(warning, long backstory, skip to the end of the post for pictures of gratuitious Volvo vandalism)
Last October after I finally got my old Subaru Legacy written off and decided to import a Nissan Cefiro from Japan, I realised that I needed transport, and any money I spend would come out of my Cefiro budget, so I needed a car that would be cheap, reliable, sturdy, practical and fuel economy wasn't an issue as work pay for my petrol. A Volvo 940 was the obvious choice.
£175 got me this, some of you may remember it from the RR, and how well it ran
That price was the car's value as scrap metal plus the value of the 6 months road tax left on it. I have breakdown cover on it so even if the engine were to explode on the way home I'd still break even. It also had six months MOT so what could possibly go wrong?
The answer is quite a lot actually. It drank coolant, the mileage history was the same every year since computerised MOT testing was brought in in 2006 (123,000 miles) and quite possibly for a few years before that. The gearbox was sloppy, the seats had pretty much collapsed, but hey it's only a few months until I get my Cefiro so it's cool right.
I made a modification to the back of the car:
I get my Cefiro, someone puts a brick through the windscreen of the Cefiro, long long delays getting a new one, so the Lolvo is back in service. Somehow it passes it's MOT needing just disks and pads. A mate of mine who is a Volvo nutter gets involved and we fix the source of the coolant leak, the water pump.
Big mistake
Having fixed the source of the leak, the next weakest component in the car goes, this is the head gasket.
We skim the head and replace the head gasket.
It blows the head gasket again. The head is too far gone.
Sod this. I'll take two weeks off work, and we'll stick a new engine in there. We get one from a scrapyard, came from a 1990 2.3 n/a Volvo 740 with 98K on the clock, written off due to a rear end accident. The engine is in gorgeous condition, perfect inside, unfortunately the scrapyard decided to steam clean it so now we don't know where the leaks are, so we replace all the seals ie. crankshaft and camshaft, replace all the gaskets (except head gasket) make sure all the valves are shimmed correctly (they are), take the injectors for a proper cleaning, put a new clutch on there and install it in the car.
All goes well for a few months then the gearbox breaks, one day I change into 3rd, it goes bang and I get neutral. We drop all the oil, fish out the teeth from 3rd gear and I drive like this for another month while pondering the pros and cons of replacing the gearbox.
5th gear stops working.
At this point it's been 5 months since my Cefiro windscreen was ordered and no sign of the ******* thing. Since the Volvo is doomed, and it's going to be my main car, I decide I want a better car. I want an estate, with an automatic gearbox so my GF can drive it (medical reasons, not skill reasons) and seats that dont cause me massive back pain.
My mate comes in again, and finds me a 1994 Volvo 940 "Wentworth" 2.0 turbo auto estate for £400. It has a few things wrong with it. The old guy who owned it knew nothing about cars and took it to a respected ex-Volvo mechanic who it appears is a complete cowboy. Among the problems we found are:
- Replaced the brake proportioning valve, but didn't bleed the brakes
- While doing this, let the brake fluid pour all over some coolant hoses and strip the paintwork off the chassis leg
- Put expensive 0w30 fully synthetic oil in there when the recommended oil for the car is 10w40 semi-synth. I know the thing about synthetic oil causing leaks is a myth, but putting oil too thin for the car when it's already at 150K on the clock is asking for seals to go, and they have.
And a bunch of wear and tear stuff. It needed a new MAF, lambda, temp sensor, air filter, distributor cap, rotor arm, leads, plugs, knock sensor and probably other stuff I've forgotten, most of this was pulled from the old car which was left to rot in my driveway. No problem, plenty of time before I need rid of the old car.
Or not, suddenly my Cefiro windscreen arrives the day after they said it was discontinued and out of stock, and I need to clear the driveway. The Cefiro is not going in the street as it will get hit by a drunk driver. The Welsh like their drinking, and they like their driving. Putting an old Volvo out in the street is fun because it means you can collect wing mirrors. In short we need to clear the driveway in a hurry.
