GAZ 24 – Venus: a masterpiece custom Volga from Smolensk

For a very long time I wanted to write about a car from our native expanses, but at the same time… Don’t get me wrong: I respect all car enthusiasts and their projects, and even Japanese tuners are, frankly, very nice to me, but. Still, I’m really a fan of the American school. And yes, I understand that none of the people connected with cars is in any way to blame for the fact that everything in our country is so bad with car production, and all the good engines are foreign, and it’s much easier to get something Japanese, and even with that, it’s getting worse every year, and now electric cars they came up with it, and even in the USA all muscle cars were discontinued… It’s all the fault of completely different people who have completely different interests. But understanding all this doesn’t help at all, and when I see another Volga with a Japanese linear engine, it literally tears me in half. On the one hand: yes, it’s commendable, the car was restored, and even the Japanese line is definitely better than the civilian Soviet engine. But on the other hand…

Yes, on the other hand, seeing Japanese engines in native classics is downright painful. Old Soviet cars are literally being asked to put a V8 in them – or at least a V6. And, in any case, I definitely don’t want to write about a car with a Japanese engine on RockThisTown. Just take a look at our engine room: what the hell is a Japanese engine? But even if you find a car with the right engine, there’s another problem: I’m still not a reporter, and in particular, I’ve never been able to take photos properly. So a real independent article seems to be excluded, and without a personal meeting, all that remains is to copy information from other sites. But when I take articles from foreign publishers, at least I have the honor to work as a translator. What should I do here? Copy it blindly? In general, I wanted to find a car from the post-Soviet space, for which I would not be afraid to seem like a lazy brute to myself, and which I would not be ashamed to put on our website side by side with cars like Le Perle and Outrageous.

And now, the moment has come! A car was found that meets absolutely all the parameters: GAZ 24, which was built by Andrey Ivanov from Smolensk! At some point in 2014, Comrade Ivanov was just passing by this Volga River and decided to leave a note under the windshield wiper, notifying the owner of his desire to buy a car. Andrey got a call back, and that’s how he became the owner of the 1980 GAZ 24 in very good condition, and for only 30,000 rubles. The price is just magical, but that was many years ago. Now such cars are much more expensive.

Like every good project in the hands of a skilled person, the car was rebuilt several times. The first update for the Venus was the spoked wheels and a simple understatement of the suspension: the springs were shortened in front, and a couple of leaf springs were removed from the rear. A little later, the body was covered with blue film and some other small things were added to the simple changes, such as the steering wheel from the chain and the partial redesign of the interior in red, after which it was decided to start rebuilding the car really seriously and put the V8 engine from the GAZ 53 truck. The result turned out to be inspiring: after traveling for some time with the engine from the 53rd, Andrey dismantled the Volga completely and rebuilt the car from scratch within a few years.

The engine was replaced again, and again with a V8, fortunately, Comrade Ivanov is our man, and therefore knows that it should be a V8 on such a car. The Russian engine was used again: this time the ZMZ-5234 with a volume of 4.7 liters and a capacity of 130 horsepower, bought with only twenty thousand kilometers of mileage. The engine fit into the Volga with minor alterations: I had to slightly modify the engine shield so that there was more space for the exhaust system, and pick up the fasteners. Andrey connected the engine to a five-gear manual transmission, newer from the Volga.

Some changes were also made to the chassis of the Venus: disc brakes were installed in the front, and springs gave way to a four-lever suspension at the rear. Plus, Andrey installed pneumatics: simple, but nevertheless allowing the car to effectively cling to the ground. The discs deserve special mention: what looks like a solid quarter-mile check-in kit is actually a replica. According to one of the articles found on the Internet, it is from China. Nevertheless, the wheels were executed according to all the rules, and not only in terms of discs: narrower wheels with a slightly larger diameter of discs were installed in front, and in the rear, respectively, the rubber was wider, and the diameter of the discs was smaller. For this, by the way, we still had to expand the rear body, but it was done so carefully that the edge of the arch remained factory-made and the expansion was virtually invisible. History is silent about how much time and money was spent on all of the above (and below) described.

The purely cosmetic part of the car consists of a now completely redesigned interior in classic red and a simply delightfully painted body. The design was invented by one of Comrade Ivanov’s friends: it is both extremely simple and at the same time devilishly complex – one hundred and thirty lines of different colors. It took about thirty coats of paint, two kilometers of duct tape, and about three weeks to implement the idea.

To be honest, I would say that the body turned out to be even too good: one of those cases when it becomes a pity to drive a car somewhere, because chips and scratches are inevitable, and with such a color scheme, every stone on the body will be like a blade to the heart. But judging by the number of videos on the Internet, Venus is not the queen of trailers at all. This Volga is constantly traveling somewhere: either to exhibitions in other cities, or to all sorts of charity events – and all the time on its own. Which, in general, is very commendable… but I still feel sorry for the paint. It turned out too well.

The latest feature of Venus is a remote control, completely designed specifically for this Volga. The trick is that it was created on the Arduino platform – this is the same electronic constructor with an open architecture and GitHub code, which, by the will of fate, was mentioned just a few articles ago: with its help, Matt Leischer on the other side of the planet tried to make the throttle valves in his Chrysler work correctly. And in this case, with the help of Arduino, someone unknown created, in fact, the country’s first air suspension control panel. By the way, the throttle can also be controlled using this remote control, and it is also possible to remotely start the car and honk the horn.

In general, it seems to me that Venus is the Volga, which, well, it’s not a shame to put on a par with American showbirds. This car has everything: a canonical-looking V8, on display, and a full range of related products from the bug trap to the side exhaust pipes, and the paintwork, and even a remote control. It is definitely possible to find projects that can beat this Volga separately in one category or another, but this is the first time I’ve seen such a successful combination of all parameters. I really hope, however, that it won’t be the last, and that in the future there will be more cars on our site that are assembled closer to our specific locations.

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