Nope. OVT stands for Oregon Volvo Tuners, a Volvo club that began in the Portland area about 5 years ago and currently has 300+ members. The club founders Nick Choy, Tony Kilstadius and Kyle Eisenbach say the club grew out of their passion for modifying and maintaining Volvos. The club is open to owners of all Volvo models and no you don’t have to be in Oregon to join OVT. Heck, I got the impression that you don’t even have to own a Volvo to be a part of OVT, you just have to love cars and enjoy hanging out and helping out. The club has nice balance of vintage; rear wheel drive and front wheel drive content.

The club is very informal, a typical meet usually takes place at a members home / garage and can cover activities ranging from minor tune-ups to transmission conversions, Turbo upgrades etc. It’s not all work though, they do have a good time, as the BBQ is usually fired up a few yards away from the under hood activities and you can usually count on the opportunity to sample some of Oregon’s’ finest beverages- (after all, Portland is the Micro Brew Capitol of the World!)

There are no membership dues or fess, simply go to their website at www.ovtuners.org and sign up. The website offers very well moderated forums to help with your projects and maintenance questions as well as an active events and get together calendar. One thing you’ll notice is that they don’t tolerate much BS on the forums, which is great. The club participates in a wide variety of automotive related events including Friday night drags at Portland International Raceway, Volvo Club of America events, and they put on a few of their own events as well, such as the very popular “ Volvos on The Green” which is held annually at OVT Member Marc Williams home. He has an acre of nice green grass in SW Portland where members line up their cars on display. It’s not really a judged event, more like a traditional cruise in where you just relax and shoot the breeze about Volvos and check out members latest mods and restorations.

With a worthy mission of “Have fun and build community” OVT should be around for a long time! Check out the forums and members photo gallery at www.ovtuners.org.

Our local Volvo Dealer didn’t waste anytime modifying the new 2008 C30. Within days of backing it off the transport, the upgrading was in process. They started with a Cosmic White Metallic Version 2.0 C30 with T5 Turbocharged engine and 6-speed manual transmission. We worked with Herzog Meier Volvos own in house tuning department HM-MotorSports (www.hm-motorsports.com) and supplied them with many of the upgrades. So far the suspension upgrades include a fully adjustable H&R coil over suspension, our own 22mm rear anti sway bar upgrade and HD front sway bar end links. To bring the rear camber back into spec after lowering, adjustable camber links were installed. Under the hood you’ll fi nd a K&N Typhoon Air Intake system we upgraded the Software using the ipd Soft loader system. Check out these new products on the C30 section of our website. www.ipdusa.com Originally H&M had planned to install a set of aftermarket wheels but the aggressive look of the optional 7.5 X 18” Atreus alloy wheels that came on their C30 grew on them and they ultimately decided to stick with them. Still left on the to do list is a turbo back performance exhaust system and possibly a big brake upgrade package. The project was just coming together as we went to press, so we have not been able to do any performance testing, but we will follow up with more photos and performance specs in our next newsletter.