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1992 Volvo 740 turbo aka Project Basketcase

corivus

Hey Shiny!!
Joined
Aug 19, 2004
Location
Tempe, Arizona
You guys will have to forgive me, I'm not great at telling stories so this is kind of a short history of what has happened with this car.

Current up to date modification list:
OG RSI Stage 2 Cam, this basically is the stage 3 cam from RSI
K24 Turbocharger reclocked for RWD use
660cc Ford injectors with EV adapters and injector hat adapters
3" Intercooler Piping
Knock-off HKS SSQV BOV
E-Fan conversion
Thelostartof EZK/ECU Chips for ethanol tune
Innovate LC-2 Wideband setup
Full 3" Turboback exhaust with magnaflow mufflers and performance cat
Provent 200 Oil seperator, fully replaced PCV with oil return
Electric Pusher fan wired up to fire when the a/c turns on
Eibach lowering springs in the rear Cut springs in the front
HDI Electronic Boost Controller currently set to 5psi
20 gallon gas tank
940 Gauge Cluster

Maintenance Stuff:
New Oil Cooler, switched to water cooled oil cooler
New Alternator
New Starter
New Ignition Switch
New LH 2.4 Harness
Heater Core
New Evaporator
New Condenser
New Accumulator
New Orifice tube
New Bushings for all Accessory Items
Stock Exhaust
Eibach Springs in the rear
****ty Rattle Can paint job on the hatch
Replace Rear and front suspension (To Do all parts aquired)
Replace cut springs (To Do)

Future Plans
CD009 Install
More boost
Ported head
Custom intake and exhaust
???
Profit

So I figured after almost 3 years of ownership its time to post this slow build that has been slowly building up into something worth posting. I traded this 740 for my old 850 as I needed something simple and a bit more reliable(I know I know :rofl: ) and I wanted rwd. This seemed at the time to fit the bill and was straight and clean mostly...

Original Setup:
660cc ford racing injectors
MS1v3
Custom IC Pipe made by JAO
E-Fan Pusher for a/c
Vac Pump for climate bellows
M46 Swapped
Manual Boost Controller

The first couple of post are around the time that I decided to go ahead go through with the trade so some of the photos are from the PO.

Exterior photos
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Made a trip over to thelostartof's place and had the stock exhaust added back on since it just dumped out of the downpipe since the old exhaust fell off, sounded like poop at that point but after the new exhaust was on it was much better.
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This was the MS1v3 setup and all its wiring glory, I stepped on it a few times and got annoyed chasing down the wires I unplugged so I decided I would need to fix that eventually.
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Interior pictures

Now in order to use the electronic 5th gear the switch was wired into the seat heater switch since no seat heaters where installed. This is fine because I was planning on swapping out the m46 anyways after reading multiple threads about them not holding up to real power.
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Back to the interior pictures.
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So I decided hey thats not so bad it needs to be cleaned up but my 850 isn't in the worlds best condition so lets do this. So the PO drove it to me and got ready to drive off with my car. Looked it over and everything seemed good so I went and got it washed and pulled the Hydra's off. I really don't like them so I sold them to someone on facebook.

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Driving home and hearing a loud grinding and suddenly I can only go 10mph...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f96-pHYVHPw

So about 2-3 weeks into ownership M46 blew up but didn't know it yet. Because I figured it was a clutch or pressure plate since he said those where in bad need of replacement. I'll try and dig up the photos of the transmission carnage. Sold off the overdrive to someone local so they could get themselves back on the road. Ended up searching for a while to find a m46, found a local option but it was trashed after some searching I found one on the tb forums that fit the bill of being affordable after shipping. At this point it was time to get it up in the air and get some eyes on what was going on with it exactly.

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Pulled the transmission and got some video and pictures of the carnage, for some reason I can't find the video so pictures of the carnage will have to suffice. When rotating the assembly it was very apparent that this m46 was not useable. The bits of gears that I shook out initially was maybe 1/4 of what came out once I took it apart to sell the overdrive to someone.

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Overdrive out and ready to help someone else get their volvo on the road.

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Ordered a clutch and pressure plate kit online and while waiting I decided to do a couple of things. First task was to get rid of the rats nest of wires that was sitting in the foot well. I thought this worked rather well, no visible wires and the MS1 box sat in the glovebox. I decided to make a box to hide all the wires that just went all over the place.

