CNC'ed antenna hole plugs!

My buddy Amar from Vancouver has been bugging me for 6 months to make more of these, ever since I made one for my car.  Most of us with 240's have long since ditched the silly factory antenna that sticks out of the trunk fender at weird angles and doesn't work that well anyways, I installed an A-pillar antenna from my '85 244, looks and works much better.  But now we're left with a 3/4" hole into the trunk!  Mine was plugged up with a sticker for 4 years to keep the leaks out, surprisingly worked great, but I knew there was a better solution. 

So I finally got around to making a batch of 10 CNC machined antenna plugs last week.  Took me 7 hours start to finish to basically re invent what I had made before, write the g-code practically all by hand, debug the program and pop them all out.  Now that I have the programs I could do another batch of 10 in probably 2 hours.  It installs flush with the fender and uses an o-ring to seal the moisture out.  Overkill?  Definitely. Beautiful?  You betcha.

I also made a quick and dirty light box today!  Always wanted one, so this morning I googled it, it's way easier than I thought. It's literally just a cardboard box with holes cut out of 3 sides, a piece of white paper taped to the ceiling of it, a piece of paper curled up the bottom and back, with a big pillow case overtop.   The key is having a good bright white light source.  I happen to carry around a wicked new flashlight that I bought last month, it's a Nite Core EZ AA, tiny little thing that packs a huge punch, and only requires one AA battery.  The body isn't much larger than the battery itself.  Two settings, low and high.  Low is good outdoor nighttime walking light, a little dim, around 10 lumens for 20 hrs.  On high it turns into daylight with 130 lumens that lasts continuously for 1hr.  Been using it a lot for a month and I'm still on the first battery.  Amazing flashlight, I bought it from www.4sevens.com for $60 shipped with two lithium batteries, worth every penny.  Surprisingly in the light box, my cheezy old sony cybershot took an identical photo whether the flashlight was on low or high, cool eh?

Also just a few pics of my 242 from the summer.  You can see the antenna plug in the first pic.

Shifters and strut braces are done!

Haven't posted in a little while, but I'm so glad to have all the shifters shipped out.  They have so many little parts that each take a lot of machining or finishing time, it's nice to finally get to the last step which is assembly.  You know, installing the bearings and clips and reverse lockout and wiring and knob and button etc etc etc.  Mindless work that takes a few hours.  So last week I brought a big huge box of parts inside, plopped it down in front of the TV and it took 3 movies to assemble all the shifters. 

Here are some pics of the nickel process, first up is a pair of rusty old shop pliers that I nickel plated first.  They were pretty horrible and dark brown before, so I soaked them in Muriatic (hydrochloric) Acid for about 20 minutes.  It's nasty nasty NASTY stuff, but boy does it get the job done.  It eats through rust first, then into the steel, so it's great for nickel prep.  But the fumes are horrible, so I had the garage door open and a fan blowing the fumes outside.  However, that didn't stop those fumes from landing on EVERY SINGLE steel part on my shop and creating a nice layer of surface rust, including my lathe, milling machine, and all my tools.  Fun.  Steel wool and WD40 got it all off without too much drama, but I'll have to figure out a better method next time, might just put the bucket of acid far outside.  Aaanyway, so the pliers turned out better than the pics show, since they were pretty pitted to begin with.  The next pic is just a bath in distilled water to rinse them off.  Since they're too long to fit the entire shifter underwater I have to do them in two dips of 30 minutes each, and in that pic you can see the water line.  Not pictured is the actual nickel bath, but it's done in a tub like that white one.  You can see a pic of one of my plates of nickel that's seen a lot of use, the cloth wraps around it in the bath to keep the big chunks together.  This thing started out looking like a nice piece of sheetmetal!  I think it's time to replace it.  Nickel plating is basically electrolysis if I'm getting my terms correct here, the plates get power and the part gets grounded, then the acid steals nickel particles from the plate, lets it swim around the bath, then sticks it to the part.  Pretty cool stuff and very durable if your substrate is squeaky clean. 

All the BIG strut braces are done and have been shipped except for the two polished ones, which I'll ship out tomorrow.  I had customers start receiving this recent batch of firewall braces and say "They're too short!  What's wrong?".  Well it turned out that I screwed up, for some crazy reason I cut them all just over half an inch too short while I was making them (even though I followed my notes exactly, well, I guess not..), and through a lapse in judgment I never test fit them on my car before shipping them.  Duhhhh.  Luckily, very luckily, it's an easy fix.  Yesterday I machined a bunch of spacers and bought longer bolts that I'll be shipping to all those customers free of charge, my bad.

