Today felt like it was late May so we fiddled some more. I got my oetiker clamp pliers and snipped off the hose clamp holding the flame trap bushing, and removed it along with the rest of the "intake air snail." I decided to replace the clamps around here with nice worm drive clamps instead of crimping on new oetiker bands. I left the third one, on the hose that goes down to the oil box, since I have a new flame trap piece I could see that it would come straight out.

The flame trap pieces had much of sludge and carbon but cleaned up well, so I'll save the aftermarket pieces for later. The vacuum elbow was trash and I had a "uro parts" elbow on hand to install, although there is enough clearance here that I could have simply cut a piece of usual vacuum tubing.

I did not have a throttle body/intake manifold gasket so I cleaned this on the car. There was more crud in the idle air valve than in the throttle body, and it took almost a half hour to clean that out. The passages are spotless and the vane is darn close.

The intake manifold is dirty and I'd like to check torques/replace the gasket, but I'll try not to worry about it. This one should be easy to clean if I ever have it off, though. If I do that, I'll replace the oil separator box too.

The shifter turns out to be fine, I think it was a somatiform manifestation, the same way that the car felt better after cleaning the throttle.

Now I am waiting for the I/M to go ready again and wondering what to do next. Thinking about shortening the power seat cables or flushing the coolant.

 

Despite unhooking the battery I do not think the ECU forgot the adaptation data that it's built up. Since changing the oxygen sensor I've had no way to reset anything because no fault codes have appeared. Watching the obd2 datalogger it looks like the 'fuel system status' is going to 'closed loop with fault' when the adaptations are applied and the result is incorrect. After installing the sensor it was saying 'fault' all the time; after driving 200 miles it's only during decel and idle and the short and long trims have grown closer to zero.

We removed the seats and brought them in the house to clean them up and repair the drive. On one seat the sheath of the "inside" side of the sliding rail drive had to be shortened about 3/8 inch. The motors, cables and memory stuff are the same as my other car so I knew how to do this.

What I didn't expect was to be able to turn the car on, seats removed, without getting airbag faults. I understood there is an airbag in either seat, but this is separate to the srs system and not even connected to the car electrically. It looks like the integrity & attachment of the side trim is critical to it working properly and I'm glad I got a replacement from the junkyard. The srs is not connected to either belt buckle and there is no weight sensor in the seat. There are tensioners but they are in the pillar along with the reel, they are not part of the seat.

The heater didn't work in one seat and I found a dirty contact at the control box. The control box makes a loud click when the heat is turned on and off, and I found the fault because I happened to wiggle the connector with power applied. We also learned that the heaters don't work unless it's cold when they are turned on.

 

I've been doing a bit of work on our seats also, while transferring all the seats and door panels from our old car to the "new" one. The "new" car had been parked in Sacramento sun and the leather was stiff, piping rippled, etc. The only hard part for me on the seat cables is finding the base location left / right. I tried to measure the mounting rails and just place the gear assemblies a like distance from the front of the rails. However, when moving the seat now it works perfectly in one direction and makes some noise in the other direction (pulling the seat base toward the door kills the noise). Fortunately, this was on the passengers seat and it rarely needs to move.

One thing that amazed me was on the front door panels: there are several places to fit the little white plastic "push-in" fasteners and the black plastic one will frequently break when removing the door panel and not hold the fastener. While wondering how to effectively replace the fitting (not designed to be removed) I noticed a separate place to insert the little white plastic "push-in" fastener. You just have to cut a small piece of plastic to slide / click in the fastener and then clean off the NVH blanket around the hole it will go into.

 

Bob I tried lining up the tracks using their physical features on my last car and it did not work. It seems the tracks are always different lengths! I resorted to looking across the tracks and fiddling until I was satisfied that the bolt holes were lined up. Probably this task can be made easier with a drywall square but I didn't bring one when we fixed the seats.

We got 19-20 mpg on the last tank of fuel. Hopefully a straight highway run would give 25 mpg or more. Since changing the oxygen sensor, my partner has driven it more than 300 miles, and the I/M have not gone back to ready yet. We did not do any deliberate runs of the prescribed "trip" procedure, though. Last time, I tried the "trip" a couple of times (maybe not all were successful) and the O2S I/M went ready during a highway run days later.

 

I did a "trip" cycle today and the vol-fcr tool read from the ecu that the trip was complete. So if I do another one hopefully the I/M will start to come ready again.

