HOLY COW! I found that the car had been hit before. It was just a SEA of Bondo. That would explain why the gas door never fit quite right. Oh well... I didn't have the coins for a new gas door so got to make the old one work.

 

Working on my driveway proved to be a real pain in the neck! Outside under a bunch of trees is just not ideal.

I took the wheels and painstakingly sanded them by hand. I didn't have any way of media blasting them so, I just had to do it the old fashioned way - with a lot of elbow grease. The wheel that was bent, I straightened with some huge leverage and a car jack. Now, the wheel is pretty straight but it still wants to lose air in the winter. I don't know why the wheel doesn't leak in warm weather. I bought a cheap spray gun at Harbor Freight and shot the primer and topcoat on the wheels. The color is a Ford Silver something something. The guy at the paint shop said it's what ALL the body shops are using to paint silver wheels. I think it looks fantastic.

 

The Harbor Freight paint gun turned out to really NOT give anywhere close to the results I was hoping for. I'm very glad that I chose to go back with the original color and that it was NOT a metallic. If I had been trying to shoot a metallic with the HF gun, it would have made an incredible mess. The gun wouldn't clean up, I never could get the fan to lay paint evenly, the cup leaked, and it was basically a complete nightmare.

The paint was a two-step affair with a basecoat and clear topcoat. The basecoat kept reacting with something in the environment and I fought fisheyes throughout the project.

Finally, I borrowed a good DeVilbiss (albeit very old) from a friend and began to get some reasonable results. Another change I made was to switch from the crap paint that I was being sold, to BASF R-M base and clear. I had to go down to Nashville to get it. I won't say that I WAS using but I will say that the BASF stuff completely restored my faith in automotive paints. Best of all, I was able to wetsand out my mistakes - along with all those kamikaze bugs. After wetsanding the clear coat, I buffed it with Wizards Mystic Cut. That stuff, combined with the BASF stuff made me look far better than I really am as a painter. Naturally, when I wanted to take photos of the car, it rained for about two weeks solid. So some of these photos are in the rain.

As we like to say here in Tennessee... "You can't tell that from a GOOD job!"

The gas door is still a little wonky but this is not supposed to be a show car anyway. It's a daily driver and it only needs to look good enough for long enough till I do it all over again in a few years. By then, I will have rounded up a new gas door.

 

Thanks for sharing. Body work is the one thing that I have yet to undertake myself. I just bought a 1991 240 in the darker Midnight Blue that came from your neck of the wood, Ashville, NC, that has some of the typical clear coat failure, but zero rust and very few if any other imperfections. I have been considering trying to give it a re-spray myself in a homemade spray both in my garage. I have read enough and learned that a good spray gun is a major component of getting a good paint job even as a beginner as is using a good quality paint.

My other 240 (I have a collection of 3) is a twin to yours and is the same I believe Pacific blue. I like the looks of the Virgo wheels. There is a set I found locally and am now thinking of picking them up after seeing them on your car as well as another on here.

My two... The light blue car is a 2 owner, I am the third, Texas car with only 88,000 documented miles. Drove it all the way from Laredo, TX to Western, MA after buying it.

Nice work.

 

WOOOOWWW! That car on the left is BEAUTIFUL! Actually both cars are very nice from here. But I think that the car on the left has the metallic paint and the metal flake in it gives it a really cool glow. But maybe it's only the way it looks in the photo.

I have a parts donor car that has that same color but the paint has completely faded. In the future, this will be the car that gets the V8. But you're right. Down here in the Southern States, we just don't have to worry about rust. I love it!

I'm not sure what Volvo called the particular color that my car is but I sort of like to call it Swedish Flag Blue. It's virtually the very same shade of blue as the Sweden's national flag.

 

Hi there!

I appreciate you posting your step-by-step of updating the paint job! I have an identical 1984 244 Volvo in the same beautiful blue, and my top coat is failing similar to yours. I've been considering trying to do it myself and what it would take - so thank you for the post! Time to start the process.

Cheers

 

Hello MIss Lucy,
If you are willing to put in the work, sand the car all the way to bare metal and then cover it with a good quality EPOXY primer. I made the mistake on my Volvo of just smoothing out the old paint and shooting over the top of it. You really cannot see it but trust me when I tell you, it gave me fits. It was so much trouble that I realized I should have just taken the entire car back to the beginning. My other car is a 2003 Mercury Grand Marquis and I will paint it this coming summer. And YES, I will take it all the way to bare metal.
I'm always amazed at the way forum threads can stick around for decades. There hasn't been any activity on this thread since some time in 2018 and yet, here you are.
I think you should go for it! As far as painting your Volvo. Some things I really like about my blue color are the fact that it is a solid color. There isn't any metallic in it. I know metallic paint really glows in bright sunlight but it is more difficult to spray on evenly. I have a cousin that's been spraying cars all his life and he's in his 60s. And yet, a few weeks ago, his gun had just a little bit of fuzz in the nozzle and you could definitely see the streaks in the paint.
Also, solid colors like my Blue Brick, don't require a clear coat. It's a one step system and that really simplified things. I sprayed my paint on rather heavy. Each coat was pretty light but I sprayed probably eight to ten light coats. Then I wet sanded it started at around 600 grit. I worked my way up to about 2000 grit and then I buffed it. I got my buffer at Harbor Freight. I also got my buffing pads there. The polishing compound that I used is was Wizard Mystic Cut.
I live way out in rural Kentucky. No one here requires body shops to have paint booths and so, we just spray in our garages. The only real problem with that is that we often get kamikaze bugs dive bombing our paint before it has a chance to set up. The wet sanding takes care of all of that. It also takes care of any mild runs (not real bad ones) and orange peel. Yes, it's a lot of extra work - work that a professional body man would not do. But, for a beginner like myself, I feel confident that I can turn out a first class job if I'm only willing to keep working with it. If you understand the process and are willing to put in the work, I can assure you that you are indeed capable of making your Volvo just as good looking as mine.

Please keep us apprised as you go along.