I have been searching for a Volvo cabriolet for years when I started thinking of building one myself. A P1900 was much too expensive and other Volvo models without a roof were hard to find . 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 did not have the opportunity to go to the USA to see the car: I needed the money to buy the car and my work didn't allow me to make that trip .
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 buy 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 2006. 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 dismantling the car, cutting all the corroded steel, sand-blasting the remains and then welding it all together again. In this course, I made some reinforcements as I couldn't understand (nor could a fellow enthousiast who works at Volvocars as a chassis-engineer) how the car could have been driven for some 40 years without any substantial thing done to the chassis with the roof removed... 

Then I started sanding it (by hand) and finally it was repainted. I chose the Steel-Blue Metallic colour. An original colour 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 VOLVO’s history !

Dirk Van Den Zegel, Belgium

Note: The Webmaster welcomes any information about other 1800 Cabriolets

The Volvoville P1800
When Volvo designed the P1800, they purposely made the doors without solid frames around the windows. This was done so that they could eventually come out with a convertible version with as little trouble as possible. Unfortunately, the Volvo engineers of the 1960s were given a hurdle that they could not overcome. Safety was now the name of the game, and the technology of the 1960's was just not up to the task. There was no way of making a convertible safe enough to pass Volvo's tough new safety regime. 

That didn't stop some dealers, however, from modifying their stock of 1800's. Volvoville of Long Island, New York, became the most famous when they offered a dealer-installed option of a roofless P1800. The dream of Volvoville's founder, Stanley Lazarus, the Volvoville P1800 convertible was built using tops supplied by a local boat builder. The first was built in 1964 using a 1963 model, with about 30 more of these custom-made convertibles being ordered before Volvoville cancelled the option in 1969.