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4.6 32V 240 Wagon

Who said you couldn't put a modern Ford V8 into a Volvo? And the hood closes too!

Yes, congratulations!

Now you have to be careful not to spin that right rear tire too much before you get a limited slip in. You now have 3 times the HP of original and much smaller tires than the Lincoln.
 
mark viii volvo 240

Hey, Sooo happy for you and amazing build. Are those new tv screens?
I worked in my wagon today sorting out an oil pan leak and continuing my Subby wrx calipers / infinity rotors combo brakes adapted into the wagon. Is a lotta work with custom made parts and grinding stuff to make it fit, which I'm almost done with that cause the factory rotors were shot!!! Im dying to get mine on the road too( wife isnt happy cause she hates the car) ]
Anyway great job fellow turbobricker!!!:rofl:
 
mark viii volvo 240

by the way, Have you thought about electric power steering pump?
volvos come with it and might be an easy swap for you.
Im gonna do that for mine to safe some power and all the housing drama.just food for thought
DZ
 
by the way, Have you thought about electric power steering pump?
volvos come with it and might be an easy swap for you.
Im gonna do that for mine to safe some power and all the housing drama.just food for thought
DZ

I have not. But I don't think I will because the Ford pump fits just fine and all I need is some custom hoses to get the hydroboost and power steering working.

I feel you on all the cutting and grinding. I still have some left to do with mine getting the AC condenser to fit. And if by TV screens you mean the headlights, yes, they are new lenses. Massive improvement compared to the originals! (see first post of the thread)

aidanahunter - can you give us an under-hood shot as she sits right now?

Why, of course!

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This one's for Tom:

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This last one of the bumper sticker is significant because it was a birthday present from my wife. She got it for me last year when I had made the decision to pursue the project and I said I'd put it on the car once I get it running and driving. Well, one year later, it's on the car!

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Some more notes on the build. I found out that when there's extra weight in the car, the driveshaft rubs under load. When I drive it alone, everything is fine. Guess I'll need to do a little more work with the hammer.

I took it on the freeway for the first time. I had it up to about 80 and it was smooth cruising the entire way. It felt just as it did when it had the B230F...until you got on the throttle and it accelerated in overdrive ;) I ordered IPD adjustable torque rods but I'm not even sure I'll bother with them. There is some vibration under load, but not too much. Still haven't floored it. As I guessed, the engine turns at about 2500rpm at 70mph.

I did have one major scare. You can actually see it in the picture of the thermostat housing in my last post. You will notice one of those hoses doesn't have the clamp slid down over the barb. I thought I had taken care of that, but I hadn't. I was busy rushing to get the car driveable in time for the date. After my freeway drive, I got off at my exit and I smelled coolant as I was driving down the road my street is off of. I made it back to the house, got out and found a trail of coolant in the driveway and a puddle forming under the engine bay. Sure enough, that hose had come loose.

The car has been driven about 40 miles since it was capable of doing so. I can't believe the hose didn't come off sooner and I'm insanely lucky I got back to the house when I did. The engine did not overheat. All it needs is fresh coolant and it'll be good to go.


Thanks everyone for the positive words!
 
Congrats man! Must feel great to get it on the road. It looks so OEM under the hood. Very nicely integrated. I hope you have an enjoyable next phase of the project sorting out the smaller stuff and making it better now that it's "a thing" as I like to say.
 
Congrats man! Must feel great to get it on the road. It looks so OEM under the hood. Very nicely integrated. I hope you have an enjoyable next phase of the project sorting out the smaller stuff and making it better now that it's "a thing" as I like to say.

Thanks! It feels great, indeed.

Since the last post the car has been driven a little more. 63 miles on the build now. No more coolant hoses coming apart, but I learned that this is enough time to burn up a power steering pump that has no fluid going to it! I smelled burning after I got off the freeway, drove the car home and found plenty of smoke coming from the power steering pump. It's a shame because it was a new old stock Mustang power steering pump that I had on the car. I will have to go back to the original Mark VIII pump which was perfectly fine when I pulled the engine.

Right now, the highest priorities are fixing the driveshaft rub and getting power steering and brakes operational. I have all of the hose and fittings, just need to cut and assemble them. There is a very helpful diagram out there that someone made in the Mustang forums that shows all of the fittings you need (with summit racing part numbers) to run braided lines in place of stock lines. I used that to order my parts.

