3 months later...
3 months later...
This car, in Canary Yellow, wagon, was my poster car. Everyone had Coutach and Diablos and I had a wagon.
Wow! Nice job!
In reply to pointofdeparture :
Slick!
AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to pointofdeparture :
Slick!
Dizzy!
First off, as the owner of an old P80 congratulations on the purchase and kudos on the repairs and upgrades. I find these to be some of the most handsome sedans and wagons ever made. They really are timeless.
Second, I have a respectful suggestion. Grab a bottle of Chemical Guys VRP. My wife's Wrangler has a lot of black plastic trim that easily fades and this stuff is awesome. Wipe it on, buff if quickly and it stays dark for a long time and it nourishes the plastic as opposed to some of the sprays that dry it further. It would black out all of your trim and really take the car to the next level.
Always wanted one of these. Have been kicking around finding one of the Volvos for my son's first car. Something we can work on and teach him on.
Mothers back to black works fantastic on black trim - I used it on all my Tacomas + FJ Cruisers. Excellent in the So Cal sun.
Loweguy5 said:First off, as the owner of an old P80 congratulations on the purchase and kudos on the repairs and upgrades. I find these to be some of the most handsome sedans and wagons ever made. They really are timeless.
Second, I have a respectful suggestion. Grab a bottle of Chemical Guys VRP. My wife's Wrangler has a lot of black plastic trim that easily fades and this stuff is awesome. Wipe it on, buff if quickly and it stays dark for a long time and it nourishes the plastic as opposed to some of the sprays that dry it further. It would black out all of your trim and really take the car to the next level.
mr2s2000elise said:Mothers back to black works fantastic on black trim - I used it on all my Tacomas + FJ Cruisers. Excellent in the So Cal sun.
I have tried many of these types of products over the years and actually already did three passes with my preferred formulation (Solution Finish, which is dye-based and tends to hold up better than many others I have tried). Unfortunately you can only do so much for 25-year-old trim that was never cared for from the beginning, especially for a car that is parked on the street in the sun every day. It was basically white to start with!
In reply to pointofdeparture :
Ah ok, that makes sense!
So the 850 sedans come stock with a power retractable antenna. I know that some people love the novelty of these things, but I've always hated them. They get poor reception, the mechanisms fail, they are super easy to break, etc...
Well a couple months back I went into a car wash with the radio on and the mast got torn clean off. I ended up yanking the whole assembly and sticking a hole plug from Lowe's into the hole on the rear quarter, telling myself I'd figure it out after the car came back from paint.
That time has come, so I did some thinking and eBayed an assortment of parts I was familiar with from my prior Euro E28 project:
I hacked the plug off of the old power antenna mechanism, wired up the power and ground to the BMW antenna base (which is amplified), flipped the BMW grommet upside down and trimmed the top, then pushed the whole assembly through the fender into the Volvo grommet and installed the mast. Problem solved! (I'm going to replace the mast with one from a Honda S2000 which is shorter and car wash safe, just waiting for it to arrive, but at least this lets me put the trunk interior trim back in for now).
I never listen to the radio, but the reception with this new setup is noticeably better than it was with the original power retractable unit, and it takes up significantly less space as well as weighing 2lbs less.
Have now installed the S2000 antenna. Little project in the grand scheme of things, but I've removed some unnecessary complexity and now I can go through automatic car washes without breaking anything.
Might try to install the solid Delrin front subframe bushings on Sunday if the weather isn't too bad (it's rainy season here in the Bay).
What a transformation for this car; I love it. I wonder if there's any hope a good PDR man could salvage my daily 940 wagon.
orthoxstice said:What a transformation for this car; I love it. I wonder if there's any hope a good PDR man could salvage my daily 940 wagon.
It's really amazing what truly good dent guys can accomplish. There's no filler in the rear quarter of my 850, which is downright incredible when you look at how bad the damage was. (I sure paid for it though...)
Since I got this thing it's had a noisy lifter that has kind of bothered me, and it also goes through probably two quarts of oil between changes.
