The Story 'Till Now, Part Deux: Stopping

 I know I know, anybody that knows anything will tell me that a car only really needs two buttons: Go and Go Faster. And, while I'm quite certain I'd be able to get the damned thing titled and registered at the good ole Nevada DMV without putting a drop of hydraulic fluid into the rusty and bone dry master cylinder, I plan on karting the dog around in this. Friends don't let friends put dogs in danger.

Puh puh please don't let him do this to me

So, this brings us to Part II of The Story 'Till Now. We'll be covering a solid refresh of the braking system - and I'll note it's a far more solid refresh than my original plans or budgets had accounted for. It seems up until the advent of ABS, all cars have more or less identical braking systems. The pedal pushes a hydraulic cylinder which pushes fluid through a bunch of lines out to the brakes themselves where more cylinders push the friction surfaces together. The 1967 Volvo 1800S has a vacuum powered brake booster just past the master cylinder, drum brakes on the rear axle, and fascinating three-pot disk brakes up front.

Start at the Top

This story starts at the master cylinder. Tucked up against the firewall is a brown device, a cylinder with a bowl on top. It's not supposed to be brown. Nobody makes brown car parts. They're black or silver or red or who knows what - and as much as it pains me to say it - brown is bad. I knew this when I bought the car. I had tried to take a peek inside the brake master cylinder only to have the cap shatter in my hand. So, the first part I ever ordered was a shiny new (black!!) brake master cylinder. Some months later, new master cylinder installed, I used my better judgment (for once) and decided to check out the remote brake servo, given it's generally woeful external appearance.

Remove servos look like this

 

Then Work Your Way Backwards

A quick peek inside dashed any hopes of a getting the brakes up and braking any time soon. After ordering a rebuild kit, I found this was a Mark II servo rather than the factory installed Mark I. My rebuild kit wouldn't work, and a kit that would is going to set me back two hundred fifty dollars. Time to regroup and come up with another plan

Some sort of worm must have turned the old fluid into bird poop

The new plan involved fitting a modern remote booster with the same boosting ratio as these ancient British built contraptions. Of course it will have no bolt holes in common with the originals. Hell, it would have no bolt holes at all. A few weeks of procrastinating followed by a day of installing gives me a new booster, installed backwards, mounted in the general vicinity but nowhere near the proper brake lines. Happy days. Luckily, my Friend Who Knows Better was able to get me the proper tools and advice to plumb this infernal new contraption in.

Aftermarket remote brake booster

A Corollary on Brake Bleeding

There is an official way to bleed the brakes outlined in my wonderful Haynes manual. The first step is to enlist the services of an assistant. Sure, you find somebody willing to sit in your ratty-ass old Volvo and pump a pedal for hours on end. See how far that gets you with your friends. After the promise of three foot massages, a fancy dinner, shared custody of the Volvo *and* the dog, and a trip to Tahiti, I coaxed my wonderful girlfriend out to help in the process. Covering the rebuilt hydraulic clutch and all four wheels...

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Holding...
*squirt out two drops of old fluid*
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Holding...
*two more drops*


...Repeat for the next hour. That my friends is the sound of true love.

Nothing Can Stop Me Now!

A funny thing happened when we bled the brakes. The front wheels stopped turning. Seized brakes, so much for all that Going I had planned. On the bright side, I had foreseen this hiccup and already had sitting on my desk a pair of caliper rebuild kits. Now, a disk brake caliper really is a very simple device. Rebuilding one is damn near trivial. Take it out of the car, pop out the cylinders (use air pressure to help you out, you'll need it), gently pry off all of the old cracked rubber bits, clean thoroughly, polish the guts with some very fine wet sandpaper, reassemble with new rubber bits. Unless of course the cylinders look like this:

Corrosion is bad, mmkay?

In which case you should replace the cylinders or spring for some professionally rebuilt parts. What you should not do is quietly rebuild them anyway and put them back on the car until a convenient rebuilt pair is made available. Remember kids, do as I say not as I do. On the bright side, the sloppily rebuilt calipers work adequately for getting the car into the driveway and back to the garage. This car will not be leaving the driveway until a properly rebuilt set of calipers are installed and the rear wheel cylinders are replaced. That, however, will be a story for another time.

