welding project Juular's Scandi Noir. Volvo C70, 240 &122. Dodgy rear end.

[hairnet]

11 hours ago, juular said:

 

 

 

 

 

but realistically I need to replace the fusebox, which I've ordered a blade replacement for.

#yesssssssss

 

[juular]

Shit Volvo news, continuing from the story of the C70 pissing itself everywhere.

I managed to find a used C70 trans cooler on eBay which saved me from having to hack together a solution involving a universal cooler.

Slight problem though, it came with the rubber hoses still attached, and as soon as I tried to remove them it just sheared the soft aluminium pipes off.

So I had to cut the pipes back to a good bit of metal and lose the flared ends.

Next up, dropping the damaged cooler. Only 2 bolts and no need to take the bumper off.

No matter how careful I tried to be I of course dumped a load of ATF on my just washed driveway. Then left a nice trail all the way to the back garden as I carried it to the bin. 

It was clearly fucked and leaking in several places.

The replacement went on no problem but highlighted a new challenge in that the rubber hoses from the gearbox no longer reached the now shorter pipes on the cooler.

So I cut the metal crimps off the rubber hoses and removed them, exposing useful flared metal pipe ends.

It was then a case of replacing those with some fuel hose I had lying around in the 240s boot.

Last job to do on the C70 was fix the mess below. The inner driveshaft boot showed up on the MOT as an advisory, and it didn't last long after.

First attempt was made to replace it with a split glued boot. It almost succeeded.

Unfortunately the big end on the boot was just marginally too wide to be clamped down properly.

I tried another brand of boot and found it a tad too short, with no way round that either.

For what it's worth I expended some violence in trying to separate them again at the glued edges in the name of science. I failed. So there's no need to be sceptical of those glued joins holding up in my opinion.

In the end I noticed that the outer boot was starting to look a bit cracked and gave in and bought a complete new driveshaft.

No more fucking around, job done. I now also have a spare driveshaft that I'll re-boot when I can be bothered.

Did another complete dump and refill of the ATF to try and make it as clean as possible.

And finally a proper road test up to temperature.

No more leaks!

Another swede returned to the road.

240

Meanwhile the 240 was providing fine service as my main car. What a fine looking thing it is.

More ice cream was consumed.

I also treated it to a biennial scraping-off of bird shit.

The plan is to drive this 814 miles round trip to the 2CV racing at Pembrey at the weekend, as my campervan is needing a replacement gearbox.

Amazon

I haven't been driving the Amazon much for no reason other than not having the time and opportunity.

The last thing I did was to replace the leaking radiator with a new one and hack together a gearbox mount out of an old 240 engine mount.

However at the weekend I had the chance to wheel it out for the Bridge of Allan car show, seen here in front of Stirling castle with @captain_70s Acclaim for company.

The show contained delights such as this unforgettable hand sculpted Morris Minor.

And this rare MK1 Ford Transit in Saloon guise.

The good news is that the new Amazon radiator works fine and doesn't leak at all.

The bad news is my attempt to homebrew a gearbox mount failed completely. I was getting a lot of squeaking and banging while driving back from the show. I checked underneath today with a crowbar and could clearly see that the gearbox mount has already begun to separate from its metal pads, likely due to the heat of me having to use the welder on it.

So, that's the next and hopefully last bit of work to do for quite a while.

[juular]

On 13/05/2025 at 21:10, juular said:

So, that's the next and hopefully last bit of work to do for quite a while.

I know. Even as I was typing this out, I knew.

I could feel the presence of the impending doom cloud creeping over the horizon cackling at my impudence at thinking 'that'll be the last job for a while'.

Let's rewind and start with something positive. 

We took the 240 down to Pembrey for the 2CV racing, a nigh on 900 mile round trip. It was fab.

Both the racing and the 240.

The event coincided with @MrsJuulars 40th which was obviously celebrated with cake and beer.

Mr @Talbot brought along his 1 man tent, as usual.

We admired the Pete Sparrow Ami. It's way better in the metal.

The truck racing was on. It was frankly spectacular.

The journey home was mostly uneventful, with an 8 hour drive and a couple of stops at Hilton Park and Preston.

POTATOCAM

Around Birmingham I noticed the 240 sounded a little tappity, but it was hard to really diagnose as the top end sounded quiet enough.

I topped up the engine oil at Preston as it looked a little low and thought no more of it.

We got home at nearly 3AM, with no issues.

