juular

Hold the god damn phone.

Looks like the alternator regulator is fried. Did I mention it's a new alternator?

At least it was considerate enough to let me have lunch.

Got a load of tools in the car and just been diagnosing. Battery is actually flat. It's possible the alternator is dead, or it's not getting a good earth through the block for some reason.

I was going to get you to cross stitch and frame it, but perhaps MS paint would be more realistic in terms of time frames with this car.

Currently broken down with a flat battery.

Account balance being calculated valued customer sir. Please await the waits. Big ends gone. Damaged Crankshaft Leaking from bellhousing Leaking radiator Headlights not working Indicators not working Ignition barrel fucked Gearbox mount split in two. As mentioned the original plan was to take this to Rustival this weekend but to be honest I completely gave up because of the issues and I haven't been in a state of mind to sort it. The few times I'd had a go at tackling small things I ended up a mere bawhair from putting a sledgehammer through the windscreen and having it towed. The furthest I'd got recently was unceremoniously dumping the engine. I didn't even have the mental wherewithal to stick the fingers up at it. To cheer myself up I dug further. Oil pump taken off, a hose shoved up the engine's oil arsehole and five litres of diesel pumped through to try and flush all the passages. Like a cold dino enema. That needs a level of attention. So I professionally recored my radiator. Grudgingly, the engine. I found the cause of the bellhousing leak. That was a brand new rear main seal conversion kit, I didn't even press it into the housing with my big dirty king chuck fingers. It just fucked up all by itself. Beautiful. Let's check how well the spare crank matches up to the big ends with new bearings. It's what it says in the book. Not going back in here again for at least a week, so both the big ends and mains were replaced. A generous squeeze of raspberry sauce to appease the god of ungrateful cars. And the rest. New seal for a guaranteed five minutes of reliability. More sauce. It hasn't exploded yet.

Crank is toast. Plastigauged #1 and it was clearly out of round as the mark was tapered quite strongly. Thankfully I have a spare crank.

It could well be. I have it off to flush it and check it over. Never got any oil pressure warnings mind you, but it could well be pumping alright while simultaneously disintegrating.

Well I didn't expect this. Either something has got into the oil or the effect of #1 disintegrating has fed swarf into the others. Going to flush the engine before fitting new shells.

I guess it depends on the industry. In mine, almost every destructive and costly poor decision has been made by the sort of person who can rattle off exactly the right answers at exactly the right times, and can tell anyone exactly what they want to hear. However when put in a situation where actual competency is required everything falls apart in a dramatic fashion. Conversely the cleanup of said messes are usually done in the background by highly skilled and undervalued people who would probably cower if you spoke to them off guard.

I absolutely would hate to work for that company. It's not a confidence test.

Strange desire to own a diesel Sapphire as my parents once rented one to go on summer holidays when I was wee. It was the first diesel car we'd had and I remember being a huge novelty even though it was slow as a week in jail. It seemed much more modern than my dad's Volvo 340.

As much as I love the idea of an OM (nom nom) I'd like to repair the B18 as it's not too bad. A quick polish of the crank and some new bearings will see it good. It looks like the Conrod nut on #1 has wound itself off. Longer term I think the 240 would make a better OM candidate. There's more room and it's more of a big comfy cruiser. That's if I don't push it into the canal before that point.

Well. That escalated quickly.

Wheek. That is all.

At's no right.. You might hear the rattle above after the shift to 2nd and at around 2500-3000rpm. First thing I thought was pinging, but it continued after turning the mix up and timing back. Then I thought bottom end. However when revved stationary it sounds more like valve train. You can definitely hear it in this one. Not good. Clearances reset. No change. Aux belt off. No change. Took the timing cover off to check the timing gear. Intact and solid as a rock. Next thing on the list would be the cam followers. Which means head off. Hhhhhhhhh. They are all intact, but.. That has seen better times. Given the state of that there's no option but to take the camshaft out as that follower will have probably damaged it. Straight in the bin with that. A new K cam and followers on their way. As for the noise, I reckon it may actually be coming from the fuel pump, as the lobe for that looks particularly tired.

I have sorted the 240 problem by once again pretending I don't own it. On to the stalwart C70 which I forgot needed an MOT until the last moment. This car has been giving such little trouble I had to check what the previous MOT said. The steering rack play comes up every year, and it changes from steering rack to inner tie rods to one of the track rod ends depending on where I take it for MOT. The car has the tightest steering of any car I own so I think there's nothing actually wrong there. Maybe the rack adjuster needs tightened a bit, but for now I'll ignore it. The sills were easy enough to sort. In fact I'm a bit annoyed they even made an advisory as there's nothing wrong with them. Simply, a tyre fitter has managed to fold over both seams of the sill. But then this is the same place that failed a spotless 240 for DANGEROUS CORROSION because a rubber grommet was missing. Fixing that is just a case of straightening the seams with mole grips. Done. Last thing to sort was the small matter of the tailpipe having fallen off. Since there's no backbox on these it wasn't a big deal but I thought it was worth fixing. I fixed this by HAMMERING A BIGGER EXHAUST OVER IT. No, really, I found a bit of spare pipe that was marginally bigger than the exhaust and fit perfectly without evening having to cut it. And I just hammered it on. Let's see how that goes. Ah. Note how the steering rack play has switched to a track rod end this time, right as expected. They've done their time I suppose. Pair of new springs £35 and half an hour of work. I'm annoyed about the suspension arm advisories as I replaced them this time last year. 5 year warranty apparently. I'll test that! Anyway, good to get another year out of this beast, because I absolutely love it. No sign of anything major on the horizon either. Brilliant car.

