It turns out there's a reputable(?) tank repair place out in Greensburg so I'm going to call them tomorrow and see what they think.
It turns out there's a reputable(?) tank repair place out in Greensburg so I'm going to call them tomorrow and see what they think.
The gas tank is $20 off at IPD, last day of the sale today.
https://www.ipdusa.com/products/6808/Fuel-Tank-Genuine-Volvo-260020-110198
The gas tank repair guy said he could re-solder the fitting "no problem" and was familiar with this vintage of Volvo tanks so I'm assuming this isn't his first rodeo. I will pull the tank later in the month after the Vintage Grand Prix and just keep a full jerry can back there. As long as there's four gallons or less in the tank it doesn't leak.
I went exploring my downpipe options and ended up buying a full exhaust off VP. It's supposed to arrive today and I should have time this weekend to throw it on the car. It's just one of those Simons kits. Having a full muffler in the rear sort of changes the look of the car but I'm looking forward to getting rid of the cracked downpipe, BRAAAAAAAAAP sound any time I drive the car. It being an automatic makes it even worse.
Finally, a huge thanks to Ed from here for sending over this, completely gratis:
This forum has been an incredibly helpful resource both in terms of information and parts and I appreciate it! Sort of the cart before the horse here since I don't actually have an M41, but I have a line on one and need to pull the trigger. With the pedal assembly sorted I just need a clutch kit and the hydraulics and I should be good to go. My car has the "long" BW35 so apparently the driveshaft is the correct length assuming my flanges are the same.
One more thing:
I am terrible at keeping the exterior of any of my cars clean, ignore dents, scratches, and rust... but I am super particular about having everything on the cars I own WORK, whether that's the glovebox light or a power mirror or whatever. I cleaned and fixed the underdash lightswitch for the parcel tray on the 122 and then spent... two hours? I'm not sure, trying to get the old Motorola radio in the dash to receive AM signal. It's Volvo branded and powers on (light comes on and the speaker does a little thud) but I get nothing through the antenna.
I think my priorities are a little backwards.
Great job on your Volvo. How many gallons are the 122 gas tanks. My rusty 1800 tank was only 11 gallons which didn't go far with a B30 6 cylinder so I put this in instead.
Now there's an innovative solution! I believe the 1800 and 122 tanks are pretty similar and capacity sounds the same to me. 11 usable gallons, maybe 12?
VP got the exhaust to me today and I had the afternoon to myself so I went down to the shop space (that I am soon to lose access to) and put it on. Generally when I go to do maintenance on any of my vehicles, something goes wrong but getting the old exhaust off and new one on took very little time.
The offending hole in the downpipe. This went straight to the scrap bin.
The Simons kit replaces the actual muffler and mid-pipe section with what I can only describe as the longest cherry bomb ever made. I think this is to get the sporty "tone" they bragged about in the copy, but I can't say I've ever seen anything like it before. Fit was perfect, all the parts went right into place which was a welcome change from my usual aftermarket exhaust experience.
The rear tow eye interfered with the new rear muffler so it had to come off. I wouldn't feel comfortable having the car winched from there anyway given the rust situation. These nuts and bolts looked extremely ominous and I had a feeling I'd need to fire the torch up but they were all bark and no bite. I spun them off with hand tools.
And installed. The tone is throaty I would say. Definitely more rumble than the previous inch wide piping. Sort of an identity crisis because at the front of the car you hear the tick-tick sewing machine noise of a B18B and out back it sounds, I don't know, sort of Italian? Needless to say the downpipe brap is gone and the car is much more pleasant to drive.
Looks great and sounds like a big improvement. I am incredulous that those bolts and nuts came apart without a torch, blade or disc
When I got this car the fuel filters were clogged with rust from the tank. There was one of those chintzy Spectre glass filters in the trunk that I installed "temporarily" to get it running and then promptly forgot about it. I finally put a proper NAPA 3001 inline filter on to prevent the car from burning down or losing fuel prime and leaking gas all over my garage.
I also adjusted my shifter because I could never quite seem to get it into park. The shifter connects to a maybe 3/4" diameter steel shaft that runs parallel to the steering shaft. It has a splined end onto which a lever slides over and connects to all the other arms that go to the transmission. VP has a handy diagram here: BW35 shifter diagram
Anyway I noticed that it hit the final position detent before actually moving the transmission fully into park so I took everything apart, moved it over a notch, and reassembled. Now the car goes into park and engages the parking pawl! However, Drive is now the lowest shift position and I no longer have L available. I noticed the bushing for the shift shaft(?) is long gone and only $6 from VP but do I bother fixing something I plan on removing anyway?
