Update as of December 10, 2016

We spilt up into two "teams" this past weekend...

Team A: Gabe C. and a friend of ours

continued to strip the interior of the Volvo. We removed the dash and began removing the A/C tubing and system.

Team B: Gabe T. and Quinton worked on removing the turbo tubing, cylinder heads, and some other parts from the engine in preparation to exchange the camshaft for one with higher performance, as well as, to free up some space in the engine compartment (hard to tell in the photos). 

Future plans for the engine and surrounding area:

add a new camshaft,

insert new belts, 

install a bigger turbo, and

machine the heads to improve compression.

For the interior:

finish the removal of the A/C and excess wires;

install a roll-cage, a racing seat, and a harness; and

make new dashboard including gauges and a switchboard.

Update as of November 26, 2016

We worked both on the 25th and the 26th. What we did was most of stripping of the interior of the car. We had to remove the seats, carpet, and ceiling. We still haven't taken the dashboard out as you can see in the photos. Literally everything in the car has to come out.  The reason for removing everything is because of weight reasons. You may think that the interior might not weight that much but the seats of the car alone each weighed around 75+ lbs. the plastics, carpet, and ceiling removed about another 100lbs. Removing weight from the car means that your ever so important 0-60 time, power to weight ratio, drag times, and dead weight (weight that does nothing to improve the car's performance) are improved. We still have a little work to do interior-wise on the car. The photos are of the car as it stood on the 26th we will update when we do more work.

Introduction to our project

Here is the introduction for the project. Starting from the beginning. The team name is Team Volvo (its a work in progress) and consists of four main members Gabe Carvalho (age 14), Gabe Turner (age 15), Quinton Wiebe (age 15), and our Auto Tech teacher/mentor/spirit animal Raul Garcia (age unknown). The group got together around mid-October at our Auto Tech teacher's shop; after we had done what we were there to do one of us had the idea of making a race-car for a budget race up in Gainesville, Florida. We all thought it would be awesome to make one (or fail trying). Our current goal is to make a race-car out of the 1988-89 Volvo 780 Bertone we bought. We plan on racing in the Grassroots Motorsports $2017 Challenge; we encourage you to take a look at the link HERE for information on the race. A couple of photos and a video of the car as we first saw it are also added.

We will be updating this blog as we meet. We will post photos, videos, and text as we go along.