Wowza. It's been a few years. To put things in perspective, progress with the car came to a grinding halt after my last post due to life things. I guess since this car has been with me a good chunk of my life I guess I can update on that too.
Around the time of my last post and shortly after, I was experiencing some pretty serious health issues. I dropped almost 25 lbs from my normal weight, I was experiencing extreme fatigue and spending a lot of time in bed, waking up each morning covered in sweat and I was also coughing up black phlegm. I quit working on cars and the house. To make things more interesting, my wife and I found out in December 2020 we were expecting a child.
After a few ER visits, as well as chest X-rays, a CT scan of my lungs/airways and oxygen/blood tests I was sent to a pulmonologist. I was diagnosed with COPD in March 2021. I had already quit smoking in December which was the primary factor behind it. But at this point I stopped caring about car stuff and just wanted to focus on my health since the baby's due date was in September. Paige [my daughter] was born on September 29th, 2021.
I had saved up money from 2019-2020 to go racing my rally car again which never happened. I had always dreamed of owning a set of perfect Recaro LS-C with the orange spectrum fabric, and after finding a pair that honestly cost the same amount of what I paid for the whole car in 2008 I plunked down the cash and had them shipped from Thailand shortly after Paige was born. By some wild luck, I made an order with a company for some bolt in Recaro brackets for 1800's that came with sliders. A month later, they got bought by Corbeau and quit making Recaro brackets.
Fast forward about 2 years, had not done much with the ES but in fall 2023 something remarkable happened. For the first time in my 20 years of junkyarding, an 1800ES showed up at the Moss Landing Pick N Pull!
I was on it like a fly on sh!t the morning it got set. 5 minutes after I showed up more guys were showing up to strip it and we were asking each other what all we were taking. Over the years of moving the non running ES and the boxes and boxes of parts, I lost many many parts including the wiper motor/linkage, heater box assembly and most of the dash. The backseat had some broken pieces and there were many other bits and bobs that were gone. I got to the ES the morning it was set and got every single missing part, and on top of it the car had iPD sway bars so I snagged those. My receipt totaled close to $500. I was previously looking at various parts sources for this stuff and was expecting to spend closer to $2500 for it all so this was a gigantic victory.
With that out of the way, I went back to focusing on other projects for a while. Ryan Fay one day told me he had a set of Virgos for sale that were in good shape, and honestly I had been thinking about some for the ES for a while and after having him drop them off a few weeks ago I went ahead and mounted them and it kind of got me thinking about the car again.
I started mocking up stock exhaust manifolds. The stock NA manifold turns down and hits the control arm too much to work. Stock turbo manifolds, with the turbo in the stock location have zero chance of working. I started investigating maybe getting a tight radius 90 degree cast elbow welded to the turbo flange on the 90+ so that it makes it sort of a top mount solution and clears the control arm. But it seemed ghetto.
I remember earlier in the year some drama that arose from a turbo manifold group buy [Kangaroos Team] with some manufacturing errors. I made a meme poking fun at it, but in reality they dealt with their mistakes better than any other part mfg I've ever seen in the Volvo community.
I remembered its shape and though to myself, hell it might just work.
After taking my own measurements, and than comparing them to some measurements sent to me by a group member who had one in his hands, I'm fairly positive it is going to work so I am going to get one in my hands hopefully here soon.
Having this solution finally figured out has vaulted the car up the priority list by about 3 cars. Sometimes I wonder how much I could get done if I would just focus on one thing at a time but oh well.