The Story Till Now, Part I: Going

I must come clean. I purchased this car back in September or October or something like that. Right now this minute it's more than a hunk of useless metal - it's got more working bits then broken bits. Heck, I've even backed it out of the garage and then drove it back in again. I've just decided recently to write about my misadventures. So, let's set the wayback machine to September (or October or something like that) and fill everybody in on the progress to date! Luckily, I started a build log and have been relatively good about keeping it up. I figure I'll roll this out in three installments, each covering some facet of the rebuild process. Part One focuses on the fuel system and the bits that make the car go.

What I learned from the seller:

Pretty much nothing. He said the motor turned over but the fuel system would need a rather thorough overhaul to get it running. The engine bay is pretty much complete, so I can at least tell where the parts I need to replace are supposed to bolt up.

Step One: Does it blend?

My basic mechanical knowledge (from playing with legos and dismantling the electric can opener) tells me it's probably a bad idea to just mash the starter on a car that's been sitting for some unknown amount of time. A brief chat with a friend, we'll call him "someone who knows better," confirmed my suspicions and gave me a moderately safe way to get it going:

• Pull and inspect the spark plugs. They were fairly carbony, but serviceable. 
• Mist some WD40 or other pseudo-lubricant in the cylinders so's we don't crank them while dry
• Hand-crank the engine to make sure it... y'know... turns. Thankfully, it does (at least, once I took it out of first gear...). This also gets some lube on the cylinder walls before giving it a hard cranking from the starter.
• Top off the coolant and oil.
• Do a quick once-over on the carbs - get rid of the old fuel in the bowls
• Get a battery, see that the starter cranks the engine over (chugga chugga chugga)
• Spray some starter fluid in the throttle bodies, put some fuel in the float bowls, cross your fingers, sacrifice a goat, and hit the starter
• VROOM VROOOOM POP VROOM SPUTTER SPUTTER SPUTTER (repeat sputters for about ten seconds) sputter pop bleh....

Great success!

Step Two: Care and Feeding of Your Engine

Now that I have a shred of confidence that the engine isn't just a rusted lump of pig-iron ,I begin going over the long neglected basic maintenance.

First on the list - all of the rubber bits in the engine bay. Fuel lines, radiator hoses, vacuum lines, the crazy little hose that goes into the oil filler. All of it. Then, change the oil and flush the coolant. The oil was still black, but the coolant was a strange dark green not unlike the old Surge soft drink. It's something to keep an eye on - who knows what's happened sitting for so long, but any new oil or other contamination of the coolant means more fun times in the engine bay and a lot more stuff to dismantle. That electric can opener I couldn't reassemble is starting to look awful ominous...

Oil and coolant: Check. Fuel and coolant lines: Check. Spark plugs and wires: Check. Thermostat: Check. A few things remaining to do like the belt drive, water pump, distributor cap and rotor, but I'm at least at a spot where I can move on to some of the major efforts.

Step Three: The Scent of a Fuel Tank

I learned from step one that the motor does indeed run, at least until it exhausts all of the fuel in the float bowls. Nothing is coming up from the fuel tank, and that's probably for the best. The flavor at the filler hole is a sickly sweet mess that smells exactly nothing like gasoline.

Every gasoline internal combustion engine needs three basic things to survive: Fuel, Spark, and Air (strangely similar to, yet subtly different from Earth Wind and Fire. Yeah, you hear me). Given my earlier efforts to get it turning over, I determined I indeed have all of the basic ingredients for motoring bliss except for a steady supply of sweet liquified dinosaur. You'd think that for as long as it takes nature to make the stuff, it could sit for a bit in a tank without going bad. I suppose it's nature's way of getting back at us for poking holes in her and sucking out her blood. In any case, I needed to get it all out of my car before it got angry and evolved into something... terrible.

Volvo must have looked through the crystal ball and seen my predicament back when they designed these things, because lo and behold the underside of the tank has a big fatty bolt just asking to be removed.

 Smells like R Kelly's sheets

Some four gallons of a substance that looks like ginger ale tumbled out. After pulling a handful of screws, some minor encouragement from my floor jack, and some thrilling acrobatics, the tank is out and ready for replacement!

With the old tank out of the way, I could find the root of the fuel issue: solid fuel varnish somewhere between the tank and the fuel pump in the hard line under the car. It seems cars get clogged arteries as well. Always gotta watch that cholesterol, boys and girls. 

I picked up a new fuel tank from IPD (why on Earth is somebody still manufacturing these things??), a fresh length of 3/8" fuel hard line from Napa, and a new mechanical fuel pump. After hours of twisting, bending bolting, pinching, fenagling, cutting, and cursing, I finally had the car sputtering along to its heart's content. On to the next crisis.