For those looking for the prancing moose gear, go to the original. Dave is a loooong time volvo dude. He invented the Prancing Moose sticker. You can also buy a few important wiring harnesses and mods from his site.
Geely-Volvo recently slapped him with a cease-and-desist on all Volvo script, and trademarked goods, but many of his designs don't use any trademarked stuff. When it was Ford-Volvo or just Volvo, they didn't care.
Also you should definately keep that mechanic around! I'm knee-deep in a transmission swap on my XC90 V8. Had to pull the engine out to get to the angle gear and trans. I couldn't figure out how to remove the trans with the motor still in the car. They say it's possible, but I don't see how.
Besides by the time you get to the point of removing the transmission, you are only a few hoses away from removing the engine anyway. Fuel, heater core lines, and AC compressor were all it took to pull the motor/trans/AG as one piece.
I'll be resealing the timing cover of the V8 while it's out too, It's weeping. I have 96k miles on it now. After all this work it should be good for another 100k before anything major happens. Also going to put a new reg/rect in the alternator and maybe new bearings. The alternator is a bear to replace with the motor in place. Might as well do it now, even though it's working fine.
For those looking for the prancing moose gear, go to the original. Dave is a loooong time volvo dude. He invented the Prancing Moose sticker. You can also buy a few important wiring harnesses and mods from his site.
Geely-Volvo recently slapped him with a cease-and-desist on all Volvo script, and trademarked goods, but many of his designs don't use any trademarked stuff. When it was Ford-Volvo or just Volvo, they didn't care.
auslanderVLV is an (unconfirmed) fence for all of Dave's Volvo branded inventory and it's where I got the fender stickers
Also you should definately keep that mechanic around! I'm knee-deep in a transmission swap on my XC90 V8. Had to pull the engine out to get to the angle gear and trans. I couldn't figure out how to remove the trans with the motor still in the car. They say it's possible, but I don't see how.
Besides by the time you get to the point of removing the transmission, you are only a few hoses away from removing the engine anyway. Fuel, heater core lines, and AC compressor were all it took to pull the motor/trans/AG as one piece.
I'll be resealing the timing cover of the V8 while it's out too, It's weeping. I have 96k miles on it now. After all this work it should be good for another 100k before anything major happens. Also going to put a new reg/rect in the alternator and maybe new bearings. The alternator is a bear to replace with the motor in place. Might as well do it now, even though it's working fine.
Yikes, that V8 is pretty rock solid from what I hear though. The only thing that scares me at this point is a clutch job, if the clutch starts slipping then all at once I'd want to:
pull the trans and reseal it
replace the clutch and maybe go single mass flywheel
Yeah the motor is great! It's all the stuff bolted to it that's suspect! hahaha...
It's really not that bad. Lots of auto transmissions go out at 100k miles. This one's no different. I have a junkyard trans with 50k miles, and I'm going to do a shift kit on it which will extend the life of the transmission. Firmer shifts mean less heat bubilding up in the clutches.
The angle gear and haldex on the XC90's seem to have less issues. They are a little more heavily built to account for the mass of the XC90. I'll be doing full fluids and filters on all the AWD stuff while it's apart.
They had a valve body issue where the valve bodies will wear out-of-round until they can't keep pressure or get stuck completely. It was revised after 2006. seems to only affect 2002-2006. My junkyard transmission is a later one. That plus a shift kit should insure a longer life behind a fairly powerful (for the time) motor.
For those that might not have known about the b8444 Volvo V8.
It's also the motor that Noble used for the M600. Although that was twin turbo'd and upgraded internals. It's a Yamaha designed 60 degree V8.
Well this week sucked, this car is the king of kicks to the nuts...
I got home from work on Monday and noticed fluid dripping from the rear end of the car: AWESOME
I texted James who immediately said he'd warranty it and tear back into it to fix the leak, appreciated that response. We determined that it was the pinion seal that had somehow failed based on where the fluid was leaking from. However, two problems were: 1. getting to work and 2. quickly getting parts ordered to fix it. I got a rental car sorted out and 'overnighted' the parts on Tuesday morning, best case was Thursday morning arrival... awesome. I struck out 0 for 5 on local Volvo dealers having any of the parts I needed but I only had to pay $12 to have parts overnighted so that wasn't bad at all.
