welding project Juular's Scandi Noir. Volvo C70, 240 &122. An explosion of small parts.

[Zelandeth]

On 29/06/2026 at 11:11, juular said:

...Anyway a solution has been knocked together for the moment - these are the springs that hold water bottles onto cages for small pets.

So there you go, best place to fix your 1960s car is Pets At Home...

Thank you for that... I've been trying to figure out where to find an appropriate return spring for the Rover for a while now, that would do perfectly.  Probably even still have one in the box of stuff from back when we had the trio of rats.  Obviously it never occurred to me to look there for car things!

[LightBulbFun]

2 hours ago, juular said:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250728174548/http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/real-haynes.htm

Quote

Haynes: As described in Chapter 7...
Translation: That'll teach you not to read through before you start, now you are looking at scarey photos of the inside of a gearbox.

 

[hairnet]

you shouldnt have to hoy mair king chuck (lol) tokens at them

135 quid for postal into country and bring in yersen is 390

so you might be ok

[Saabnut]

10 hours ago, juular said:

Don’t forget I still have a spare 240 gearbox of yours at my place

[juular]

So a wee bit of context behind the gearbox strip down.

Thankfully this isn't the one on the car, but my spare M40. 

The one on the car is firing more oil at the road than into its own bearings. This of course is because I made the effort to drop the box and do all the seals and gaskets on it a while back, and now it's rewarding me by being an ungrateful shit.

It's now dripping about 1ml per mile which might not seem a lot, but it's enough that any longer drive needs a topup before and after.

So, I will need to drop the box again and redo all the seals.

There is also a worsening transmission noise on the car that I'm thinking could be the front or rear gearbox bearing. If it is, I will strip it down and replace them both.

So, I'm practicing doing this on my spare box to see what needs to be done to achieve a bearing swap, as I'd rather do it myself than hand it to someone else to fuck up.

Thankfully it's not as frightening as I thought and I managed to get both bearings out without losing the will to live.

The Volvo box is surprisingly straightforward with all 4 gears on the same shaft and not a lot of surprises. The hardest part is finding the right drifts and dollys for the press, and not losing the nine million needle rollers that fall out of the layshaft.

It may be that the gearbox isn't the culprit and the diff is getting noisy.

I'm not good at diagnosing these sounds.

The diff does have more backlash than I would like, and gear changes still produce a bit of a clunk even after rebuilding the propshaft and changing the support bearing.

Apart from that I've been driving the car a lot, it gets a little addictive chucking it around and hearing the pushrods knock their pan in.

I've managed to solve the smells almost entirely by dropping the exhaust and rebuilding it with assembly paste. I also noticed quite a few floor grommets had buggered off over the last couple of years.

Oops, that definitely doesn't help.

Sealing those up also cut down a bit of road noise as you'd expect.

Oh and the 240s wiper spindle arrived from Sweden.

That was a relatively painless transaction and as @hairnet predicted I paid no fees with it being under £135.

240 will need a general going over as it's getting very ratty and is due an MOT.  So that's probably going to be the next priority.

[juular]

12 hours ago, Saabnut said:

Don’t forget I still have a spare 240 gearbox of yours at my place

I have been wondering about this as a swap for the overdrive box.

Top in the M47 is similar ratio to the OD in the M41 if I remember right.

The problem is the M47 is slanted to match the redblock engine.

Might have to just do a 2.3 redblock conversion on the Amazon?

[Dyslexic Viking]

10 hours ago, juular said:

I have been wondering about this as a swap for the overdrive box.

Top in the M47 is similar ratio to the OD in the M41 if I remember right.

The problem is the M47 is slanted to match the redblock engine.

Might have to just do a 2.3 redblock conversion on the Amazon?

If I recall correctly, the early 240s have an upright-mounted engine M45 transmission designed for the B20 engine. It is possible that the M45 bellhousing fits an M47, but I am not sure. Another issue is that most M47s do not have an outlet for a speedometer cable which makes installing them in older models a challenge, as the speedometer will no longer work.

An M47 with a speedometer cable drive exists in an early version, but it is very rare. I used to have one, but I let it go with my last 240 when I sold it.

[beko1987]

I'm not good at diagnosing these sounds.

 

I dunno, your method of working through and fully rebuilding everything part/place by part seems to be working well so far! eventually you'll get to the part that is knocking/noisy and everything else will also be sound 👌