Here are some pics of the polishing process for the BIG strut braces.  First I used an 80 grit flap wheel on my dremel to scrape off the ugly oxide layer and get it down to bare aluminum.  Although this worked well, it left indents from every time I'd reverse direction while sweeping the dremel back and forth, the first pic showed this well.  That just meant more time and effort on the polishing wheel later on.  After scraping the whole thing with the flappy wheel I took some 320 grit sandpaper and hand sanded the whole thing for a while, I found it was helpful to use a foam backing, also pictured.

Next it's onto the buffing wheel.  Be forewarned, this makes a BIIIIG mess!!!  Since I didn't have a dedicated buffing wheel motor I decided to stuff a smaller buffing wheel into the drill chuck of my milling machine, works great!  Lets me really push the part into the wheel.  Another option would be to mount the wheel in a hand drill, but I think this would take longer cause you can't really push as hard and it'd be harder to control.   I knew from prior buffing experience that I would really want to cover up my tools this time around, so I wrapped packing paper over every surface of my tools and taped it down.  It took me around 3 hours to sand and polish each bar, it's a long time, but the results are so worth it!  I also wore a dust mask which was a brilliant idea, cause after polishing the mask was black and so was my face around the mask.  I used two different buffing "rouges", a 3 and a 6, although I don't know if those are industry standard numbers or what, I just got them from my local hardware store.  Shiny shiny shiny!  Lastly I used the awesome Mothers Powerball (car waxing tool) to wax them, this really helps to prevent fingerprints and will hopefully keep them free of oxidation for a long time.

 Lastly a quick update on my milling machine, I'm having a hard time finding a left hand ballnut but I think I've got a place that can hook me up.  I finished making the required mods to the factory casting, you can see in the first picture where I had to take my angle grinder and chow down on that lip for the full length of the table, this gives plenty of ballnut clearance.  Next pic shows how I rounded the corners of the ballnut and mount to further help with clearance. 

I got all the shifters nickel plated the other day (yay!), I'll post pics when I get them uploaded.

Also worked a bit on my CNC milling maching.  The X axis is DONE (woot), the Y axis will be done when my new left hand ballnut comes in.  I found a local place (Motion Industries, huge company, lots of branches in the US and Canada with one nearby, awesome place!) that will have one for me by friday, $46 canadian, not bad at all!  I paid $25 US for a right hand thompson ballnut from Mcmaster, and I found a few prices for left hand ones at various stores in the US for around $35us, so $46 canadian at a local place is completely reasonable.  Also Mcmaster has been kind enough to ship me a replacement right hand ballscrew free of charge, since they shipped me that left hand one by accident.  But since I've already machined the LH one I wanna use it.

I have to remind myself sometimes that I'm still a car guy at heart, and that it's mostly volvo guys that are reading this blog, not die hard machinists.  So as I go along I'm going to start posting the cool things that I'm picking up and hearing about in the Volvo world!

First off, this is just freakin cool.  A regular on the Turbobricks forums has done it again.  Not only has he built an insane 242 with a turbo 16v engine, stuffed a twin turbo V8 into a volvo 740, played with other makes of cars, but now he decided to part out his '95 M3 and stuff the 240hp engine and transmission into his other 240.....IN THREE DAYS, start to finish.  Read all about it here!
http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=184194

Also in recent TB news, my good buddy Kenny "Captain Bondo" from Vancouver finally dyno'ed his sexy 240 wagon with the S80 6cyl whiteblock engine swap.  388 hp at the rear wheels!  At a silly low 16psi boost.  Not bad at all!  I bet he could crank out 500whp if he were really willing to break some parts.  Although even now he says 1st and 2nd gear are useless for traction and 3rd is a gamble!  Kenny is quite the fabricator, he's an incredible TIG welder and he's got years of professionally working on cars, so he really knows his stuff.  He installed a Ford explorer 8.8 rear axle to replace the weak sauce volvo one, did the entire paint and body work on his car in his attached garage, installed huuuuge brembo brakes on the front with home made adapters, built a fully aluminum exhaust system from intercooler piping (and it's actually holding up!) the list goes on and on.  He hasn't really nailed down a "project thread", but this one is probably as close as it gets:
http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=160024