Well after months of not doing anything about the fuel leak from my gas tank I pulled the trigger on a new tank on black Friday. I think I had the old one out and the new one in with about only 30 minutes of effort. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice the filler neck is offset in the body quite a bit; my patched in trunk floor is apparently not lined up at the back edge which angles the tank a bit.
I drove two miles over to Wilkinsburg where the Marathon station has top-tier 90 octane for $6 a gallon and put 8 or 9 gallons in.
And we're BACK. It was fun to rip the car around for a little bit after. That said, the rattles and shakes are now really drawing my attention so I think I'll spend some time lubing, greasing, and otherwise tightening up things next.
Then a friend texted this to me: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1169615227198136 and the thought crossed my mind that this would be a lot easier with a nicer car!
In reply to orthoxstice :
That may be a good deal on that car. If the rust situation is manageable. Being a Cali car, it may be.
I need to write up my most recent LeMons build one of these days. Over the last 2 years I build an Amazon race car, which we ran pretty successfully at Thompson, CT this past August. I did a full dual exhaust on the car, with side dumps, and an X pipe. It was loud, but sounded great taching up to 5500 rpm.
jfryjfry said:Looks great and sounds like a big improvement. I am incredulous that those bolts and nuts came apart without a torch, blade or disc
Volvo may have sourced their hardware from the same place Jaguar did in the 1960s. Unless the fastener is rusting away, it's almost a guarantee that it will unscrew and probably be reusable.
Lotus must have got it from the same place! The threads on most of my hardware are fine.
I ended up needing to break this out of storage early this year after my 940's exhaust fell off. I was only able to commute with it for two days before the AMP light started staying on no matter what. I deduced that the voltage regulator had failed and ordered one of the electronic ones but that didn't fix things. I'd read that a failed regulator often kills the generator. Luckily we have a decades old generator repair place in Pittsburgh and they were able to do a full rebuild for $100. Money well spent, I thought.
However, when I went to take the generator off the car this happened:
I ended up having to drill it out but, sadly, I ended up off center and could not get the remainder of the bolt out. As a friend of mine likes to say, "if you can't make it better, make it worse" so I just drilled out the hole I had and retapped it. I got some Lowe's grade 8 hardware and a new bushing for the arm and it mounted up okay.
Luckily it all worked. And the car runs much better! I suspect my generator has been limping along for awhile before this. Many thanks to Ed's Generator Service down on 51. If you're in the area I can't recommend them enough for generator and alternator rebuilds.
In reply to orthoxstice :
Is that coil...mounted upside down? I don't think I've ever seen that before, though I guess there's no reason not to?
See you have the later collapsible steering column. Nice.
I have a pile of old generators; unless you need the extra amps, they generally work fine and as you found out, aren't terrible to rebuild. That said, I do have alternators in my 2 running cars at the moment. One is a Kubota mini unit and the other is a Delco GM model.
volvoclearinghouse said:In reply to orthoxstice :
Is that coil...mounted upside down? I don't think I've ever seen that before, though I guess there's no reason not to?
See you have the later collapsible steering column. Nice.
I have a pile of old generators; unless you need the extra amps, they generally work fine and as you found out, aren't terrible to rebuild. That said, I do have alternators in my 2 running cars at the moment. One is a Kubota mini unit and the other is a Delco GM model.
Haha yes, that's the previous owner's handiwork. Not sure but I think they did it to be as close as possible to the Pertronix pickup.
You'd mentioned the Kubota one before and I had considered looking into it but the rebuilt gen will serve for now.
Upside down coil is a bad idea. They are filled with oil for cooling, and frequently will leak mounted terminals down. After they leak they always fail too.
Every air cooled Volkswagen upright engine had their Bosch coils mounted upside down like that. It's fine.
In reply to Cousin_Eddie (Forum Supporter) :
I am not willing to bet that a Bosch coil made more recently that the end of aircooled VW production is still an old dry unit. This Volvo originally had a Volvo only part that was damn reliable, so this coil is reasonably new. The amazing part of the old dry ones was that you could mount them on something that shakes as much as a 4 cylinder engine and they would continue to make just enough spark for a long time. Also I saw plenty ov VWs have wires come adrift that might not have had they been inverted.