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Years of AZ sun had destroyed these seats till nothing was left and the foam was crusty so I started scouring junkyards for proper seats and found a v90, got the DS seat out but had to come back with a battery for the other seat. They ended up crushing it that day so no PS seat for me :(

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After some back and forth with a few different things I got it back on the road and driving. At this point it still had an issue where it would sometimes not start after running for more then 10 minutes. I did find out that I could push start and it would drive, this worked ok for the most part but really sucked in the summertime.

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Then I decided maybe I should put in a t5 if its going to put down power because my goals where to keep up with some of the other faster volvo's here and my other friends who ran much faster newer cars.

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Just kidding hope its new owner will use it, before I got the chance to install it fully (it sat for a long time all put together) DeeWorks announced that he was going to make a CD009 adapter, and yoshifab also announced they were doing a driveshaft adapter so the only thing I needed to figure out was the shifter. After reading about the power a stock unmodified CD009 could handle it was a no brainer to make the switch.

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Drove it like this for a bit but still having issues with no start while warm but it hauled things when left running just fine.

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Got a set of ecodes locally that needed some work, honestly I might just order a new set and use these to experiment with. Wired them in but did not have the adjustment options as the gears were kinda destroyed, if I can find a set that I can scavenge the gears from or just move the hardware to I might do that. Light spread is meh because its not pointed right but it looks alright.

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We(TLAO) ended up switching it back to LH 2.4 with some thelostartof chips for EZK and the ECU on a "what if" kinda thing and all the issues with no start, hard start went away pretty instantly. Setup my wideband to feed a narrowband signal to LH and that was that.

For Christmas of 2017 I got a wash and wax kit so what did I do? I Washed and waxed that thing up and drove it some more. At this point I was really loving the car it was running great, no cold start issues and I just put more and more miles on it.
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After driving home from my sister in laws I heard a dragging noise.... stopped and found this yay the remote oil cooler was leaking badly so that had to go.
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I ended up just removing the whole remote oil cooler setup and swapped to the stock oil cooler setup which used coolant. This also freed up a TON of space in the engine bay. Again I just kinda drove the car around like this collecting parts to eventually upgrade the car.

About 7 months ago I started having issues where the coolant would get over pressurized so I performed a exhaust gas test in my coolant and sure enough it was there. Originally I was going to just do a head gasket on it eventually but things got super busy at home. So I took the 740 over to thelostartof to have him do some work on it. This ended up turning into doing some upgrades and the 16t and t cam got swapped out along with the stock exhaust in favor of the full 3" exhaust.

I'll post more later but that's where I am at with this, a lot of the heavy lifting was done with the awesome help of thelostartof. I may be forgetting some things but I'll update this post later with more showing how I got to where I am now.
 
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Prior to pulling the headgasket thelostart of wanted to make sure that the exhaust fit just right along with some of the custom work that needed to be done to get the k24 to fit on the redblock.

Adding in feed and drain lines for oil into the turbo.
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Wastegate actuator mounted.
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Seems like all manifolds are cracked to some point, this one wasn't that badly cracked, some easy welds fixed that up.
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Also needed to grind a few spots on the manifold for clearance.
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Grinding down the manifold for the studs to fit.
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Mounting the turbo on the manifold after all the grinding and it fits great.
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Tightened up and ready to go on the engine
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Old exhaust still connected but the k24 is hooked up, at this point the size of the exhaust side of the turbo was comical compared to the stock exhaust.

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Getting the new downpipe to fit all tacked up
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Welding up the new downpipe along with the adapter to fit the exhaust to the turbo.

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Welded and all fitting nice
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So, I mentioned that I was having issues with the coolant overflowing out of the overflow. Well I performed a test on the coolant to see if there where exhaust gases in the coolant and sure enough it was positive.

Had thelostartof do the work because my schedule was a bit heavy with the holiday's. Once he got it pulled apart he found that the hg was failing between cylinder's 2-3. A Quick replacement of that got it all back together.

Cracked open and head off the car and looked like oil changes where not done on a regular basis at some point in this engines life. I am a bit rediculous about it and change every 3k miles or 3 months so that could of made it last longer.

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Mocking up the new bung for the wideband since I'm just using that to see what my afr's are at. using the narrowband for lh so that I don't have to worry about anything failing.

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Block all cleaned up and ready for the new gasket.

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Shimming the early model RSI stage 2 cam shimmed up

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Getting it all back together with my knockoff HKS all in place, you can see my watercooled oil cooler in the background of the first picture.

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Charge pipe and intake all hooked up, it sits super nice.