The scrapyard offer us the same price with or without the engine, £80. They charged us £200 for the engine, so we decide to sell the engine separately, and don't want to hire an engine hoist to get it out, so my nutter mate comes up with an idea.
We unbolt the subframe, cut all the wiring and pipework, unbolt the suspension topmounts and the spaceship bushes, disconnect the gearbox from the propshaft, cut the front off the car, jack the car up, put it on stands, put the jack up on wooden blocks, to jack it up some more, raise the stands to their maximum height, attach a tow rope to the subframe and drag it out with my new Volvo
Then we make it more mobile
Is this road legal?
How about this?
We then phone the scrapyard and arrange a collection for Monday. They don't turn up, at this point some mysterious vandals who have nothing to do with us honest decide to strip the car of useful parts.
Headlights are handy to have spares of
Door glass is useful too, and quite easy to remove if you don't need the doors any more.
We're not complete ********* though. We left the key in the ignition for them so they'd have no trouble moving the car (except the handbrake is on, oops)
We had a bit more trouble with the doors on this side
There they are..
Wednesday morning rolls around, they still haven't turned up, this being Wales it rains a lot and the car has a few leaks so it's filling up with water
Quite a lot of water actually. Using the wiper blade as a dipstick you can see how much. I don't care as it will fetch more at the weigh-in.
Getting bored now, we put the car up for sale privately
Finally about 4PM today, they turned up to collect it. Argued about the price since it has no lights or anything else salveageable, but hey, if they'd collected it on time, then no-one would've vandalised it or stole parts. Got £60 for it in the end.
The scrapyard driver has a typically Welsh method of collecting the car, since all he has is a flatbed and a winch. He puts the flatbed under the front of the car until it's almost hitting the axle stands, then raises the flatbed to lift the front of the car, kicks the stands out the way, lowers the flatbed again and drags the car. We took a video of this but it's not ready yet, and was less funny than I was hoping it would be.
And now the engine is safely in my shed. If anyone needs a Volvo B230F engine in really good nick in the South Wales area, get in touch
Last October after I finally got my old Subaru Legacy written off and decided to import a Nissan Cefiro from Japan, I realised that I needed transport, and any money I spend would come out of my Cefiro budget, so I needed a car that would be cheap, reliable, sturdy, practical and fuel economy wasn't an issue as work pay for my petrol. A Volvo 940 was the obvious choice.
£175 got me this, some of you may remember it from the RR, and how well it ran
That price was the car's value as scrap metal plus the value of the 6 months road tax left on it. I have breakdown cover on it so even if the engine were to explode on the way home I'd still break even. It also had six months MOT so what could possibly go wrong?
The answer is quite a lot actually. It drank coolant, the mileage history was the same every year since computerised MOT testing was brought in in 2006 (123,000 miles) and quite possibly for a few years before that. The gearbox was sloppy, the seats had pretty much collapsed, but hey it's only a few months until I get my Cefiro so it's cool right.
I made a modification to the back of the car:
I get my Cefiro, someone puts a brick through the windscreen of the Cefiro, long long delays getting a new one, so the Lolvo is back in service. Somehow it passes it's MOT needing just disks and pads. A mate of mine who is a Volvo nutter gets involved and we fix the source of the coolant leak, the water pump.
Big mistake
Having fixed the source of the leak, the next weakest component in the car goes, this is the head gasket.
We skim the head and replace the head gasket.
It blows the head gasket again. The head is too far gone.
Sod this. I'll take two weeks off work, and we'll stick a new engine in there. We get one from a scrapyard, came from a 1990 2.3 n/a Volvo 740 with 98K on the clock, written off due to a rear end accident. The engine is in gorgeous condition, perfect inside, unfortunately the scrapyard decided to steam clean it so now we don't know where the leaks are, so we replace all the seals ie. crankshaft and camshaft, replace all the gaskets (except head gasket) make sure all the valves are shimmed correctly (they are), take the injectors for a proper cleaning, put a new clutch on there and install it in the car.
