Hello all,
New to this forum but I can see it's packed with top notch info.

Issue: Driving home from work last night the transmission started acting up. First thing I noticed was it started jumping from 4th to 3rd. RPM's would jump as it shifted down, tapped on the throttle and it would shift back into 4th and RPM's would drop.
Hit a bunch of traffic (screw you I-5 North) and started losing power. Started climbing a bridge and she couldn't continue forward...Engine would rev, but no response. Parked it on bridge, scary, turned it off and called a friend with Triple A. Not wanting to cause any more traffic delays, I started it back up after about 5 mins, put it into "1" and was able to limp over the rest of the bridge. Before I hit any more hills, I pulled over and had it towed home.

It's a 89 740 GL Automatic with over 263K on it. According to the records the tranny has been replaced once before.

I'm gonna try replacing the tranny filter and do a tranny fluid flush this weekend.

Is the transmission fuct at this point?? Any ideas of how much a replacement tranny would cost here in Portland???

I'd really prefer to keep the car as it has really grown on me, but I can't exactly justify dropping a large sum of money into it.

Thoughts are greatly appreciated.

 

Living in P'Town is a definite plus for you. Oregon and Washington purchased almost half of all 240's sold in the US...lots of rwd Volvo shops there. Transmission swap is a 4-6 hour job. Try to get an AW71 or AW71L. These were the heavy duty model found in 740T, 760T and 940T (turbo) models. Externally drop in replacement for the AW70 found in n/a cars. Get on turbobricks.com and see who has one for sale in your area. I recently sold one for $100 but typical prices from an individual are 100-300 bucks. It is possible the tranny was just starving for fluid, but if it was chronically run w/ low fluid it may very well be fubar'd.

 

Sounds like the tranny is done for... But in PDX, not a bid deal... There are ads all over Craigslist for Volvo parts... I have a guy will swap it for $150... email me if you need the info.