After we got our 1800S back from the paint shop, we noticed a number of things they’d missed. Part of the reason for this was that we ended up moving from Illinois to Connecticut before the car was finished, and as a result, were unable to be there while the final work was done. It looked nice on the outside but fell short of what we really wanted.
We found a great paint shop in Connecticut called Holmes & Bahre Paint & Body and took the car to them, explaining the issues we needed to address. We met our new friend and body man extraordinaire, Guy, at the shop, and he proceeded to fix all the issues.
We found a bit of rust in the bottoms of each door and wanted this repaired properly.
We started the job by taking off the doors from the car and taking the interior surfaces of the doors and door bottoms to bare metal. This was tricky, as we did not want to mess up the exterior door paint, which was very nicely done.
We repaired the doors, fixing the holes with sheet metal and not filler. We also stripped and repainted the insides of the doors and installed some Eastwood Thermo-Coustic Sound Deadener on the inside of each door to make the car quieter. The original door insulation consisted of a piece of cardboard glued into each door, so we think the Eastwood stuff will be a huge improvement.
We then moved on to the sills. The rockers on our car were replaced, but the original shop skipped any work on the door sills. We found a little rust in the driver side sill, so we took the sills to bare metal, cut out the bad metal and patched the hole. We then painted the sills, carefully blending it into the exterior paint. The sills now look amazing.
After all this work, we thought the engine compartment looked terrible. We did not have to rebuild the engine so originally we did not paint the engine compartment, deciding to leave it as is. We decided to rectify this but were reluctant to pull the engine. The part we hated most was the usual rust under the master cylinder, due to years of brake fluid spills eating through the paint.
Our genius paint and body man, Guy, had a solution. He removed all the electrical and auxiliary components from the sides of the engine compartment. He then completely encased the engine in aluminum foil. He used this instead of plastic because it clings to all the surfaces and holds paint, unlike plastic wrap, which will not usually allow paint to dry and creates a mess when removed. As a finishing touch, we added a factory Volvo underhood insulation kit that was added to the later 1800E models. It is not technically correct, but we thought it finished off the engine compartment nicely. We figure that if the factory added it as a running change, why shouldn’t we?
We stripped and sanded the engine compartment, painted the areas where we removed the surface rust with Eastwood Rust Encapsulator paint, painted it the correct Volvo White, and after it was dry, removed the foil. Now the engine compartment looks great.
Our 1800S now has the paintwork it deserves, with the doors done properly, along with the sills and engine compartment.
Now that the car is out of the paint shop, we will be redoing the interior, including adding the Eastwood Thermo-Coustic Sound Deadener to the floors, replacing the interior door cards and armrests, kick panels, seats and carpet. We will also be replacing the rest of the old and worn out chrome trim with new factory items. Then we’ll replace the ugly aftermarket valve cover with a stock chrome item and finally get rid of the Weber and replace it with our SUs.
Stay tuned: Now that the hard stuff is done, the project will coming together happening quickly.
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Update by Andy Reid to the