There are two other "completes" that have my attention now, in the list of parameters that vol-fcr will read. One is 'Drive Cycle Complete' and this is Yes. The other is 'Warm up cycle complete' and I've seen it say 'No' and 'Not possible.' I'd like to figure out what that one is.

 

Wish I could help you more with the various monitors. I once tried the complex drive cycle from Car Fax about ten times, including a few 10+ minute freeway drives spaced with 5 min idle times (AC off) as they recommended. I finally gave up and drove to the gym to clean up and use the jacuzzi, when I got there the monitors suddenly were all passing. In SoCal they will not do SMOG unless most of the monitors are passing, so at that point I drove straight to the SMOG place and it passed the test. My experience is that once the monitors all pass, they tend to stay that way. Our 97 S90 had a problem draining the battery that I think was a door lock solenoid which didn't release if the voltage was a bit low. I could clear the problem by disconnecting the battery and then doing a recharge, but that also set all the monitors back to incomplete setting up a problem if I was in the SMOg test window.

The seat position on the tracks was not mentioned in the manual that covers the motors/drive assemnlies. Unfortunately, once the cables slip the gear assemblies for the for/aft seat motion are not in the OEM positions. Usings measurements from the front track bolt positions, our seat is now essentially square with the interior and it looks OK. However, the cable has a vibration in one direction, but runs very smooth in the other. The cable problem occurred first on the passenger's seat from our original car, which was hardly ever moved, so there can't be much wear on either the drive assemblies or the motor. The cable system design is marginal and I bet that the plastic cover and interior lining degrades just enough with time alone to trigger this one side frozen problem. We have not had this problem with the driver's side seat, but we did start using the memory function only before sitting on the seat to avoid stress on the motors / drive assemblies.

 

Hey Bob that's a great idea, to request the memory seat move before sitting down. I'll mention this to my partner.

I haven't gotten a second verified trip yet. The problem is starting the car between 29C-49C water temperature, it has to be done deliberately. Also my partner isn't a steady throttle driver, to her credit the pedal feels funny around the sweet spot in this car and it takes a deliberate effort.

We got 20.5 mpg between fill ups, drove nearly 370 miles and had 2+ gallons remaining in the tank. We are trying midgrade from a top tier brand as an experiment. My understanding is this is normally mixed at the pump from premium and regular. Because of the price difference it was like getting 1 gallon free and we'll see if she drinks a lot more.

 

Bob another thanks for the OBD monitors info and trip sequence. I was at the car and water temp was 46C, the monitors I had been waiting on had not gone ready, so asked to go for a drive. We had do to an extra 5-minute highway run to get Trip Complete = Yes. When that changed we put the laptop away and checked with the obd2 scantool, and all the monitors had gone ready.

I don't have to do a smog test but having them all go ready makes me feel good that it passed all its sanity checks and did most of its adaptations.

After 1200 miles the engine oil is still a light amber color. When it was misfiring some fuel was getting in there, and it must have done something to clean things out.

 

We haven't been so kind to the brick this year. My partner crashed it on the ice in February. I thought that I would just go to pick n pull and get a headlamp, but they took the volvos off the yard while I was waiting for a dry day and trying to deal with personal issues. Found a depo headlamp on ebay for $105, figured it would be ok when we learned the lens is glass. The pattern on the glass is almost exactly like the Valeo headlamp but the unit itself is not as high quality.

The hot humid weather is upsetting and we did not really want to drive the car any if we could not get air to the face. During the winter I had used the mityvac to confirm that the vacuum actuator for the up/down door was leaking, and ordered a replacement for it.

We spent three evenings taking apart the dash and hvac, cleaning and reassembling. I am happy that the console is clean and that we could remove the cluster to fix its illumination. After reflowing four solder joints I got all the lights working again. The small illumination lamp on top of the speedometer makes a big difference, and I shouldn't have to worry about my partner not being able to see the temperature gauge.

The console was very dirty and I'm glad we took it out to clean it. Probably if we have to remove the center part of the dash to remove the cluster again, or the ECC control (we haven't replaced any lamps in it yet!) it can simply be unscrewed and moved back a few inches.

 

Thanks for the update.