The last problem was figuring out how to get the car from my house to James' house 33 miles away. Turns out the rear haldex you can just unplug the controller and you're good to go to drive normally and limp it over, good in a pinch for short durations. Thought that was pretty cool.
Thursday afternoon I got the car on jacks, pretty easy to unplug the controller once I figured out how the electrical connector unclipped.
Popped an error immediately on start up but it drove fine
I took the car to James' house and we spent 3 hours working on it Thursday night. Turns out the tiny spring had fallen out of the pinion seal when he had put it all back together the first time. All in all about 8 hours of my time this week went towards solving the problem/driving to and from/rental cars/fixing the issue. Total damage was $135 for the rental car and the parts needed... not too bad but on top of the $900+ I spent to do the work last weekend it's been an expensive month.
Also while working on the car and testing the haldex I discovered one of my wheels was bent and needs to be replaced, not sure how long that's been going on...
More hate than love on some days...
The worst part was that I had a turd of a rental car for the day on Wednesday...
In other news I got the latest UOA back and everything looks really solid internally, no coolant or any abnormal turbo or bearing wear.
All quiet here, threw some Torco in the tank last week and my knock issue went away so I need to chase that down. Still need to do all four brakes, diff fluid, transfer case fluid, and MT fluid but that'll be all it needs.
The last couple of weeks have been great. Got some time in the garage to finally tackle the last few things that needed to be done on the R. The car is now 'stage 0'd (volvo speak for caught up on maintenance with all preventive maintenance and any deteriorated/worn components replaced). Feels good to finally have her sorted!
I knocked out:
4 corner brakes and rotors
rear differential fluid (fill hole only, siphoning out fluid manually is dumb)
angle gear (very simple transfer case) oil
MT oil
Front swaybar endlinks
Fixed my droopy front bumper lip with rivets
Repaired a burnt out fog light socket
Front wipers
Removed my Christmas lights
Fixed mis-matched 'temperature' headlight bulbs
shiny new hardware
matching bulb temperatures is OCD but satisfying
rear diff oil was nasty and likely original
because getting to the fill plug for the rear diff shouldn't be easy....
MPGs with the christmas lights...
I guess it's not gay if they don't touch?
She cleans up nice!
meme game is weak today but I do have this no-codes volvo video:
That pic reminded me of the absolute worst repair I ever attempted. Damn alternator on a damn 99 Ford Contour POS.
This was in the days before YouTube was much help but I did have repair manual info on it. The problem with the contour is that it had a 6 cylinder crammed in a tiny engine compartment. Okay, that is not THE problem, but it was A problem with that POS.
The alternator was tucked up under the passenger wheel well with zero access from either top or bottom. I should have known it was going to be bad when step 1 of the procedure was to remove the DRIVER'S front wheel. I had to beg, borrow, and steal socket extensions from all my neighbors, totalling I think around 6 ft and fish that damn socket through a pathway in the engine bay, find the 3 bolts and extract them without losing the connection to any of the socket extensions.
Son of a beech that was hard. Took several hours to extract that thing.
Anyhoo I got the sweats when I saw your socket extensions.
I had the opposite problem with the 944 - some of the bellhousing bolts are damn near invisible and you can't get much of a tool on them either. Disassembly instructions are pretty much 1. Remove rear half of car 2.1 Pray that someone was in there before AND used anti-seize on the bellhousing bolts when everything went back together or... 2.2 Drop engine
I had the opposite problem with the 944 - some of the bellhousing bolts are damn near invisible and you can't get much of a tool on them either. Disassembly instructions are pretty much 1. Remove rear half of car 2.1 Pray that someone was in there before AND used anti-seize on the bellhousing bolts when everything went back together or... 2.2 Drop engine
Truth.
We removed the engine for the frame machine. Bonus is that we can do clutch maintenance now. We can also set the crank and reference sensors while the motor is out.
