B18 Engine
It was 1978, and I had gone all through college without actually having a driver’s license (something about my parents being “too busy” to drive me to the DMV while I was home). I had never owned a car before and I had, at most, $1000 to spend. Searching the ads, I found what seemed to be an interesting classified: “1963 Volvo 544. Unique. Needs special owner. $1000.” I knew that Volvos were odd European cars often owned by college professors, but this car was 20 years old and must be, I thought, worth more than $1000. Using a friend’s car, I found my way out to the seller who proudly unveiled the amazing humpback Volvo 544 two-door marvel, a car that although built in1963 looked like something straight out of the 1930’s with wide fenders, a lumpy body, and the original off-white paint. The interior was a bright red, all vinyl and chrome. The dashboard had all the safety softness of an anvil. The ride was wonderful. The long-throw stick shift moved more than a foot-and-a-half from one gear to another. The steering wheel was a vintage Nardi bought by the owner. The car in fact was his baby, the thing he bought prior to having children that he thought he could restore, but circumstances simply didn’t allow it.
The exterior aesthetics were quite wonderful, but it was what was under the hood that made the present owner (and by osmosis, myself) positively giddy. Opening up the classically bulboid hood revealed the legendary Volvo B18 engine, amazing in its compactness and the fact that it was originally designed to power tractors. What made it unique in the automotive world was its bifurcated carburetion, two carburetors with separate air filters, each powering two of the car’s four pistons. I literally cannot repair my own lawnmower, but I could, utilizing the arcane books that the original owner had included in the sale, actually attempt to tune this amazing engine (or so it was hoped).
After a series of radiator failures, brake failures, and running out of gas simply because the gas gauge didn’t work any more, I ended up trying to renovate the car body itself only to find that the original body had rusted so thoroughly between its plastic gasketed seams that I had to put a Volvo 122S body over the original frame and body. The B18 engine thus was preserved and I had the car for about five years before ultimately selling it to my partner, who loved it even more than I did. Its isolation in a sea of space under the hood renders it a virtual art object in my memory.
Despite its changing bodies, owners, and varieties of use, that little B18 engine had a thirty-five year lifespan which encompassed something well in excess of 200,000 miles. Its modesty and clarity, as well as its pungent European upbringing (all of its parts being made in Sweden) made it a time capsule of a time when automobiles were mechanical more than they were electronic (dumb versus smart, charming versus awe-inspiring). Perhaps things aren’t getting better after all. . .