 

Sorry to hear about the light assembly, things like that is one of the reasons I'm slowly stripping our original car and keeping as many small parts (in particular electronics) as possible. The 54k mile replacement S90 spent its life on a farm near Sacramento, mostly under a tree. The amount of dust and tree dropping everywhere in / on the car was amazing! The rear upper arm bushings are bad on the car, so I'm about to try making some urethane plugs by cutting down parts for other cars. It look like I can insert the plugs with a bunch of factory tools / dropping the rear subframe. Dealer price for replacing the bushings is around $1k, so I'm hoping for something that will at least improve the problem for simply some of my time.

 

Oops! Reply above should have been "without" the factory tools / dropping the rear subframe.

 

My V90 wagon had a problem with the PRNDL switch that caused the check engine light and the low gear light to light on the instrument panel. Replaced the switch and every worked fine. The switch is buried way up above the transmission and it's very difficult to reach.

 

There is a lot of stuff up in the dash / console area. I'm slowly taking it out, the main engine computer and individual modules that do the various delays and other stuff normally done by computer controllers in newer cars. I want to save all that stuff from the donor car, because a lot of stuff is becoming unavailable from Volvo.

Our headlights stopped working and reviewing the wiring diagram indicated that it might be the module that does the bulb failure warning light. After taking stuff apart on both our good and donor car, the problem was actually in the light switch itself (still available for $100 or so). The switch has a spring in it associated with the small slotted adjustment to select the various modes (Canada, US, European, etc.). That spring force was enough to eventually break the plastic tab in the back of the switch that holds it together and the resulting separation of the back panel prevented the normal contacts working. The donor car switch was OK, but I eventually glued the back of both switches in place with superglue and put the switch from the newer car back in place. We've had plastic fail in other places simply from age / UV, like the high brake light housing which just came apart. When I took the light off the donor car, the housing also broke apart. Fortunately, the housing is also used on S70s, so a generic dark gray color replacement was available from Volvo for a reasonable price.

 

Hey guys! It's been a while since I've been here. After fixing the most of the crash damage we simply drove the car. A couple weeks ago we did our 5,000 mile oil change.

Last weekend, I finally installed the Meyle ball joints that I bought last year. After replacing the swaybar end links, the front end clunks had been remedied enough to make us concentrate on other things. It turns out the right hand side ball joint had a little play in it. To remove them I ground off some of the ball stud and used KD 3916 pressing tool. Now we need an alignment, and once that's done we will be ok to spend some money on tires that are actually new!

The next thing to tackle that might result in a quiet ride is to replace the speaker wire holding the rear muffler with the correct hanger parts. I already bought wire brace 3514610 for the bottom of the muffler, and bosal 255-854 rubber hangers. I couldn't find the part numbers for the top "clamping" brace, because Volvo forgot to put it in the parts list, but I eventually figured out that the the clamp is 9443343 and requires one flanged locknut 985866.

The valve stem on our spare wheel fell apart and it would not hold air. After fixing it, we broke the screw post that holds the clamping nut. The screw post in our car was 3528920, which might be for a much later car. I have no idea how it got in there, but we replaced it with a new 9159082, which is long enough to contact the floorboard of the trunk.

I still haven't installed the water pump, or replaced the prestone coolant with blue coolant. That's coming soon. I found a drip from the top radiator hose, at 4:30pm on friday afternoon, and panic-ordered a nissens radiator. During the weekend I took the swollen 1997 Volvo hose off and found no cracks in the radiator. Installed the URO hose for now: still not wanting to spend $130 for the 7 cooling hoses, bought gates hoses for the radiator. Next year I will probably start out by replacing the URO hoses I put on the oil cooler, and expansion tank hose. The Gates hoses should last until I'm ready to buy Volvo radiator hoses, which will come after the heater hoses are replaced.

Since there's a new radiator sitting in my living room, I decided to make it useful while I decide whether to return it. I identified the transmission oil fittings to be some kind of M16x1.5 inverted flare. I don't want to buy a tube flaring kit, so I just bought whatever adapter I found on ebay to -6AN. Whether I decide to mash the -6 side into 1/2 hose, or get a real end for 3/8 hose, this might make the transmission flush easier or less messy. Yes, I spent several hours, and half the cost of 3-gallons of transmission oil, to figure out how to make what should be a half hour task a little bit neater. (I'm really interested in being able to watch the drain tube for air bubbles when I do this.)

Bob that's a bit of a bear about your headlamp switch but I'm glad to hear that you found a way to fix it.

