Daily Driver Duties

At the beginning of febuary i went on a business trip to Ireland with my MD, one night in the hotel bar and the topic of conversation was what to do with a car that my MD's other company had just retired out of service.

It has been with the company for a good few years, in fact it was probably one of the first cars they had but for the past 6-8 months it has just sat in the yard due to a few running problems. Now being the petrol head i am, i came up with quite a few ideas - some completely out the box, some a little bit more realistic.

Fast forward a month and the car needs to be moved as the space its occupying is needed, and i get asked as to where it can be put until we start working on it - Cue a couple of facebook statuses asking if anybody has a spare driveway/garage we can borrow, then my brain starts ticking: see the Astra is getting to a level that i'm happy with and i now want to get it all cleaned up etc for the shows, and with me using it daily - i just keep filling it with crap. The "project" recently went straight through its MOT, it refused to fail - well refused to fail the MOT but now refuses to start unless you give it a jumpstart and the starter motor a kick, So i asked that if i fix it, can i use it to run back and forth to work: the answer was yes. So saturday Loz (my work colleague at Irmscher) is going to bring his banger truck and we're going to ferry over to mine, where armed with some sockets and RedBull i'm going to start sorting its gremlins.

The Car in question: is a Volvo 340, not just a 340 but a 1.7 340 - whats so special about that? It means that either the 1.7 turbo lump out of the 440 or the 1.8/2.0 16v lump out of the clio (williams shape) can be dropped in with relative ease.

The plan is for it to be a cross-company project as such, My MD's other company is a Volvo and Saab parts specialist(now also branching into BMW and Mini parts) so parts won't be a issue.

With me using it for daily driver duties it means we can sort the chassis etc before dropping the engine in, and also means i can tidy the astra up ready for show season. Win-Win.

I'll have some pics up on the weekend :)

Karl