For the price of another set of rear discs, you could have..

[CreepingJesus]

That's a really excellent buy. I remember going to visit my uncle at the Volvo dealers he was a salesman in, and seeing one in the showroom, in black, amidst the usual tanks. They hadn't been out long, and it seemed like it had come from another planet, sitting there. It lasted well, as a model.

The OHC 1725 Renner lump always struck me as an odd one too, canted over at an odd angle, with its' non-xflow head. Good engine tho'; pokey and reliable. The F7R, IIRC had a bored version of that block, with a Wiliams designed x-flow head, and the crank + rods off some diesel or other. The regular 2 litre wouldn't fit the Clio's engine bay, but they wanted one for the F2 Kit Car rallying regs, so knocked out the F7R instead. Don't quote me on any of that, tho'!

[warren t claim]

Lol! Slightly O/T but I waved someone in an blue Amazon driving down the Washway Rd a few weeks ago thinking it was you. Only when it got closer I realised it was a 2 door with a Grizzly Adams type driving it. Do you know him?

[Guest]

Lol! Slightly O/T but I waved someone in an blue Amazon driving down the Washway Rd a few weeks ago thinking it was you. Only when it got closer I realised it was a 2 door with a Grizzly Adams type driving it. Do you know him?

 

I think it may well be that 'tard CIH ran into.

[warren t claim]

Lol! Slightly O/T but I waved someone in an blue Amazon driving down the Washway Rd a few weeks ago thinking it was you. Only when it got closer I realised it was a 2 door with a Grizzly Adams type driving it. Do you know him?

 

I think it may well be that 'tard CIH ran into.

 

Not a friendly man is he? I think it was a B reg 122.

[droofer]

i met you in halfords car park, just after you got it,seen this ovlov in the flesh and looks pretty good for the money, cheap motoring ftw!.

not my cup of tea, but a good buy!

have you posted the pics of the acclaim yet??

[trigger]

We're thinking of using it as a pool car at NSJC Towers if any of our daily drivers fail to proceed

 

NSJC? Norfolk Show Jumping Club?.

 

Nice looking car these, and great valve for money, Yours looks exceptional VFM Wat, but i still wouldn't have one though (yes i have driven them so i am talking from experance).

[Guest]

We're thinking of using it as a pool car at NSJC Towers if any of our daily drivers fail to proceed

 

NSJC? Norfolk Show Jumping Club?.

 

Nice looking car these, and great valve for money, Yours looks exceptional VFM Wat, but i still wouldn't have one though (yes i have driven them so i am talking from experance).

 

Wow! Practical driving experience!

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

Fantastic car, and what a bargain.

 

Lol! Slightly O/T but I waved someone in an blue Amazon driving down the Washway Rd a few weeks ago thinking it was you. Only when it got closer I realised it was a 2 door with a Grizzly Adams type driving it. Do you know him?

If it was a H reg, I saw him getting into his car in Halfords car park in Altrincham. Otherwise, there's two of 'em.

 

I was thinking of writing a feature on this for the web reincarnation of Original Tin. What do you think?

That'd be great!

[Guest]

Oh Lord. Two weeks into the ownership experience and already we have a list of odd electrical faults. First of all there's the heated rear window, which is now easily defeated by a cold snap. Some jiggling of the contacts sorted that out, until I realised the moisture was inside the glass, pointing to the condensation the rear light clusters let in.

 

Indeed, let us consider the heater matrix, which never quite demists the windows. Some K Seal and coolant top up has stopped the cabin stinking of antifreeze when the engine gets up to temperature.

 

Surely, the lights. All 8 at the front and distended Pac Man at the rear, where condensation brews merrily. A working offset pin 566 replaced the buggered OSF DLR lamp. Except the fuse keeps blowing. The visiting Scouse Team of Excellence (Pete-M) replaced the 10A with a 15A, and for a brief moment the front and rear fogs, DLRs and rear stop lamp clusters worked perfectly (when slapped).

 

Twat boy Wat then leaves the doors unlocked and the headlamps up with the power off. I think this has tripped something, wank contacts and dodgy connections not withstanding. Now the pop ups don't and the dipped beam headlamps don't work at all. DLRs are as perfect as full beam is absent.