This past weekend was the 8th annual "South East" meet in Alabama, I drove down last year from Canada and had an absolute blast, but I couldn't make it this year.  To sum up the events that I've read of this year, 500dollar Matt's car (740 16v turbo) made a very satisfying 370whp @18psi and didn't break down during the 750mi trips each way from Virginia.  But the star of the weekend was Kenny (the host) who finally got his new built engine back into his 740 and laid down an insane 510whp!  And went to the dragstrip and blew a 10.82@129mph!!  That's with an all volvo engine and volvo automatic transmission, unbelievable.  Okay, well custom pistons/rods/cams, but it's still a volvo engine.  Good job dude.  Several other guys laid down great numbers/times too, but I think those two were the highest.  You have to realize that Kenny's car had been off the road for over a year during this rebuild and he just got it thrown back together a day or two before the meet.  He's a man who knows how to git'r'done.

Nearing completion

Over the past two weeks I've been trying to finish up all kinds of projects big and small.  A lot of times I have too many things going on at once so I get a bit overloaded and backed up, however I'm getting much better at managing everything.  Lets see here, what have I been up to lately...

Well for starters I finally got all the TIG welding done for my batch of BIG strut braces!  Most of those have shipped out, I still have to finish polishing two bars and then that project will finally be complete.  I also finished powdercoating the plates and firewall braces for that group buy.  And in that bag is also 8 reverse lockout tubes for my shifters, fresh from the oven with black powdercoat on them.  In the bag you see mostly super gloss black with some chrome firewall braces on top, and on the table they're chrome on top, black, transparent blue over chrome, and silver with a clearcoat. 

On the shifter front, they're sooo close to being done.  Today I'll be nickel plating the shifter shafts, then once that's done it's just assembly.  Yesterday I nickel plated 16 of my hardened lower pins (pictured a few posts below) and luckily every single one turned out perfect!  Also pictured is how I drill the hole in the shaft for the overdrive wiring.  I used to use drill bits and step up in size, but that left rough edges and a horrible burr on the inside, now I just use a 3/8" 4 flute endmill and it cuts like butter!  Barely any burrs at all, I take a quick pass at the edges with my dremel before calling it good.  And when I put the wiring in, I use a rubber grommet to protect it from the edges of the hole.  There's a pic of some M90 shifters that I nickel plated a few months ago, I've got a bunch more that need to get plated here soon.  The last pic is one of my nickel tanks, notice I wrapped it in bubble wrap to keep the heat in there.  One tank has to keep ~113° F and the other one should be 160-200° F, so now that it's starting to get really cold out this bubble wrap helps to keep the heat in.  It's 11am here in early october and it's only 4° C!!  What's that in Fahrenheit, 39.2°.  Nice and sunny though.  I know some place in canada have well below freezing and snow right now, so I'm not complaining too bad. 

 

Whaddoya know, another shifter picture I just found, forgot about this little guy.  These are nylon tubes that I machine and are installed in the reverse lockout mechanism (black slider) on the shifter.  Just a tiny bit of grease and the reverse lockout slides up and down silky smooth.  Two springs go below the nylon to spring it back to the down position.  The big chips are from parting them off at the exact length required, and the little chips are from turning the outside from around 0.754 to 0.740". 

I've also been working lots on my CNC milling machine!  Boy it's just about done, I'm ecstatic!  FYI for anyone thinking about doing the conversion, you have to be pretty passionate about it to have the drive to get it done, there's a lot to do and a lot to spend.  Eventually I want to create a page on my website dedicated to my machining adventures including all the details of the conversion, but for now these random bits of info will have to do.  I've been doing a ton of wiring, I decided to wire up the mill for 5 axis control, just cause I can, and cause I plan to actually have it be 5 axis someday.  For now it will be 4 axis (XYZ and a rotating 4th axis) and the 5th will control a stepper motor for my tapping attachment, so that I can tap threads into holes easily and repeatably.  I covered all the wiring that will hang out around the milling machine with hose, just automotive vacuum hose, to keep any water/coolant/chips out.  I sealed the ends with a big goop of silicone sealant and that cool heat shrink with the glue inside.  The connectors are also sealed, the pics show that.  In the future I will build a large enclosure that houses the milling machine and keeps all the chips under control, and also keeps the flood coolant contained and recirculated. 