I also just ordered a whole bunch of fittings and hoses for the air conditioning from coldhose. New compressor is on the way as well. I'll write a more detailed description of how I got the AC to work if it actually works...

There's plenty of other small stuff to do as well, but I won't get that detailed for now.

Chris's fartsy shots inspired me to take this one as I was finishing up for the night:

 
Power steering and power brakes are now working. I assembled the hoses and installed the fittings without too much headache. The 6AN fitting I installed on the power steering pump had a few too many threads, so I ground them off to get the seal to seat properly. I used the cooler off of the Mark VIII and mounted it to the radiator cross member. I'm using Mercon V for fluid and all seems well.

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Air conditioning is not going to be happening for a little bit. I ordered a lot of the wrong fittings and my condenser showed up completely bent. Will post an update once that is actually happening.

One cool thing I did was got cruise control to work. It wasn't working before and I figured that was because the PCM was giving me a code for the vehicle speed sensor. Turns out I accidentally removed the ground circuit for the speed sensor when I was trimming the wire harness. After adding that ground back, cruise began working. It is a little floaty for some reason, but I'll look into that later. I have bigger fish to fry...

Working further on the driveshaft rub, I found that it was still rubbing against the bolt I had cut the threads off of. Not knowing what that bolt went to, I cut off the entire thing letting the bolt fall inside the car. As I was looking around the car after I had run some errands with my wife, I realized that the bolt I had removed belonged to the passenger seat belt anchor. I drove my wife around in the car basically without a seat belt. I'm honestly quite shaken by this and having some trouble coming to terms with it because I actually admire my wife quite a bit. Until then, I'm trying to think of ways to fix this.

Even with that bolt completely cut off, the driveshaft still rubs in the tunnel when there's at least someone in the passenger seat and about 100 lbs of stuff in the back of the trunk. I'm a little nervous that with a loaded trunk and back seat passengers, it's going to be pretty difficult to get this thing to stop rubbing. I could keep going at it with the hammer and try to anchor the seat belt to the body using an L bracket that allows the buckle to be anchored in the stock location. What I should probably do is get a smaller diameter custom driveshaft, try lowering my transmission cross member with some spacers (maybe even the engine too), and get this seat belt anchor bracket and bolt from a junkyard to bring it back to stock.

I went back to my post about my driveshaft and removed the following picture so I can point out that these bolts are actually quite important and that I wouldn't recommend messing with them.

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I took a risk last week and decided to take the 240 on a vacation with my wife to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I say "risk" like this was a decision I made on a whim, but the truth is I had been hoping I'd have the Volvo ready for this vacation since last year!

Before we left, I addressed some of the things in my last post. I took the driveshaft out and hammered the tunnel until I couldn't hammer it any better. I also was able to re-anchor the passenger seat belt with some leftover motor mount steel and some junk yard seat belt bolts. While I was at the junk yard, I noticed the vehicle I pulled the bolts from had black OEM hard rubber floor mats. Since my blue interior wagon came with tan mats, I swapped those out and sold the tan ones to a local guy with tan interior 240.

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After some hour-long highway test drives with no drama, I felt the car was truly capable of completing the trip. If we took off in the morning and heard driveshaft rubbing over the bumps on our street, we'd have to take the E91 instead (what a shame, right?).

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Lucky for us, it appeared my hammering had finally cleared a substantial enough path for the driveshaft. The only time it would ever rub is during shifts under heavy throttle or large bumps on the freeway. Tolerable.

In this picture you can see my old phone working as a coolant temp gauge and tachometer. The overdrive light in the cluster has actually been wired to work as the "cruise control on" light. On the freeway, after the control loop stays on for a bit, the control smooths out quite nicely. I should also note that my speedometer is inaccurate, showing the car traveling faster than it really is. In this picture, I'm actually doing more like 62 or 63 mph.

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The first stop was New Glarus, WI, where we got our fixing of Spotted Cow and other great beers at New Glarus Brewing Co. We camped in the state forest a mile from the brewery. The following morning, after checking the fluids, the hood wouldn't latch. After slamming it, I got it to stay closed, but it came loose on the freeways in Madison. At a gas station, I investigated, and found that the spring wasn't pulling the latch shut. I took the spring off, dipped it in the quart of motor oil I had with me, put the spring back on, and that fixed it. It's quite nice having a front grille that comes off with two lock pins that don't require any tools! This was the only car-related mishap that happened on the entire trip.

