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I'll tell you what, I've got a damn good wife. No less than 3 days after she follows me 400 miles home from Ft. Collins in the "almost free" 544, I tell her we're going 200+ miles to Santa Fe to look at a '58 445. She has no problems with it. She follows me around on these adventures with 2 kids in tow, aged 2 years and 4 months. I'm a lucky Volvo glutton I am.
$2500 and 225 miles later, the 445 is sitting in my driveway. The carbs, SU HS4's are completely worn out at the throttle shafts and were way out of tune when I test drove the car. I fiddled with what I could and made it a little better but they still aren't even close to being right. Fenderwells and doors are rusty, brakes were squishy, rear doors don't close right, hardly anything electrical works, tires are old and severly weatherchecked... but it drives!
The old B16 got awfully hot going up some of those hills. From Santa Fe, we climbed north on 84, out of the desert, into the Pinion/Juniper forest around Abiquiu and finally into the tall Ponderosa at about 7800 ft in Chama. There's a long steep hill about 15 miles from where I live and I watched that gauge go all the way past the green bars into the white as I was flooring it, doing 40 mph in third gear. Everything cooled off on the way back down and it didn't quit so I suppose I didn't hurt anything.
This is the oldest Volvo I've ever owned. Everything about it screams 50's at you: round 270 degree speedometer, Volvo script logo in red on a big horn button covered in chrome, chrome dashboard knobs, white gauge needles tipped in red, big chrome "444" on the dash under the radio... its just too cool... Gets a lot of looks too.
Here's a couple of pictures, practicing HTML, hope this works.
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Bob W.
14 Volvos ('62-'91) and counting
544-122-240-740
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