I am basically following the instructions by "Hoss", from www.hossmachine.info.  He has done an incredible amount of innovation with his machine (the same one that I have), and I plan to do practically all the mods that he's done, and a bunch more that I have in mind.  For the initial conversion I don't really have to do a lot of physical modification to the machine, just drilling/tapping a few holes and grinding away a few casting spots to make room for the new goodies.  All of which is completely reversible, but who the heck would convert BACK to manual control after the joys of CNC???????????  I certainly never will.  Ever. 

Hoss is even kind enough to post all the cad drawings for the parts you need to machine for the conversion, making the swap a whole lot easier.  I ran into a few snags when I tried to modify his plans and add things of my own, just a few things I overlooked, no biggie.  The pics show some holes in the machine that I had to drill and tap for metric M6, that's what I did last night.  All his plans are for imperial bolts, but I like to use Metric since I'm a volvo fan, and since the machine uses metric bolts too.  At first I had a really really tough time drilling through the cast iron with my cordless drill, it just wasn't biting at all.  I thought there might be a trick to cast or something, then I bought a new drill bit and it sliced through like butter!  The pics also showed some parts that I had to grind away.  Hoss said that he used an angle grinder for all of it, but I found that it would only get me half way, then I used my dremel with a double cut carbide burr to finish it off, worked awesome! 

I bought my ballscrews and nuts from Mcmaster.com, same place I got the ones for my lathe.  They only list right hand threaded nuts and screws on their site, but they shipped me one RH and one LH, with three RH nuts!  At the time I received them I though "no biggie, I can reverse the direction in Mach3 to compensate, it'll work fine.  I didn't realize that the RH ballnuts won't work on the LH screw, figured that gem out yesterday too.  And I already machined the screws and threaded them, don't really wanna do that again, so I might see if I can find a cheap LH ballnut and get it here quick.  I e-mailed Mcmaster but haven't heard back yet.

Other than that, I just have to throw the machine back together, lap the ways with valve grinding compound to make them slide smoother, get myself a LH ballnut, then the X and Y (left/right and in/out) axissesses will be done.  I need those two done and CNC'ed so that I can finish up the Z (up/down) motor mount, which won't take long at all.  I just need to mill a big ~2" pocket into the plate for some bearings to hide, so the computer will control X and Y and I'll manually feed down the Z axis for each pass.  Then bolt up the Z stuff and holy cow I'll be done!  I would still have to wire up the E-stop button and the limit switches, along with the tach and the touch probe, but that stuff can wait until I've made a few fun chips with full CNC control! 

 

 

 

Powder looks great!

The other day I made two sets of spark plug wires, although I'm all out of a few boots and the wire separators, so these wires get bagged up until my new stock comes in.  I also ordered more red, blue, and black wire.

As I said in my last post, on the 25th I did a whole wack of powdercoating, and it all turned out perfectly! 

I've been working nights, haha, here in the shop, usually from after dinner to 3am, converting my milling machine to CNC control.  It's a ton of fun, and the results will be incredible.  Here's just a few pics of what I've been up to for the conversion.

 

 

Just got my new powder in this morning! Lots more chrome and lots more black. So I'll spend all day today powdercoating these big strut braces. I'll finish welding the firewall braces early next week, then rush those into powder as well. I'll make a video of the powder action today too. Lets see, today I'll be doing 2 sets of chrome, TONS of black, and 3 sets of white. Then maybe tomorrow I'll quickly do the translucent blue, which gets sprayed over chrome.

Last night I got one of the bars rough polished, I used a 180 grit flap wheel on my dremel over the whole thing to get rid of the oxide layer, then #3 steel wool by hand, I need to buy some finer steel wool and give it another go, then onto the buffing wheel. I've got one more to polish after this one, so I'll take pics of the process.

Yesterday was again a very productive day in the shop.  After making all those shifters it got me thinking...  Since I've already got the tools all lined up and zeroed in to produce these shifters (which takes quite a while) and they're repeatably coming out perfect, maybe I should run to the metal store and buy a bunch more tubes and make even more shifters.  I made 12 in that last post, which fills all the orders that I have on the table, yet leaves me with no extras.  So I ran out and bought 12 more, 6 normal ones and 6 shorter ones for M90 shifters.  I spent yesterday machining those and every one turned out perfect.  Last night and this morning was spent threading the top of the shifters for the shift knob, I'll post a video I made of that soon once I rip it from my camera.

