Home from the shop.
In a few weeks, it will be 25 years that I've owned my Volvo 850 wagon. This is the only new car Autoliterate has ever owned. Always loved station wagons. As a kid, I wanted my father to buy us one but he wouldn't. He liked coupes, and was just too much of a European sophisticate–
I bought the 850 wagon a few months after the deaths of my sister...
...and mother.
That was a weird year.
Anyway, I happened to sell a screenplay while in residence at the MacDowell Colony in NH, and a couple of days later spotted the 850 wagon, just down the road at a Toyota/Volvo dealership in Keene NH, where I was getting work done on my late sister's Tercel.
The wagon had a 5-speed manual. In all the years I have owned mine, I've encountered only one other 850 wagon with a manual trans in the US.
More common in Europe, perhaps.
Something else about this specific car appealed to me: every other 850 I'd encountered had either leather or velour upholstery. I thought the leather looked kinda fragile, and the fuzzy velour of the era didn't have much appeal, either. My car had simple vinyl upholstery and I've still never seen the like on another 850 in the US. And it still looks pretty good. I had the driver seat re-upholstered, 9 years ago.
After buying the car in New England, I drove it back to Santa Barbara CA, where I was living at the time. Over the next few years I made several road trips back and forth from California to the east coast, often sleeping in the back of the Volvo en route–often in the middle of nowhere, or on a quiet neighborhood street in Thunder Bay or Medicine Hat or Cheyenne. No one gets their hair up, observing a strange Volvo in their neighborhood. They don't even notice if there's a guy asleep in the back...
Here are some field notes from a cross-Canada trip in the Volvo a few years back.
Then I left California, settled in Downeast Maine...
...and got married. We brought our newborn son home from the hospital in the 850, sixteen years ago. The car has seen some serious Maine winter, though it has also spent seasons in the barn when we were wintering in West Texas or Cambridge MA. The 850 has been based in Cambridge for the last couple of winters. I never drive it in the city, I much prefer biking. It's mostly my commuter machine for runs between Cambridge and our home in Maine, a 250-mile trip, one-way.
Last year the 850 began showing rust in the wheel wells, notably on the driver's side rear, and it really sprouted this winter...
...with more on the passenger side rear. Cancerous bubbles were showing beneath the paint on the driver's side front wheel well too. I started searching for body shops in the Boston area that were willing to do rust repair. No luck. The few places I found were up in New Hampshire. Most auto body shops in the metropolitan area are set up to do only collision repair, and they like to work with insurance companies exclusively. They don't want cranky guys, with funky old Volvos, whining about rust.
Most people around here don't hold onto their cars long enough for them to get rusty. (See our posts, though, on the Cambridge Volvo fleet of (mostly) aged 240's.) Usually Cambridge is all about shiny new Audis, the newest Tesla, BMWs in all shapes and sizes, and major-league Volvo SUVs. There's even a plug-in Porsche around the corner. (But before you buy a pluggable Porsche, or something similar, read Dan Neil's WSJ piece, Why Plug-in Hybrids are an Illusion of Eco Consciousness (And DN's very much in favor of all-electric cars, like the Tesla).
(Hey, if you're a Volvo person, Autoliterate has posted many very cool Volvos, like this P-210. Or this 1971 Volvo 164.)
I ended up taking my 850 back to Abe's Garage up at Fresh Pond, in Cambridge. They did the last major round of repair /maintenance work back in 2017. They were quite aggressive, looking for stuff that needed fixing. Up-selling...no doubt about it. On the other hand, I am just enough of a car guy to have recognized the things they pointed out were real problems, creating actual and/or potential issues.
The work they did in the autumn 2017 wasn't cheap but it was solid, and it has lasted. And whenever I have been up at Fresh Pond, usually on my bike, and checked out the garage, they seemed to be working on interesting cars like this '58 Chevrolet Del Ray that was up in the air they day I stopped in for an estimate on my 850's rust issue...
We got the 850 on the hoist, and did a thorough search for rust under the rocker panels, and other vulnerable zones..
That driver's side rear wheelwell moonscape needed to be cut out and new steel shaped in. Same with the other side. The entire driver's side front quarter panel--with the rust bubbles--needed to be replaced.
The car actually looked pretty strong underneath, otherwise. It did need a new passenger side front axle. The rubber boot was torn, and there was corrosion. And one brake caliper, passenger side rear, needed replacing.
That's the new caliper.
Brakes needed new pads all around, and some new metal was welded into the exhaust system.
And--yikes-- a new manifold. $$$. Sigh.
That's the old manifold.
And the rear suspension needed bushings, and--well, you know where this is going. My 850 is a 25-year old road warrior, not a trailer queen. How much am I willing to spend? What makes sense here?
I wished I could do the work myself, but don't have the patience, the skill set, the confidence, nor the brainpower. Don't have a shop, don't have the tools. I'm a novelist, screenwriter and essayist. I can take stories apart and put them back together and I have the occasional creative notion. I can tune and re-tune the machinery of a book, or a scene in a screenplay. But mechanical systems need to be very simple for me to grasp how they are supposed work, let alone fix them when they don't.
I'm good with maintenance, though. My zeal for maintenance is why the 850 is still around. It goes with being... parsimonious. Maybe frugal sounds better? I'm a minimalist. I do take care of stuff. And I tend to prefer simple stuff to fancy stuff.
If you have been following Autoliterate, you're probably aware that our favorite cars are plainjanes and our favorite trucks are back-to-basics workaholics.
The Volvo also needed a new ignition coil, wires, sparks plugs.
It was becoming a long list.
Bottom line, I figured the choices were a)commit to doing the work or b)start looking at a new used car and getting ready to buy someone else's problems for maybe $20k, at this time, in this market.
So I decided to invest in the 850.
She was in the shop at Fresh Pond all week. I picked her up this morning. Got her up on the hoist, noted that all the work seems to have been done and done well. Caught a couple minor things the shop agreed to take care of on Monday.
So we're done. For now. Almost.
Of course there will always be other stuff that needs to be done, e.g.,
1)the passenger side headlight wiper is a shredded wreck; most of its missing. I'll have to figure how the parts/ unit is sold, and what it's like to install. Could I do that myself? Suggestions?
2)I've had the headliner thumbtacked up for the last 5 years. Kinda...tacky, but redoing it would likely be more than I'm willing to spend.
3) probably there's a bunch more stuff that I'm not recognizing now. There always is.
4) I've always run 10w30 (not synthetic) in this car. Have changed the belts I think 3x. Somehow I don't mind the plastic wheel covers though they are fragile, and I've gone through a bunch of them over the years...
...I think she looks pretty good for a 25-year-old Swedish car. And I am aware that I'm spewing bad stuff driving around in an old car powered by an internal combustion engine, but I'm not about give up the Volvo. I figure it's not been such a bad bargain for Mother Earth, one car sticking around for a quarter-century and counting. Recycle and re-use; or just keep on using. My Volvo has always been anything but disposable. But when its time for the next round of serious rehab, perhaps it will be feasible to have an outfit like Moment Motors drop an electric motor in.
Because f they can do it to a 1963 GMC C15...
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