Next stop was the Porcupine Mountains on the coast of Lake Superior in the UP. We had been meaning to see this place since we met, so it was great to finally get here and see the sights.

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After camping in the park, we drove to the northernmost tip of the UP: Copper Harbor, MI. It was raining most of that day, and the heaviest rain came down while we were on the twistiest part of the road to Copper Harbor. By the time we got there, it was absolutely down-pouring, so we parked the car at the local brewery and sipped on a flight while we waited for the rain to slow down. Lots of people showed up during this time - there isn't much to do up there when the weather is bad! We camped in the state park right next to the city.

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Next day we were supposed to go on a kayak tour of Pictured Rocks, but the trip was cancelled due to high winds. We decided to go to our next destination instead of camping the last night: Traverse City area. We stayed with my parents who had rented a cabin on the coast of Lake Michigan for the week. That meant the Volvo got to cross the Mackinac bridge: the connecting point between Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas, spanning a total of about 5 miles. We also crossed the bridge in Houghton, but this time it wasn't raining.

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After that we mostly just used it to drive into town and see some sand dunes. It made it back home with no issues, completing the 2,000+ mile trip.

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So that means the 32V 4.6-swapped 240 has been driven over 2,500 miles since being able to move under its own power.

Driving impressions: It's everything you'd expect riding in a 240, until the moment you get on the throttle. The car actually has throttle response, unlike before. My wife says she's never had an easier time taking naps in a car than this one. Driving without air conditioning was fine because we never had any days where it was hotter than 85 degrees for a high. The brakes are great - better than a Mark VIII. With the open differential, the back right wheel tends to slip quite a bit during a high rpm 1-2 shift with the all season tires currently on the car. The engine sound is fantastic. Not too loud, not too quiet either. The power steering can be a little noisy when cold, and you can always hear something in the system due to the hydroboost. Fords were not exactly known for having quiet power steering systems in this era, though. They're pretty noisy. Gas mileage was about 22mpg highway, probably due to gearing and/or tune. That's fine by many peoples standards, but I'd like to see mid to high 20's. For now, since the car works, I don't really plan on doing much with it in the near future other than driving the hell out of it.

The things I plan to address are as follows:

Air conditioning. I don't really want to since it's fine driving the car without it most of the year, but I've made it this far and bought most of the tools and parts, so why not.

Speedometer. It's inaccurate, and tells me I'm going faster than I really am. I'm not sure what causes this and haven't looked into it at all. It is tolerable, though, and easy to remember how fast I'm actually going vs how fast it says I'm going after driving with google maps on showing my actual speed.

Windshield. This car has its original glass, and after 30 years and 280,000 miles, it's pretty hard to see out of at night or in sunrise/sunset conditions. It's a safety hazard. I plan on getting a 91+ windshield on the car and have been doing some research. Lots of info out there.

Driveshaft. It's still not clearing over bumps, and I think the best solution is to get a smaller diameter custom shaft if I don't want to mess with the engine and trans mounts. I'm also getting driveshaft vibration. I purchased and installed IPD adjustable torque rods to get my diff angle lined up with my trans angle, but when I did this, I got very loud vibration at highway speeds, and it only got louder as I got faster. Thinking this was quite strange, I adjusted them to stock rod length. Got the same results. I put the stock rods back on, and the car drove as before, with some vibration showing up around 45mph on the speedometer and smoothing out after 60mph. Very strange. My trans and differential angles differ by about 2 degrees. I know Tom had one hell of a time figuring this out, so I'll be heading down his path I suppose. I plan to consult the shop that made my current shaft.

Wheels. The same vibration that existed with the car pre-swap is still there. I believe it is a wheel balance issue. I plan to carefully check over my wheels and either replace/fix them or try out the Mark VIII wheels like I talked about early in the thread. They would look sick on the Volvo, but I need spacers and lower profile tires. And some measurements to see if it'll work at all.

Rear end. The Volvo's 3.73 rear end with the 14" wheels makes the 4.6 turn at 2,600 rpm at 70mph. The engine would be happiest turning at 2,000 rpm at this speed. It's a little uncomfortable driving the car any faster than this because the transmission starts doing what feels like coming out of overdrive lockup. A ford 8.8 rear end with a 2.73 or 3.07 ratio gear would help things quite a bit. This would set things up nicely for adding a supercharger someday in the long term if I wanted to go that route...