 

I took apart the ball joints for postmortem. The TRW balljoints feature plastic bushings around the ball end of the stud. The righthand side, the one I noticed was loose after removal, had a broken plastic bushing. The housing has a mostly cylindrical profile and the inside of the bushing is spherical. The bushing was cracked near the plate end, where the load of the car pushes the ball end of the stud against the housing. I don't recall the orientation of the bushing in the housing so I can't speculate on the forces that caused this crack.

It looks to me that they maybe designed this part to be optionally manufactured with a grease fitting in the plate that holds the ball stud into the housing. I don't know if there's actually enough clearance between the bushing and the ball for this but there are features on the bushing and ball stud that suggest someone thought about grease replenishment.

Without a grease fitting, there is a small void in the retaining plate. This could be intended to be a grease reservoir. Whatever that's worth, all the grease was in the boot, where gravity would want it. I did not find substantial grease in the plate end of either joint.

 

Are you going to replace all of the timing parts when you install the water pump? I did the pump only a couple of months ago when it fail on the road and I had to replace it in AutoZone parking lot.

 

Hey RSPI, I already replaced the other timing parts, didn't have a garage so at the time I verfied no leaks and no play in the water pump and decided to do it later. It was your videos that taught me how to do this btw!

I decided to replace the fence wire holding the muffler up with the real brackets. In doing so I learned that the car was driven quite a while with the muffler hanging because the pipe that goes over the axle was bent. So I bought the starla center muffler and installed it along with new rubber hangers and the new bracket for the rear muffler. Used the bosal clamp at the cat and the dealer clamp at the rear muffler, no leaks. Next time I am going to try the 2.25 inch accuseal clamp at the rear muffler.

The pipe over axle was crushed where it was bent. Test drove the car and holy cow. There is a lot of low end torque now.

I replaced one of the vacuum bellows for the ECC this year, with fantastic results until it stopped working when really hot. Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to get air to the face again. Well it quit today while I was in the driveway so I verified there is no vacuum leak, this was easy, undo the hose connection at the firewall and hear all the air rush into the vacuum tank. Then it worked for about a second, I heard the recirc door move, and clicks when it started and stopped working. I cannot get any clicks or hisses out of the ECC by moving controls.

I feel like I have to inspect the ecc control brain and the solenoid box to repair this. When I had it taken apart before, I saw that the vacuum hoses are kind of stuck on the valve block, but today I learned the vacuum hoses are on a 'connector' and I should be able to get that off the valve block. Otherwise, I wonder which component will be easier to remove and what electrical tests I can do once I have access to the components and their connectors.

 

Good luck with the exhaust, our newer car was probably driven in some winter weather as there is some corrosion on the center and rear pipes. Therefore, I've removed the whole system from our donor car, since it still looks new after 140k miles in SoCal. Every time I get into anything with vacuum on the car, the rubber fittings / transitions are suspect (maybe more in SoCal from our SMOG). I've purchased several different sizes of vac hoses, but at times you do need the OEM Volvo transitions due to connecting one dia of plastic hose to the actuator fitting that has a different dia connection. I'm trying right now to get the OBD tests to complete, required before I can get the car SMOG tested out here. I have the Volvo TSB, a key difference from some of the generic drive cycles Alldata has for Volvo is that the "idle" intervals should be done with the AC off. Probably the reason the wife's normal driving never sets the OBD tests is that the AC is always in the auto mode.

 

Since we have been using the heater the solenoids have reliably stopped working when something gets warm. We would lose these controls on every trip. Tonight I decided to do something and figured the solenoid box should be easy to reach, and went under the dash looking for it.

It's right there behind the passenger's knee bolster, accessible after removing the bottom dash panel. I touched the wiring harness and it clicked a bunch, found the problem. Every solder joint on the connector looked suspect, I reflowed them all and I think I fixed it.

The vacuum hoses come off pretty easily, there were no retainers to mess with on my car. I just had to gently pull the "vacuum hose connector" up off the solenoid box.

Bob I hope your emissions test went well, the directions you provided helped me get everything to go ready in a few hours. One of the problems I had was not starting the engine with the right coolant temperature. If the weather is warm I can't do it unless the car has cooled overnight. In winter I have to run the engine for just a minute to bring the temperature up a little. Without meeting this condition you will not get a drive cycle.

There is a little bit of tension in the exhaust, I am going to give the rubber hangers in the rear some kind of safety, like steel wire or a hose clamp. Next week I want to fix the sunroof rattle and try to figure out how much fuel we are using. We also took the car for a front end alignment, so that is set right again after the crash and ball joint replacement. I would like a couple new tires too.