Back in the Volvo game with a new-to-me 1980 Volvo 242 GT. This car purchase happened pretty fast. I have always been keeping my eyes on the market for a long, long time, but never really cared about anything that I saw locally. I tried for the longest time to justify a flight to the west coast and drive then import one back to Toronto. Nothing made sense and didn't really excite me.
It was a very quiet day at work, so I popped onto Kijiji to see if there were any 242's in Ontario. The only one listed was about 45 minutes away and it was a GT. I made a call, and arranged to go look at it the next morning. Really liked it, talked with my wife, let her know how rare it was, and how much it would mean to me, and ended up buying it.
So here it is:
1980 242 GT
VIN: 24241A3186360
4 Speed with Overdrive. (M47?)
Pictures are a mix of the sellers driveway and my own driveway.
Car has a B230FT from a 740(as I was told). I have no idea what happened to the original B21, nor do I really care, as I am not a fan of K-Jet. My previous, 85 244 Turbo Intercooled had K-Jet and was a bit of a nightmare.
As for the body, it has been resprayed, I was told 3 years ago. It has had some new metal welded in, and from what I can see, it was a decent job. A little sloppy on the rocker panels with finish work, and some bad prep working in the sanding in a few spots around the body. But beggar's cant be chooser's. Overall, the shell is in really good shape. I did however find one small hole in the floor. Drivers side foot well on the leading edge of the floors. Nothing too bad. Some day, I will end up patching that.
The body trim holes were welded and filled. They will not be reopened, because I actually hate those as well. Seems that the previous owner had good taste.
The car starts, runs and drives, but I will have to do a lot of work before I can drive this thing around at all. I will have to take care of the brakes, and make sure they are in good working order.
The biggest project coming up is going to be the interior and the electrical. I have no idea what the previous owners were planning on doing with the interior, but switches and relays are all over the place. I have to find their homes, make sure everything works, then cover everything back up with the interior trim.
For the rest of the interior, I do have a complete spare interior from a non-gt 242. It will be going into this car. Get your torches and being the flame war, but the GT interior bothers me to no end. The corduroy seats ALWAYS look loose, and I can't stand that. Not to mention the striping always looks faded to me. It was awesome at one point, but I'll help the purists up their values by taking a fully pure GT interior out of my GT.
Bye bye door cards. Bye bye front and rear seats. Bye bye orange dash stripes. Side note, if anyone wants to buy interior GT parts, PM me. Its for sale in the next coming weeks.
The car came with a ridiculous amount of spare parts. A lot I will be keeping just so I can finish the interior, but the rest will be getting put up for sale. The Virgo's included. I have a set of OEM 17" Pegasus wheels to put on this. I'll be dropping it modestly, throwing the wheels on and heading to cruise nights to confuse the hot rod guys with my turbo, Lego Designed automobile.