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Buttoned up and ready to go, again thelostartof did some amazing work on this. Right now I'm gonna wait for LH to finish tuning ethanol which i'm halfway to and then its just 500 more miles after that for it to learn the cam there abouts. Cleaned up the engine bay a little bit for the picture but there is a IG filter on it so its a bit more red then it usually shows up in pictures.

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Also making some changes to my shoes, found a set of Propus C's for a price I couldn't ignore. Just gotta get some 25mm spacers for the front and 35mm spacers for the rear. Gonna need to do a bit more refinishing on them and replace the barrel on the 5th wheel since it was cracked.

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Awesome! I just picked up a '90 745T in the same color. I need your rear lower tan leather seat! Mine is missing.
 
oh hey... let me update this a little bit. So couple things, fixed an issue where I had no fuel, turns out the stock wiring for the sending unit came loose so after some soldering I had a running car again. This pissed the wife off so the days are numbered on the 740 but I'm having fun with it for now. That said I did some things, first off was say F U to my PCV setup and put in a Yoshifab block adapter as seen here

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Then I got a valve cover that I painted wrinkle red and polished the letters on, some of you may of seen this on fb a few times....

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Once I did that I put it all together and plumbed it into my man provent 200 so I had a oil return breather setup and could tell my pcv to take a hike.

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For those wondering, changing out the filter for my setup is super simple compared to a pcv.

Step 1 remove cap
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step 2: do...the things???

Aside from that just been enjoying it and happy to have a early 90s car that has great cold ac in it. Future plans are redoing the entire front and rear suspension with poly bushings which I mostly have and getting a stronger pressure plate and maybe a nicer clutch.

Also if anyone actually becomes interest I can post better pictures of the polish on the letters and the wrinkle
 
Doing a few more updates that I missed last night. So my a/c stopped working and I noticed that the seams on the compressor had freon residue on them this is the original compressor and I happened to have a spare so I swapped it out for the new one.

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After this I ordered a electronic boost controller because I wanted to be able to adjust on the fly. After talking with thelostartof I decided to go with a HDI Boost controller as there are a few locals using it who are pretty happy with them. Install was straight forward and wiring it in was simple. I did intitially have issues with it only setting boost at 5psi no matter where it was tuned but this was resolved by first reseating the connector and then just cutting it out and making a better male/female connector.

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New ac compressor in and blowing cold, just in time for 110*+ Temps and boost controller working properly. Also another shameless picture of my valve cover.

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More stuff, found myself poking around under the hood at night a lot or taking shots at night so I wired up underhood lighting. Need to grab a pressure switch so it activates when the hood is open but for now this works.

Making the harness

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Testing the lights off a 9v battery, this is pretty bright.
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Mounted
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Testing it in the garage during the daytime in az... yeah this should work
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And finally night time shots.

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it works really well, and if I go to a show and it turns into night I can light up my ****show of an engine bay, i think next thing is wire sheathing a rear main seal and possibly a stronger pressure plate.
 
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Well this will be the final update for this car, its been running 20psi all day long and it wasvery apparent that I needed to get a stronger transmission then a m46. While hunting on ideas for this and planning the next engine for more power it seems the universe said project basketcase isn't meant to run. I'll post pictures before saying what happened.

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So around 4am about 3 weeks ago now a uber eats driver fell asleep at the wheel and accelerated into my neighbors car which was parked behind mine. The initial hit woke both myself and my wife up and I immediately called the police who were at the house within 2 minutes (super surprising) so the guy couldn't just run off. His car was a complete loss and so was my neighbors, intitially I thought something was off as there was a flex dent in my rear passenger side panel. The police officer kept insisting it was preexisting damage as if I was trying to get my car added to the report. The following morning I went to take my daughter to class and saw that the console mounting tabs had broken and realized that I was right and the car was hit. When I looked at the car further there was a pinch in the roof and the welds in the door sill for the rear passenger side had popped. On top of that the driver side rear door will not open and the passenger side rear door will fly open if its not slammed shut, that was an awesome discovery. and the entire rear passenger side cargo area is bent downwards.

I still have not heard back from the police department as they haven't filed the report still... after 3 weeks but i'm hoping soon it'll be filed. I've already spoken to the officer's supervisor but nothing has been done which is pretty much what I expected. Luckily I have awesome volvo people and will be posting a new project car here in the next couple of days as soon as the parts to install are welded together and the machine shop is finished with them.
 
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