TurnerX19 said:Upside down coil is a bad idea. They are filled with oil for cooling, and frequently will leak mounted terminals down. After they leak they always fail too.
I had heard of that, too. My Jag had a sideways mounted coil on the front of the engine; when I swapped to the Pertronics distributor and coil I fabbed up a coil mount on the radiator bulkhead, with the coil vertical, terminals on top. Pertronics recommended the coil in that orientation, and away from as much heat and vibe as possible.
On the LeMons Amazon I recently prepped I mounted the Bosche coil over where the OP has his, but right side up. I also custom fabbed a pretty aluminium bracket for it.
I'm back again with tuning problems. I had to use my 122 to get down to the commuter bus lot (like, two miles) and on the way back after work it started sputtering, misfiring, and I was not sure I'd make it back up the hill. Anyway, I tried setting idle timing and doing an SU tune and it's just not possible. The timing/idle or idle/timing wanders all over the place. I tried both the unisyn method of tuning and the Tom Bryant dashpot wire method and no dice. The oil also seems suspicously thinned out (it's 10w40 T4) so I wonder if the car hasn't been running rich for awhile.
I was feeling stumped and then checked for play at the throttle shafts. It is.... significant. Just wondering if others have had tuning problems as a result of worn out throttle shafts. I might spring to have my carbs rebushed.
Yes some coils will fail not mounted correctly. The MSD red coil is very good, but needs to be mounted vertical, terminals up. MSD also make a high vibration coil that can be mounted any way you want. i had a red coil fail, then I read the instructions. You might want to add a good MSD coil and spark box, should improve starting and running. If not running high RPM, can trigger the spark box with a set of points.
Lots of discussion afterwards about what I said about the coil being fine mounted that way. If one wants to Google, Bosch coils are epoxy filled and can be mounted in any orientation.
In reply to orthoxstice :
You can definitely have tuning problems from worn out carb bodies, but it's strange that it ran OKish in the morning but not in the afternoon.
Agreed, the throttle shaft wear will cause erratic idle, but that didn't just happen. I've had plenty of 122's that I've driven with sloppy throttle shafts. Once you're off idle it doesn't matter as much. The timing is what concerns me- it sounds like from your description it's erratic? I wonder if the mechanical advance spring broke in the distributor or something. Do you run any vacuum advance? First thing I'd check is pop the distributor cap and make sure all is well under there. I forget if you're running points but if so, make sure those are set up properly as well. If it's a Pertronics setup, it may be dying- I had one in my Corvair that was acting up as you described.
On the throttle shafts, you may get lucky, I've just overhauled two sets of SU HS6's and on both a new throttle shaft cured the sloppiness. Most of the wear occurred on the shaft, which is softer, apparently, than the carburetor body. I put a dab of grease on the shaft where it turns in the body, too.
So months have gone by and I only recently got time to dig into the Amazon again. My summer car projects have not been very much "fun" with mostly deferred maintenance to daily drivers piling up until catastrophe struck (doing a head gasket on my 940) or routine maintenance that was stressful (timing belt service on my gf's Jeep Liberty CRD; do not recommend).
Reflecting on the post above I decided to take stock of where I was at and get back to a square one. So I changed the oil and reset the valve lash. Cylinder 3 intake valve was still in spec but every other one was out a few thousandths. Then I assessed the plug gaps (all seemed fine), the plug conditions (cylinder 1 appeared perfect, the others showed evidence of running rich), and took the distributor apart to check into things.
The distributor cap was surprisingly loose even with the spring clips fastened. Like I was able to lift it up a good 1/16th of an inch or more and could rock it too many degrees off axis in any direction. I bent the spring clips to have even more bow to them and they now grip the cap tight to the distributor body. There was also a little corrosion on the cap contacts that I scuffed off. Anyway after all this I ran the car and drove it maybe 3-4 miles. The mid-range stumble appears to be gone. The car was driving like its old happy self again.
But when I returned to my garage there was smoke puffing out from under the hood. Inspection showed significant amounts of oil leaking from the passenger-side of the valve cover and dripping onto the exhaust manifold. I had put a rubber gasket on when I last set the valves and it is now swollen and distended. I think I'll go back to the cork for now.
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