Next up, welding, bending, then nickel plating!

Shifter progress

Today I made 12 shifter bodies, have I mentioned how much I love CNC?? Every one is exactly the same, it's incredible. These take around 7 minutes each to do the grooves and turn it down to size.

The past few days  have been busy ones.  Other pics include some shifter pins, this is the lower "pivot" point that goes through the bottom of the shifter, it's held in on either side by two c-clips.  Now they're ready to be hardened and nickel plated.  Third picture is the needle bearing housing, they're stainless steel.  Needle bearing gets pressed into that, then the hardened pins ride on the needle bearing and provide smooth precision shifts!

Next up is some ballscrews that I turned and threaded for my upcoming CNC milling machine conversion.  The new threading tool that I got from Shars kicks butt!  Huge thumbs up.  Last one is a pic of the DCMT 1/32" radius insert that I smoked while turning through the hardened layer of these ballscrews, they're tough! 

Lastly I had to take a bit of meat off the nose of my turbine wheel because it was too long and not letting the nut thread on all the way.  No problem for this machine!  It was easy and turned out perfectly. 

Loads of videos

I just posted 7 new videos to my youtube page, a few volvo ones and a bunch of machining videos.

Here is one of them, a continuation to the one posted below.

Video of some CNC machining

Here's a video I made this summer while machining some endlinks for a group buy of BIG strut braces.

September update

After a busy summer trying to get things sorted I'm finally opening the store up again, save for a few products. One big change to the website is that I've put a note next to almost every product describing the inventory situation. I think this will be very beneficial to some customers who seem to expect me to keep everything in stock by the hundreds and who want the product at their doorstep the very next morning. That just isn't the case with a relatively small business like this one, unfortunately.

I've got several big and important projects on the go so I don't want to bog myself down with lots of huge orders, not leaving much time to get anything done at all. Everything except shifters and strut braces will be readily available, however spark plug wires will depend on my current inventory. I think I will still accept order for shifters and strut braces, however please be aware that it could be several MONTHS before you'll receive it. Those items just seem to take a very long time to produce, maybe that's because I tend to wait for a while and do them in large batches of 10-20. But that makes each individual piece go quicker because I can set up an assembly line. So, more time overall, but quicker per part, pick your poison.

I want to personally thank everyone who has ordered from us in the past, without your constant support and enthusiasm I wouldn't be able to continue running this incredible business. I'm having a blast, this is my dream job! However I've gotta admit, running your own business is a heck of a lot of work.

It's been a great summer for me. As you can see below I've developed a new product, my blow off valves, which I will be selling some time in the fall. I've been using that first prototype on my car for a few months now and there are a few small changes I'd like to make. Namely the way it sounds. At low boost (<10psi) it makes a great loud Pshhhhhhhhh noise, just was I was hoping for. But above 10psi the release happens much quicker and the sound gets higher pitched, similar to the bird chirp like HKS SSV thing. I believe that a simple change in my piston design will have a big impact on the sound output. Also I have to do some more playing with spring pressures.

In other news I have completely re-wired my CNC lathe for a much cleaner install, and also wired nearly everything required to convert my milling machine to CNC. I think all that I have left to do is make some stepper motor mounting plates, machine the ballscrews, then bolt everything together.

At the end of July I held a group buy on turbobricks for a HUGE strut brace which is 1.5x bigger than my regular ones, they sold out very quickly! It's early september and I am just about finished making them, they took a lot longer than I was anticipating, but that's just how things seem to go. After having the plates waterjet cut, deburring them and bending the brackets, I got to finally learn how to TIG weld! It's something I've always wanted to do, and always hoped that I'd be good at it. Well, I was right. The past year and a half of oxy/acetylene welding has really paid off because they're very similar techniques. After practicing with the TIG torch and the pedal on some scrap metal for about 30 minutes I started welding the big strut braces and did a great job. Gotta get myself a TIG welder one day, boy ohh boy.

Here is a new product that I've been working on and designing for a long time. It's called a blow off valve, and simply put, it's a pressure relief for turbocharged cars. Here is a bit of the process I've gone through to produce the first prototype.