When I bought the car the P.O. threw in a case of Mann oil filters and a bunch of M1 5W-30; I did an oil change right away with a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil to try and quiet the lifter. The oil was jet black within 1000 miles so I changed it again, and added another quart of MMO after about 1500 miles (when it was a quart down). Didn't turn black as quickly this time, but I had decided that I wanted to move up to Rotella T6 5W-40 that I've always run in these, and figured I would try a BG EPR flush and use up the rest of the M1 oil while shutting up the lifter and maybe helping the oil control rings. Engine flushes in general tend to be snake oil, but the BG product has some very vocal support and I've had good experience with their other products so I decided to give it a go.
Drained out the current M1/MMO mix, filled it up with fresh M1 5W-30, the BG EPR and a new filter, then fired it up and held it at 1200RPM for 20 minutes while I sat in the car and took advantage of the fact that De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising was just added to Spotify. In about 5 minutes the lifter went from being as loud as it's ever been to basically silent, which encouraged me to press on for the full 20 before shutting it down and draining the oil. The oil I drained out (which had a whole 0 miles and 20 minutes of high idle, no load runtime) looked similarly dark to the M1/MMO oil that had probably 2500 real world miles on it, so clearly the BG stuff did something.
Filled her up with Rotella T6 5W-40 and yet another new filter, and drove home with a nice quiet engine. It did feel a little bit like the engine had a touch more grunt at tip-in, but that could very well be placebo. I'm more interested in seeing if the lifter stays quiet and the oil consumption is reduced at all. I will report back!
Ever since installing Delrin subframe bushings in my first 850R, I have believed that they are far and away the best handling modification you can make to the P80/P2 cars. Volvo designed the front subframes to use four 3" rubber bushings that have large voids in them; this is great for NVH and sharp bumps and so forth when the bushings are fresh and new, but when these cars get some miles on them the bushings fall apart and subsequently the front subframe can drift around with about an inch of deflection in any given direction. This is terrible for a bunch of reasons and in practice means that the car's alignment is constantly shifting around while driving, along with a bunch of "feel" type effects such as making shifts feel rough, rubbery steering, and so on. My experience is that swapping out to the Delrin bushings has a trivial impact to NVH but a huge positive impact to just about everything else, so I always make them a priority.
https://www.bneshop.com/products/awd-fwd-delrin-subframe-bushings
Being the third P80 I've done this job on, I pretty much have it down to a science now. Use a throwaway flathead screwdriver to pierce the plastic outer shell of each bushing, then drive it vertically through each bushing a few times to create a gap to hammer a pry bar into. Then just put some leverage on the pry bar and they pop right out. Takes about 15 minutes per bushing when you get the hang of it. BNE (Delrin bushing manufacturer) sells an install kit that includes a couple nifty spacers that let you simply drive the new bushings in with an impact gun; I HIGHLY recommend using these, having gone without in the past.
Couple hours later, the R now drives like the touring sedan it's supposed to be, with BMW-like steering feel, firm yet smooth shifts, and a generally more "tight" feeling across the board.
Have you taken it by and showed the seller, or even just sent him a photo?
In reply to Steve_Jones :
I sent him a couple pics last week and he was quite pleased to see that it went to a good home. He also told me that he found some more spare parts for it, so I'll be catching up with him at some point to grab those.
So one of the things that I knew I would eventually have to figure out on this car was the aftermarket downpipe/cat situation. I got lucky with the California smog man the first time around but I couldn't count on it happening again, and the OBX DP had a tendency to rattle and just be annoying in general. The original 15G on the car was also a bit of an oil burner and I had a sneaking suspicion that the exhaust manifold was beginning to leak.
Well, that sent me down a "while I'm in there" rabbit hole of "what are the highest-performing factory parts I can put on this thing and get through smog without raising eyebrows?" I ended up with a fresh angle flange 16T, a Japanifold exhaust manifold, and the factory 2.5" angle flange DP/catalytic converter from a late C70.
I dreaded doing this job for months but everything actually came apart and went back together remarkably easily. The car is now quieter, the turbo spools much quicker, my highway MPGs have jumped from 23 to 26, and the exhaust seems to stink a little less. And the best part is, it's all factory Volvo parts, so you would have to be some kind of Volvo savant to pick out that this isn't a factory setup...but just to be safe I'll likely take it back to the same smog man for its next test.
I have a lead on a 97 R wagon. Will know tomorrow. Wish me luck.
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