Ok, it was a few days later.

We were on the M8 in peak traffic when I heard the engine becoming suddenly very tappy, followed by an enormous bang and what sounded like the engine consuming itself. 

I really feared the worst at this point, but was a little confused as I rolled to a stop and noticed the engine was in fact still running, but only on 3 cylinders.

I was somewhat relieved when I opened the bonnet and saw the cause immediately: the number 3 spark plug and HT lead lying innocently on the front slam panel.

At this point the ticking made sense, clearly the plug had been slowly unwinding itself for some time, until the point where combustion gases started to leak past the threads.

I was too pissed off to take a photo of the spark plug which got duly launched into oblivion, but I did see that on its way out it had taken some of the head with it.

Luckily I did have some spare plugs in the boot, but the chewed up threads made it difficult to know how much I could wind one in before damaging the head completely.

Gingerly I managed to get a plug in, sort of, then drove the car onwards and eventually home.

A few days of sulking later, I got over myself and decided to see if I could save the head.

Luckily the plug I mashed in to get us home didn't seem to have caused any more damage and no more thread material came out as I removed it. Looking down the hole I could see that only around the top 10% of thread was actually damaged.

Bullet dodged, hopefully!

I decided it may be possible to rescue the situation by chasing the remaining threads, so I made up a precision engineered tool.

With that gently wound in and out a few times the threads started to feel pretty good again, and I could wind it right in to the bottom using only a bit of 8mm fuel hose on the ceramic insulator and gentle pressure.

I spun the engine over a few times with no plug to try and blow out any swarf. Regardless, a few bits of aluminium are unlikely to be of concern and are more likely to be vapourised instantly.

Happy with this, I stuck a set of brand new plugs in and gave it a good thrashing locally.

Zero issues.

I'm now declaring it fixed.

Since I was in about it I treated it to a couple of other little jobs.

I've been ignoring the fact it's quite grumpy on start-up for a while, mainly because it's KJet and There Be Dragons. If it runs, don't fuck with it.

Let's fuck with it.

The auxiliary air valve is here. It gives the engine a little bit of extra throttle when it's cold, and automatically closes up as it gets warm. 

Looking through it, I seemed to remember it should be a little bit more open than this on a first start.

Adjusted. I did say a little bit. Small adjustments have quite a significant effect.

Since I was there, I also took off the warmup regulator and modified it a little bit. 

I'd already added a bolt and nut to make it adjustable, but the nut had a habit of just digging into the casing when screwed down. So I added some washers.

I also gave the inlet filter a good clean out. It wasn't bad, but it did have some shit lying in it.

I didn't do any adjustments to the fuelling as it was so warm outside it was almost fully on the leaned-out setting purely from the ambient temperature. I'll do that properly on a colder morning.

Still, the aux air adjustment was a good call. Small changes, big effect. It now starts a lot better from cold.

So, this would be a happy ending, but for the fact the Amazon has now developed a non trivial problem.

More on that later. Two working cars is not to be sniffed at when the shite gods are watching.

[juular]

To bring the Amazon catalogue of maladies up to date, the last thing I mentioned was the gearbox mount.

The aftermarket Volvo mount I used here was rock solid and more like plastic than rubber. I replaced that with a modified 240 engine mount, which was a daft idea. The reason I had a spare 240 engine mount in the first place is because it was knackered and I forgot to bin it.

I fixed the problem properly by buying another set of Land Rover engine mounts from Glencoyne which are made out of rubber that is almost exactly the same as factory. 

These mounts are much wider than the Volvo ones but that was easy enough to sort by taking a small cut off one edge so that it would fit on the gearbox crossmember.

That then worked perfectly. 

The difference with these mounts on both the engine and gearbox is huge, with the deep vibration from the engine completely gone.

This almost brings the year-long issue with bad droning noises to a close.

I say almost, because in the new found peace and quiet I can now hear that the diff is fucked.

It doesn't whine like you'd expect, but there's a clear problem with the backlash as every time you either shift gears or go on the power there's a loud clunk from the back end.

Worse, there's an unpleasant groaning / rumbling noise on over-run which makes driving at a set speed on light throttle quite unpleasant.

If I grab the propshaft and rotate it with the wheels on the ground, I can move it quite a long way before it engages drive in either direction.

The propshaft itself seems absolutely fine with no movement. There's nothing else for it but to pull the diff out and have a look. 

