we recently picked up an '80 volvo 240 in great shape, the only downside being that it sat in someone's garage for 10 years without being used.
we did a lot of maintenance to it (ignition tune up, timing belt, engine mounts, filters, etc), also, we drained the tank by manually switching on the in-tank pump and running a line from the filter to a 55-gallon drum where i keep waste oil. we have great fuel flow, great pressure (tested by removing the line at the filter and putting it straight into a gage, and exceeded the ability of a 100PSI gage. the car now has plenty of clean gas in it, with a new filter.
the problem is that we took the car for a test drive, found a horrible lack of power and a top speed of 35mph on flat ground. after about 3 miles it stalled out and we towed it home.
we happened to have a complete engine from an 82 that ran out of oil about 2 months ago, which ran great previously.
we traded injectors between the two engines, the engine ran great for about 30 seconds, then died. so i tested both sets of injectors and found all of them to have a poor spray pattern, spraying only on one side, maybe 1/3 of the round cone pattern that my books say it should have. my test method was to fill the injector with clean gasoline, place a rubber-tipped air nozzle at the fuel inlet, and blow air into the injector. all injectors had that type of spray pattern, though the book specifies "the injector should provide a healthy dose of uniformly atomized fuel at a 15-52* angle in a cone shaped pattern", not my one-sided pattern.
so i ordered a new set of injectors from o'rielly's, tested them, and found a similar spray pattern to my old ones. are they defective or am i missing something here??
as i post this, i have yet to install these injectors, and am currently in process of changing over the entire injection system from my other engine, and on that system i'll test these injectors and post again

thanks in advance for any advice

 

Often it is the fuel distributor that is fubar'd.

 

it seems the fuel distributor was part of my problem, but not all of it. i took the entire fuel system and intake manifold from the other engine i had and installed it on the project car, with the new injectors (that failed the spray test), and the engine ran but was choppy, it was on and off randomly, sometimes catching itself, sometimes stalling. i noticed that when it seemed to be off but the engine was still turning, the tach read zero, indicating a lack of spark.
so i borrowed a distributor from another car (we have a few 240s), and it ran pretty well. with this dizzy in place, i changed all the injectors back to the old ones and found no change in how it ran, meaning those weren't my problem. saves me $200 if i can return them, claiming them faulty for the one-sided spray pattern.
so now i'm looking for a new distributor, which seems hard-to-find. o'rielly lists one by bosch, but is currently unavailable, so not much help. others list one by cardone, but experience shows that the odds of it working aren't good. any advice on where to find a good distributor? i plan to grab 2 from the junkyard tomorrow, expecting at least one to be good, and thats a better chance than a cardone

 

well, we have new problems to look at now. with a good distributor installed, the car runs and drives but cuts in and out rather sharply when under load, maybe one cycle per second. but it runs great when not under a load (idling). when it cuts out, the tach remains at the reading it was at while running, indicating its not a loss of spark, but maybe a fuel issue or something. i thought about water in the fuel, so i added a quart of alcohol to it (to absorb the water) and will test drive it again in the morning.