First lets start out with some of the tools I had to make in order to actually machine this thing.

Various jigs required for drilling/milling/tapping the holes into the top hat, the base, and the weld tube. I don't have a rotary table yet, so I built these instead. Not quite finished in these two pics, quite a few more holes to drill and tap.



I needed an M6-M8 adapter bolt, so I thought I'd try my hand at threading on one the lathe from steel. The cutting tools that I have aren't quite sharp enough for such a fine thread, but it seemed to work alright, until I was ALMOST done with the M6 side then it bent. So after dicking with that for 2 hours it took me all of 10 minutes to machine two bolts, stick 'em together and weld them.


Piston for my testing pressure chamber, along with an aluminum M10x1.25 bolt that I made. Worked awesome, that was the first bolt I've ever made.


I give you my blow off valve testing center. Air compressor pressurizes the 4" chamber, then I can modulate the pressure/vacuum to the top port using the lever and piston. Works alright, but I should have made the variable pressure cylinder like 4x taller, doesn't quite move enough air as it is.

I finally mounted the blow off valve and pressure tested it yesterday, it's pretty awesome. I found a few little leaks here and there, which will really help me hone in on the perfect recipe.


Some of it is quickie flux core welded, some of it isn't.











Here's my first piston design, it was just a quickie to test out clearances and stuff. Turns out that the 60* tapered seat at the bottom doesn't seal boost worth crap. I don't know if the computer is making the angles slightly off or what, I doubt it, but even when pressurized to just 10psi I could feel it leaking. I will be making a new piston that utilizes an 1/8" o-ring down there as the seat, should be awesome. I'll keep screwing with it till it'll hold 100psi without leaking.




Weldy thingies, the big one in the front is steel and the design that I like, the other one is stainless. Big one got welded to the test chamber, I'll put the stainless one on my car soon for real car testing. The notches were created with a belt sander, but eventually I'll set up a vertical rotary table and bust them out on the milling machine... when it's cnc.


Close enough eh?

long time no update!

It's funny because I read other people's blogs and think to myself, man I wish I updated my blog this often! Well there's no excuse, and I'm going to attempt to keep it up to date. I do a lot of really cool work here in the shop that I'd love to share.

Over time I'll post more details, but I'll give you the quickie cliffnotes of life around here since my last post in october. Our short throw shifters have been flying off the shelves since I introduced them last August, it's great! There have been a few small mechanical failures in the design which I have since fixed, no biggie. I stopped using stainless steel for the main shaft because it was extremely expensive and it actually still rusted a bit, so I've started using steel and I picked up a nickel plating kit which does a great job of plating all the parts I need. And the lower pin that goes through the stock shifter fork of the transmission, before I was using stainless steel for that too, but since SS is a bit of a soft material, the needle bearing was actually denting it for some people. Now I'm making them out of steel and hardening them by heating it cherry hot with my oxy/acetylene torch then dunking it in water, then nickel plating it for corrosion resistance. Now they're MUCH tougher!

In march '09 I converted my lathe to CNC, which has been the best tooling decision yet! I'll go more indepth on this conversion at a later date, but basically it's insanely awesome. The accuracy of my work has gone up and repeatability has gone through the roof. I can make the exact same part 100 times over, which really comes in handy when I'm doing big batches. Next up is to convert my milling machine, I might get to do that in July. Here is basically the biblical website for convrting the Grizzly X2 milling machine that I have. http://hossmachine.info/

CB's Fall Sale Response

I've received a few emails already asking about whether items purchased during our Fall Sale had been shipped out yet, and whether we could provide tracking numbers.

First off, due to an overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming!) response from you guys we are absolutely inundated with new orders. Please be as patient as you can with us, we'll be working as fast as we can to fill every order quickly. John is away until Tuesday as he is at the SE Turbobricks Meet in Alabama, but he'll be back in the shop on Wednesday working on your orders. We are also waiting on more materials inventory (since you guys totally cleaned us out!). We'll ship out as soon as we get it in.

Secondly, we use Canada Post to ship all our products. Unfortunately the most economic shipping method, our regular way of shipping products, does not have tracking for packages. If you choose to upgrade your shipping to airmail by paying the extra cost, Canada Post will provide a tracking number to us for you.

Looking forward to busy weeks ahead,

-Meg

Goodbye Canada, Hello Alabama!

