I was searching for a cabriolet by Volvo for years when I started thinking of building one myself.As a P1900 was much too expensive and other Volvo models without a roof were nearly not to be found . And thus also expensive.I started to contact people via the Internet in order to ask them how a P1800 could be "re-modelled". After a few disappointments, I contacted someone who told me he had an original one. When I started asking how the job was done, he told me after a while that he might sell his car. "An original Volvoville. Dismantled but with all the pieces there." ( ! )
After a few mails with photographs, I had to decide: buy it or not.It would be stupid not to buy it. And it would be stupid to buy it: you hear a lot of stories from people who bought things unseen...But I had not the opportunity to go to the USA to see the car: I needed the money to buy the carand my work didn't give me the chance to go .

We (my wife also pays , so it is only fair to decide together) decided to buy,as we thought it was worth the risk at its asking-price.
Car with chassis 18345 VF 17787, a 1966 P1800S car originally in dark grey with a red interior. Originally delivered to Volvoville on Febr 8th 1966.Only : now it was "apple candy red metallic" and totally dismantled.

I knew a firm I can trust and asked them to have the car picked up, put all the bits in boxes and then in a container in order to send it to Belgium.Some four months later I went to the Customs to collect the car I had not seen before.It had arrived there in a sorry state.
But even before I arrived home with the car, I got three offers to sell the car. I could have made some profit already then by selling it !

Obviously the car got a bit mangled in the container.But it was all there. I started dismantling it in August 06. Only to reveal that the body was redone in a not-so-good-way.And the rest... This was merely a car ! I have some hundreds of photo's of my work dimantling the car, cutting all the corroded steel, sand-blasting the remains and then welding it all together again. In this course, I made some reïnforcements myself as I couldn't understand (nor could a fellow enthousiast who works at Volvocars as a chassis-engineer) how the car could drive for some 40 years without any substantial thing done to the chassis. But having the roof removed...

Then I started sanding it (by hand) and finally it was repainted. I chose the Steel-Blue Metallic color. An original color in 1970.
It would go fine in combination with a beige interior.Then I started putting it all together again using a mixture of the original parts where possible (reconditioned and/or re-chromed) or new parts where necessary (eg the interior).

Optimistically, I had hoped to drive the car again in the summer of 2007. It was not to be.Only now (April 08)the car is ready to hit the road again. It was quite a big task rebuilding the car. But I enjoyed doing the it ! And by doing so I got a nice car !
And that car is in some way a unique part of VOLVOs history !

Dirk Van den Zegel,
Belgium