With all of these things taken care of, I think the car would be just about perfect. I'll update as I figure these things out. Thanks again to everyone that's helped along the way with this project, and I hope this thread is and has been entertaining or helpful.
 
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4.6 wagon

Hey ,nice going , you just past my neck of the woods( Chicago) . Oh by the way i copied your air box idea for my project. I was thinking for a while what to do for the air cleaner and seen your engine bay helped me make the decision and I used an air box from a Lexus Sc 400( 11 bucks by the local pick and pull) and worked up to 80 %, still gotta work some nicks cause the headlight plug in about an inch away form it and I wanna push fresh air so I need to run some sorta pipe to the hole next to the radiator.
I also gotta figure out the a/c dilema caus Im running a toyota engine now but hopefully I can work something out from gm parts( gm based a/c system)
Ok keep up the good work partner.
Take care
DZ:nod:
 
Well done!

Thanks!

Hey ,nice going , you just past my neck of the woods( Chicago) . Oh by the way i copied your air box idea for my project. I was thinking for a while what to do for the air cleaner and seen your engine bay helped me make the decision and I used an air box from a Lexus Sc 400( 11 bucks by the local pick and pull) and worked up to 80 %, still gotta work some nicks cause the headlight plug in about an inch away form it and I wanna push fresh air so I need to run some sorta pipe to the hole next to the radiator.
I also gotta figure out the a/c dilema caus Im running a toyota engine now but hopefully I can work something out from gm parts( gm based a/c system)
Ok keep up the good work partner.
Take care
DZ:nod:

Thanks! That reminds me, I never really mentioned how I got the Mark VIII air box to fit. I had to cut it all the way up to the filter because I, too, was having issues with headlight plug interference. I was pretty happy with the results. You can't really tell when you look in the engine bay. This picture has the old paper filter in it, I'm actually running a K&N direct replacement. I figure the air around the headlight will be fresh enough, and so far the engine has seemed happy.

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Airbox!!!

lol. funny right, well mine doesn't require that much surgery, bur I will try to make it as clean as possible. And thank you for the idea , take care
DZ :cool:
 
The conical on mine sits in the same location - behind the passenger side head light. I've checked intake air temps with the phone app -- they seem to run about ambient, maybe 5-10F warmer when it's really toasty in the summer, so that's a decent spot for keeping warmer air out of the motor.
 
outside temp

hey thanks for the tip. Well since im running a turbo the colder the better. I got from a 86 civic wagon a screen that goes on top of thr carb for free and almost fits the hole so im planning to adapt it for looks as well.
DZ:oogle:
 
I think it's time for an update. The wagon has been doing very well so far.

After the Northern Michigan trip, it was time to finally get rid of the donor. Before that happened, I took some symbolic photos of the two cars together.

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After that, it was time for the flatbed. I gave the car away to a local scrap yard for free on the condition that I could keep the wheels. The next day, I went to the yard and removed the wheels as the car was held in the air by a skid steer.

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The wagon went on a trip to Winona, MN for business. My colleagues up there were all thrilled to see it since I had been telling them about it for the last year. I also took it to the shop that shortened the driveshaft to show them the application.

Winona, MN is a town directly on the Mississippi river, so that topography up there is stunning with bluffs everywhere you look. It was great to finally have the opportunity to drive it down Highway 61 along the river for the first time.

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On the way home from this trip, I finally floored it for the first time. The car moves! This video is not the first time, but it is my favorite video I was able to take that day.

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Next, the wagon was taken on a long trip to Grand Lake, CO. Originally I had planned to take our E91 BMW for this trip since it is mostly highway driving through Kansas and eastern Colorado. At this time, the Volvo is not geared well at all for this kind of driving. It'll do it, but it will get 20mpg when we could be getting 30 in the E91. I decided that if I didn't take the Volvo on this trip, I would regret it. So we took it.

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It did very well this entire trip. I made the mistake of buying some 85 octane fuel and I think there was a little knocking at hot starts, but that's about it. It had no issues climbing the mountains and the coolant temp remained below 215 F the entire way. In general, for cruising, it likes to hang out around 185 or 190.

I talked about my Mark VIII that kind of sparked all of this in the first post of this thread but haven't shown any pictures of it. Now is an appropriate time, since I had the opportunity to take a picture of the Volvo in the (almost) same place I took one of my favorite pictures of my Mark VIII in 2014. Here they are, side by side.

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