Just wanted to let all our amazing customers and friends know that John and Craving Boost are in Alabama this weekend at the SE Turbobricks meet. He'll be back to work by Wednesday. If you have any questions about current orders, I'll do my best to answer them, but you may have to wait for John to return to get the specifics answered.

Watch our blog next week for 'Bama pictures!

-Meg

I just want to put it out there that TurboBricks.com is the best volvo forum this side of the motherland (Sweden, and all those sites are in swedish!). Be SURE to check out the forums. Anything and everything you've wanted to know about making your older volvo (pre-95) awesome can be learned there. I owe so much to everyone that's a part of it. My username on there is The Aspirator, by the way.

So much creativity and knowledge gets passed around there, so many interesting ideas and guys willing to try crazy things. Fail or succeed, they post about it, and it helps us all learn. Here are some of the recent posts that I have made:

Meg's new '64 Volvo Amazon.

Fabricating a new intake manifold.

M46 short throw shifters.

Sequential coil-on-plug ignition.

Building a B21 engine from the ground up (old and sold, but still informative).

Building a B23 engine from the ground up (more recent, still using this engine in the 242!).

It's my birthday!

Hello volvo lovers, John here. Today is my 25th birthday, yup, a 1/4 century. My darling wife surprised me by making me a replica 242 cake! I was in the garage working and she kept poking her head in there and just glancing at my car, then running back inside without a word. The cake is delicious, though it felt weird "cutting up" a 242, haha. I ate the whole front end in my first serving! The headlights/side mirrors/door handles were jujubes, cookie wheels, black sugar tint, yummy. She could definitely be on the show Ace of Cakes.

Vintage Volvo Spark Plug Wires

We're finally going back in time, before the world had heard of 242s, and are now offering our High Performance Spark Plug Wires in hot colours to our fellow enthusiasts with Vintage Volvos. We now make wires that fit B16, B18, and B20 engines. These engines can be found in 544s, 120 Amazons, 1800s, 140s, and the '75 240. John just sent off a set in lime green. One word - awesome.

CVC Family Day

On Sunday July 27^th, we drove our modified 242 out to London, Ontario where the Canadian Volvo Club was having its Annual Family Day. Now in it's 29th year, the Volvo Show and Flea Market was a great way to spend a sunny, summer Sunday. By far the largest Volvo meet in Canada, we strolled around the Hughes’ farmstead and eyed over 130 cars! There was a good range of classics, through the 240s, 700s, and up to the brand new models as well. Many of the cars were bone stock, but a few were modified with some neat tricks. We always have the most fun popping the hood and having folks stare in confusion at all the mods John’s done to the old 242, trying to figure it all out.

We ogled the older Amazons, pondering what we wanted to do with my little Amazon project car that’s been sitting out in the driveway since May. I really like the colour on this one. Very unusual and understated.

We met some new car guys, and said hello to friends made at previous meets. John had an interesting chat with Bev Hughes, who also happens to be a John Deere collector. He told Bev about the bright yellow John Deere turbo that’s in our car, and asked what kind of machine it might be from. Bev couldn’t say for sure, so its whereabouts will remain a mystery.

Though we didn’t win any prizes (not even for dirtiest car, surprisingly :) , we had a great day out with other Volvo enthusiasts.
Hope to see you at the next one!

Coast to Coast with CB!

Did you see us last weekend?

You didn't? Well, then you missed two of the largest Volvo meets across the US this year! John, owner and fabricator of CB, spent the weekend at the Turbobricks/Volvospeed tent out at the Import Car Show in Carlisle, PA. Great fun was had by all, and the autocross was exceptionally awesome. Sadly the red 242 didn't make the long trek, as John is in the middle of installing a new prototype custom manifold. (Sneaky peeks coming soon!)

CB products were still showcased on a number of cars, including a black Strut Brace on Sean's 240, and Spark Plug Wires abounded on a number of rides. (Most notably as tough-as-nails survivors on MrBill's 240!) Thanks to everyone who introduced themselves. We can't wait for next year!

If you were on the West Coast, you might have drove by the annual IPD garage sale and show. Phil was there with his car (see his amazing ride in our Featured Cars section) sporting new blue Spark Plug Wires with custom heat shielding, and a shiny new 240 Strut Brace with matching Firewall Braces.

Thanks to everyone who picked up cards and stickers,

See you at the next show!