Project Volvo Wagon: Horse Trading Our Way to a New Daily

We usually don’t bother discussing the specifics of project car acquisition. After all, you’re here to read about cars, not about driving around and looking at dumb things on Craigslist.

This story, though: It was too weird to not write. It’s the story of how we got our latest daily driver, and it starts with a 50-year-old Mercedes parts car. The Mercedes belonged to a friend of ours, and it was destined for the scrapyard. So we made the owner a simple offer: We’d remove the last parts he wanted: the entire A/C system and the radio, and he’d let us keep the rest of the car. We figured we’d make a few hundred bucks for an evening’s work, helping out a friend along the way.

So we dragged the 1964 Mercedes-Benz 220SE home and went to work. We handed the owner his parts, then had a dumb idea: Maybe we could get the old Mercedes running, potentially turning a few hundred bucks in scrap metal into much more. We put a battery in the car, cleaned out the fuel system, and got lucky: We now had a running, driving Mercedes.

Then we listed it for sale. A rusty four-door fintail Mercedes isn’t worth much, and certainly isn’t worth restoring, so we knew our market was limited. We asked for $1200, and had a few crazy offers–including one person that wanted us to arrange shipping to Germany. Only one offer was serious enough to consider: A man four hours away wanted to trade us a running, driving Volvo wagon with cold A/C and shiny paint for the Mercedes. Only one catch: it needed a transmission, but came with a replacement he’d pulled from a local junkyard. Definitely a weird offer, but, without many options, we loaded the Mercedes up on a trailer and made the drive down.

And, well, we got lucky. Very lucky. Parked in the guy’s driveway was a 2000 Volvo V70, and it honestly looked good enough to be parked outside an office building by a middle manager. We drove the Volvo around the block, then made the trade and brought it home. It did indeed need a transmission, but it wasn’t undrivable: It still had four out of five gears, with third gear completely ruined. Careful throttle modulation–meaning floor it from a stop then let off completely for a shift to fourth–let us drive the Volvo back and forth to work for a week without fixing a thing.

After a week commuting, we took another chance on the Volvo: There was indeed a used transmission sitting in the back of the wagon, but we didn’t have the 10 hours of labor (or a lift) to change it. So we drove the car over to a friend’s house and made another weird deal: For $300, he’d swap the unknown used transmission into the car. A few days later we got the car back, and our luck had held out: It drove perfectly. With a few days work and $300, we’d turned a dead Mercedes into our newest daily driver.

What’s next for our Volvo? You’ll find out soon enough. Let’s just say that things escalated from here, literally filling our yard with dead Volvo wagons. We’ll tell that story in a future update.

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