Left it locked up at the unit in a space where spastic flailing legs biscuit man can't park his pag-and-wank E36 Touring (i.e. outside our door). I'm going to go back tomorrow when things have had a chance to settle.

 

Oh, and I think the ICV is on its way out. Ironically this cold snap is doing little for this Franco-Dutch Swede.

 

Argh.

[Rocket88]

The Dutch have no concept of electricity

[j-j]

Despite the problems! great car! I've loved these since I was 11

 

10. OS door bin cracked like Windows XP two months before launch.

 

- They all do that. The plastic is designed to snap! It does superglue quite nicely though..

 

As for the headlights - if one is getting slow then suspect the motor itself as they're known to die. For some reason there is a motor for either headlight with an arrangement of trip switches to tell an ECU when the lights are up, down broke etc. This causes PROBLEMZ leaving one light up and the other stuck or moving up and down etc.

 

These all leak too! rear lights I think - the rear wiper will die too and then sporadically come back to life once or twice a year.

 

Quite a nice, sporty driving position IIRC.

 

Like the colour of your one.

[Guest]

extremely random electrics.

 

Indeed.

 

I had hoped things might have reset \ tripped \ settled down when I went back today, feeling somewhat better after the second wave of vom cleared me out this morning.

 

Yeah, right. Fire up, nowt doing. No DLRs, long distance lights, rear lights or rear fogs. Pop ups won't go down, or light up. Their motors grind fitfully (why do they have a motor each? Why can't they have one in the centre working a bar like my Piazza did?).

 

Right, what does work? Indicators. Heater (nuclear). Stereo. Wipers. Windscreen washers. Horn. Brake lights. I replaced the new 15A with the original 10A and tried again. Fuck all. I considered forcing the lights down but decided against it.

 

Untied the fusebox (yes, with a cable tie, some chimp had ripped the 'box off its fixings at some point previously) and went through every fuse separately. Alighting on number 22, it appeared to be smudged out to buggery. What's that do then?

 

'Headlight switch'.

 

Replace fuse. Everything works again.

 

I have precious little knowledge of auto electrics, but I think I'll be well versed when I've finished with this little bleeder. What I reckon's happening is there's either a short or a series of wanked contacts in the system (J'accuse, rear clusters) and every time something blows or the resistance changes, the fault's moving around.

It desperately needs a new set of rear clusters, but they're hard to come by at my end of the scale. They are available new, but would end up costing about a third of the car's current value. Their second hand counterparts are barely any better than mine, and still bleeding expensive. The only thing I might be able to hope for is for a younger car that might have decent clusters, or that has been stored under cover. I think that would be one of the advantages of having a drawn out production run - you could just about buy a 2 litre 480 GT on a P plate, and the hard points didn't change in 10 years of stock.

 

What I need is some kind of unfairly scrapped orphan, something consigned to the heap by scrappage or ungrateful family members. Something preferably with fitted mats, a hard load cover (not the shite soft one) and some sparkly clusters with Grandad's old polish still clinging to them. A car I can dangle myself into precariously and strip with my pish collection of Kamasa cast offs in about 20 minutes.

 

You listening, Northwich?

 

Of course, if any of you shiters come across such parts at a decent price, you would tell me, right?

 

I'm off to eBay for a set of these:

 

 

They're going to live in the car. Plus some 7.5As, which are not included. Cheersh!

 

Managed to find the ES in the 'Interesting' section of CAR 1990. Apparently it was £14,720 new. My inflation calculator tells me that's nearly £24K in today's money.

[garycox]

You tried this one being broken on ebay?

 

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/breaking-volvo-48 ... 0474003739

[Guest]

You tried this one being broken on ebay?

 

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/breaking-volvo-48 ... 0474003739

 

I mailed them last week and they didn't respond. Fuquers. It's Hull as well - a doable distance.

[Guest]

Right, let's have a mini update about the various things my clog is immolating at the moment.

Electrics wise, it's blowing the same two fuses each time. Changing the amperage still causes a failure at the switch. Worth upgrading both fuses at the same time perhaps?