To complicate matters the diff fitted to this car is an early style ENV unit for which there's not much in the way of documentation or parts available. A member of the Volvo owners group has very kindly sent me a copy of a manual from the 1960s showing the rebuild process, and I'm going to have a shot at it.

On the plus side it looks like the same diff was used in early Land Rovers which means there must be someone available nearby who will dig me out of the hole I inevitably create for myself!

Stay tuned for more self flagellation.

[Talbot]

On 26/05/2025 at 15:02, juular said:

Mr @Talbot brought along his 1 man tent, as usual.

I will accept any and all critique of having gone a tadge overboard on the tentage for this event.

[Ronkey]

Might be worth a chat with Rob Henchoz at Amazon Cars in Ipswich in regard to the diff. I know they have reduced what they do at the start of the year, but they are still listing on ebay. When I called in late last there I'm sure that there were complete  used ENV axles there. 

[juular]

Small and uninteresting but actually significant upgrade done to the 240 at the weekend. I finally spent the money to buy a new replacement fuse box that takes blade fuses rather than the horrible continental ones.

It's a like for like swap, so basically just have to move the wires across.

The big immediate improvement is that the fuse box is no longer overheating. In the longer term I can now also get replacement fuses easy enough at services or supermarkets if need be, rather than having to find more specialist places.

The other good news is that the car doesn't seem to have suffered from its spontaneous spark plug ejection incident. I've put a hundred or so miles on it and there's no signs of plug movement at all.

I've been half heartedly thinking about sorting the paint as really it's the last thing stopping the car from being perfect.

I did spray the areas that I repaired a few years ago, but weird things started to happen about a year afterwards.

It started off going a bit leathery and cracked looking.

And then in some places started falling off completely.

Not really sure what has happened there. I'm guessing maybe the paint has reacted with the clear lacquer, but I don't know how to prevent that happening again.

I've also had some thoughts on how to sort the Amazon diff.

I obtained some tools that feel far too grown up for me to be using.

My plan is to take the diff internals out of the casing and swap them with the spare ENV axle I took off the spares car. I'm glad I didn't bin it as they're pretty rare.

Hopefully the other diff will be usable, and it'll get the car on the road while I diagnose and repair the current one.

The reason I don't want to do a permanent swap is the other diff is a 4.56:1 ratio rather than the 4.1:1 so it will be a bit louder and revvier at cruise.

At the same time it will also give quicker acceleration so it might be fun to try it out for a while if nothing else!

[Supernaut]

I envy your nice, leisurely diffs.

I drove the S1 Land Rover to Fraserburgh and back yesterday. It's maybe 30-40 minutes in a "normal car" that can do 60mph.

The Land Rover has a 1.00 4th gear and 4.70 diffs. Screams its head off at about 40mph.

[juular]

The 0.77 overdrive with the 4.1 diff is surprisingly chilled. Under 3000rpm at 70mph.

[captain_70s]

Very impressive gearing for a car of that era. Wouldn't be commonplace until the 5-speed became common in the mid 80s.

For the reference, the Cresta:

And Cresta with the very rare aftermarket Laycock Overdrive...

The Dolly just screams along. No rev counter, no worries...

[warninglight]

4 hours ago, captain_70s said:

Very impressive gearing for a car of that era. Wouldn't be commonplace until the 5-speed became common in the mid 80s.

I think @juularhas combined the 'saloon non-overdrive' diff (the longest legged Amazon diff ratio) with the overdrive, giving it proper long legs. Longer than Volvo ever intended! It's what I did with mine, and worked well on the motorway.

[juular]

Well, that plan failed.

Went out to have a look at the spare 4.56 axle I had in storage.

Half shafts out. Not much corrosion and the bearings looked good which I thought was promising.

Diff unbolted no problem.

A bit of oil still in the pan, again seemed positive.

Diff out. 

Unfortunately I couldn't get it to turn.

This will be why. The main bearings are rusted solid.

There's also a bit of rust on the teeth of the crownwheel.

The plan is to dismantle it and see if the rust on the teeth goes deep or is mostly flash rust / cosmetic.

At the very least it'll need bearings, so no straight swap over for me.

If nothing else it'll be practice in dismantling the diff before I do the one on the car properly.

[chaseracer]

On 28/05/2025 at 13:23, Talbot said:

I will accept any and all critique of having gone a tadge overboard on the tentage for this event.

@Talbot: if I bring my Absurdocampbed to Snet, may I rent a corner of the east wing, pliz thankyoo? 😀