Minor ailments with this currently include one of the carb needles becoming loose resulting in raw fuel being dumped out of the exhaust (pretty stains on pavement) and a somewhat temperamental fusebox connection. Both easy fixes I suppose. In preparation for a long journey down to Rustival, a 700 mile round trip, I thought it would be good to add a few features. First up is a working 12v socket. The wiring had long since disintegrated from this do it had to be redone. To begin I stuck it in phosphoric acid to clean up the rusty insides. Then made up new wiring. Originally this is fed off the ignition switch and is both permanently live and unfused. Not happy with this, I've made the wiring to fit into a switched live on the fusebox, and added a tail onto it for future use. That meant I could then use a portable inflator to pump the tyres up that were all sitting at 20psi. Next up, I wanted to do something about the high-low beam toggle which is operated by a foot switch next to the clutch pedal. That's not it in location but you get the idea. My problem is my feet are way too big to use the switch and I keep pressing the clutch instead. The full beam can also be flashed by pulling the indicator stalk towards you so my plan was to modify this so that it can be used as a toggle switch, then I could do away with the floor switch. The advantage here is that the stalk flash is fed through a relay, so I can make modifications that don't need to handle the current. The floor switch by comparison is straight wired to the headlamps and is consequently chunky as hell. So here's the plan. Splice into the feed to the flasher stalk and wire in a bistable (latching) relay. That way you have one flick for full beam on, then another for full beam off. The relay is easy to come by for a staggering £3.43. And here is how it wires in. Temporary wired in with alligator clips. That'll do. Next plan is to improve the indicators. You'll have to take my word for it, but as standard they're so damn slow. Going all the way round a roundabout it'll probably flash twice, which I feel is dangerous as the non-lit time is far too long. This one is simple enough to fix, the original flasher relay is binned and a modern relay with adjustable speed wired in. No need to explain this really as it's a like for like swap, I just had to make up a couple of wires to connect the pins into the existing plug. I kept the old plug so that for any reason the old flasher can be put back on. Waaaaay better. Final electrical mod: hazards. Seems odd for a Volvo not to have hazard lights but there you go. This required splicing into the yellow wire coming from the flasher relay, adding a 4 pin switch, and splicing the output straight to both left and right indicator bulb wires, bypassing the stalk. Hardest part of that was cutting the loom wrap in the right place to find the green and blue wires for the indicators to cut into them. I'll feel a bit better about using motorways now. Time to celebrate with a chippy.

Satisfyingly weldy. Good job.

So with the gearbox back in (note to self. Use two jacks.) I had to go through the inevitable period of the overdrive working then not working. But it seems to be alright. The leaks seem to have mostly stopped although I'm still getting a small drip from the bell housing. I don't know if that is just oil which has been lying in there or if the input bearing cover is still leaking. I will run it for a while and check again. Anyway forget about that. Look at this. I felt the original ZH needles were a little weak and in fact when timing and fuelling were set correctly for low-mid range I'd get pinging at high revs under load. When richened, the low-mid range was boggy. The ZH needles are considered weak even in unmodified B18A engines so with this car having a high compression head and a D cam it really could do with a bit more fuel to unlock its potential. So I swapped these for a set of KD needles which I believe are the richest available and also commonly used in rally builds. £40 and 10 minutes work for a remap M9? I'll take it. After fitting those the first thing I did was wash the car. No. No I didn't. I kicked fuck out of it. And it was an enormous amount of fun even without properly retuning the carbs and ignition. Big, big improvement in low end shove which tapers off really nicely into the high rpm range. A little bit of tweaking to the carbs to obtain a better plug colour was done, followed by more hooning around the back roads. Repeat as required. After a longer drive I found it was running quite rich so it's still going to need a lot of tinkering, but it does feel like it's unlocked quite a number of extra hamsters. Thankfully there's a helpful reference to let me know when I've flipped the car.

That's some neat and strong welding going on there.

Arrived today. Thank you!

I've fallen foul of this as well. I can't remember the exact situation but I got stung for late payment because I paid too early. I think possibly one of us paid while sitting in the queue to cross to make sure we didn't forget. It didn't register as being for that specific journey so it just swallowed the payment, then issued a fine. I think I got it cancelled but it really was the usual case of technology is always right, even when it's been developed by people who can't operate shoelaces.

Making the calendar twice is an unexpected honour, I will endeavour to lord it over everyone from now on.