All goes well for a few months then the gearbox breaks, one day I change into 3rd, it goes bang and I get neutral. We drop all the oil, fish out the teeth from 3rd gear and I drive like this for another month while pondering the pros and cons of replacing the gearbox.
5th gear stops working.
At this point it's been 5 months since my Cefiro windscreen was ordered and no sign of the ******* thing. Since the Volvo is doomed, and it's going to be my main car, I decide I want a better car. I want an estate, with an automatic gearbox so my GF can drive it (medical reasons, not skill reasons) and seats that dont cause me massive back pain.
My mate comes in again, and finds me a 1994 Volvo 940 "Wentworth" 2.0 turbo auto estate for £400. It has a few things wrong with it. The old guy who owned it knew nothing about cars and took it to a respected ex-Volvo mechanic who it appears is a complete cowboy. Among the problems we found are:
- Replaced the brake proportioning valve, but didn't bleed the brakes
- While doing this, let the brake fluid pour all over some coolant hoses and strip the paintwork off the chassis leg
- Put expensive 0w30 fully synthetic oil in there when the recommended oil for the car is 10w40 semi-synth. I know the thing about synthetic oil causing leaks is a myth, but putting oil too thin for the car when it's already at 150K on the clock is asking for seals to go, and they have.
And a bunch of wear and tear stuff. It needed a new MAF, lambda, temp sensor, air filter, distributor cap, rotor arm, leads, plugs, knock sensor and probably other stuff I've forgotten, most of this was pulled from the old car which was left to rot in my driveway. No problem, plenty of time before I need rid of the old car.
Or not, suddenly my Cefiro windscreen arrives the day after they said it was discontinued and out of stock, and I need to clear the driveway. The Cefiro is not going in the street as it will get hit by a drunk driver. The Welsh like their drinking, and they like their driving. Putting an old Volvo out in the street is fun because it means you can collect wing mirrors. In short we need to clear the driveway in a hurry.
The scrapyard offer us the same price with or without the engine, £80. They charged us £200 for the engine, so we decide to sell the engine separately, and don't want to hire an engine hoist to get it out, so my nutter mate comes up with an idea.
We unbolt the subframe, cut all the wiring and pipework, unbolt the suspension topmounts and the spaceship bushes, disconnect the gearbox from the propshaft, cut the front off the car, jack the car up, put it on stands, put the jack up on wooden blocks, to jack it up some more, raise the stands to their maximum height, attach a tow rope to the subframe and drag it out with my new Volvo
Then we make it more mobile
Is this road legal?
How about this?
We then phone the scrapyard and arrange a collection for Monday. They don't turn up, at this point some mysterious vandals who have nothing to do with us honest decide to strip the car of useful parts.
Headlights are handy to have spares of
Door glass is useful too, and quite easy to remove if you don't need the doors any more.
We're not complete ********* though. We left the key in the ignition for them so they'd have no trouble moving the car (except the handbrake is on, oops)
We had a bit more trouble with the doors on this side
There they are..
Wednesday morning rolls around, they still haven't turned up, this being Wales it rains a lot and the car has a few leaks so it's filling up with water
Quite a lot of water actually. Using the wiper blade as a dipstick you can see how much. I don't care as it will fetch more at the weigh-in.
Getting bored now, we put the car up for sale privately
Finally about 4PM today, they turned up to collect it. Argued about the price since it has no lights or anything else salveageable, but hey, if they'd collected it on time, then no-one would've vandalised it or stole parts. Got £60 for it in the end.
The scrapyard driver has a typically Welsh method of collecting the car, since all he has is a flatbed and a winch. He puts the flatbed under the front of the car until it's almost hitting the axle stands, then raises the flatbed to lift the front of the car, kicks the stands out the way, lowers the flatbed again and drags the car. We took a video of this but it's not ready yet, and was less funny than I was hoping it would be.
And now the engine is safely in my shed. If anyone needs a Volvo B230F engine in really good nick in the South Wales area, get in touch
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