 

The OSF cluster bulb (for the daylight running lights) keeps going out. The fuse keeps blowing and the bulb is fine. Even with the fuse carked the OSF indicator works fine. In fact, all the indicators work fine. I get about 20 minutes down the road, there's a 'CLICK' and the blown bulb tell-tale comes on. In turn this knocks out both rear tail bulbs and the front fogs. All the other fuses (bar the light switch fuse that blows afterwards, but only if you leave the lights up) are fine.

 

When a new fuse is connected the rear tails come back on with a thump. They're cloudy as hell and need replacing though, and they're very hard to come by at a decent price. Skandix are selling NOS for 130 Euros a side .

 

To celebrate the newly discovered working capacity of all light sources (for 20 minutes) I took the following deeply thrilling pictures when I got lost in Hazel Grove.

 

 

Normal running during the evening. Both daylight running lamps (seen adjacent to the indicator on the front cluster) should stay on with the dipped beam, as illustrated here.

 

 

NUCLEAR STREAK ALL OUT MODE. Full beam (pop ups), long distance lamps switched on, DLRs on, front fogs on. The long distance lamps work when switched on with the main beam regardless of whether or not the fuse has popped or not. With Fuse 11 popped I get the pop ups on dipped, one DLR and no front fogs.

 

 

Everything present and correct at the back. The rear fogs are both on and the full complement of bulbs (tail-light plus stop-tail) are on. The innermost bulbs on each cluster are the brake lights, and even with the fuse gone they come on fine, as do the indicators.

 

 

Finally, dig my pish load cover that has spent most of its life in a stuffed Welsh ES. It was only rescued when the rusting hulk was craned off the sellers driveway. There's five of those plastic squircle eyelet clips all round, and they attach to the inner plastic trim around the bottom of the rear window and below the loading lip. The fit is definitely NOT approximate and the two clips closest the camera certainly do not pop off when you slam the boot lid or pull the rear cluster covers away with them.

 

As you might have guessed, the cover doesn't hinge with the lid. The later cars had a concertina clip at the rear of the boot much like a estate car's, where you could roll the cover in and out and clip it when needed. Why this was only included on the later models when the moulding is already there in the B pillar plastics is a mystery known only to Jakob and the Mooie Lamp Overrigens brigade. Also, they're a rare and sought after extra and worth a few quid nowadays. The spares situation (especially for body panels) is actually worse than it is for my Amazon, which is quite comical given that the last GT \ Celebration rolled off the line in 1996. By means of a footnote you can also see how badly buggered my rear clusters are - they've taken in moisture and faded.

 

A cluster full of condensation with mucky contacts would create shorting / resistance, yes. Is this what's popping the bulbs?

 

Tiger Seal and fuses are cheap, thank Christ. The Camerlegg hasn't completely stiffed me yet.

[CreepingJesus]

Could be, but it's an easy fix anyway. Take the clusters off, take out the bulb holders. Wrap a clean rag round a stick, and once you've tipped the water out, scrape out the remaining gunge. Leave them somewhere warm for a while, 'til they dry out properly, then soak the rag with glass cleaner. Get cleaning, fill any gaps/holes, sandpaper the contacts, replace any rusty screws, clean up the mountings before you pop them back together, and back in place.

Having said that, I've never done that to a 480 - only Sierras and Escorts, but I wouldn't imagine they'd be much different. In extremis, I've 'excised' the seal from the back of the glass with a blade, in order to split the glass from the bowl. It makes the cleaning easier, and better, but using mastic to glue the whole lot back together is a bit on the messy side.

[Guest]

Could be, but it's an easy fix anyway. Take the clusters off, take out the bulb holders. Wrap a clean rag round a stick, and once you've tipped the water out, scrape out the remaining gunge. Leave them somewhere warm for a while, 'til they dry out properly, then soak the rag with glass cleaner. Get cleaning, fill any gaps/holes, sandpaper the contacts, replace any rusty screws, clean up the mountings before you pop them back together, and back in place.

Having said that, I've never done that to a 480 - only Sierras and Escorts, but I wouldn't imagine they'd be much different. In extremis, I've 'excised' the seal from the back of the glass with a blade, in order to split the glass from the bowl. It makes the cleaning easier, and better, but using mastic to glue the whole lot back together is a bit on the messy side.

 

Your tips (and fuses) are cheap. Bravo!