I have a clunking sound from the front right that I need to find and fix.
First question is does anyone have a good exploded view of the front suspension including sway bar and all the other parts?

Second question is, is there a good way to check rubber bushings, ball joints etc? Everything looks ok on mine so I need to do a more complete check.

One of the things I need to correct is what you can see in the first two pictures of the top of the strut mount unless anyone can tell me a reason to this arrangement. This might also be causing the clunking.

The last picture is how some one routed a vacuum line and I am trying to find out how it should be routed. I would guess it goes under the manifold but I don't know for sure.

 

And when do you have this clunking noise ?? Hitting bumps, only in reverse, any specific speed ... ??

That line should be under the manifold and it would be a small hard plastic line originally with a 90deg rubber elbow at the end connecting to a nipple on the intake. The second picture has a blue arrow pointing to it.

 

It looks like the nut is not where it ought to be. My guess is that the threaded piece under the nut is not fully threaded down. It's a special nut with an "X" head (that's all I can think of to describe it.

Since the suspension is loaded, you can remove the nut and take a look. FCP has an exploded view and calls it a "fitting." The fitting loads the spring seat to a shoulder on the strut shaft.

 

Your spring seat is shot.... Some one tried to use a nut to space it to stop the knocking... its not good if the seat goes completely your strut will will poke through your hood, ive seen it a couple times..

 

How can you tell that the spring seat is bad? Almost every one that I have seen looks like that minus the nut.

As for that vac line, wow! It's part of the PCV and the actual tube runs with the oil trap hose back to the PTC. That is some lazy as# work there. Had to be someone that doesn't work Volvo's.

On another PCV note, both of our elbows that connect the small line to the PTC valve were torn this week. The problem was, besides being hard already, the tube going back to them were about 1/4" to long and stressed the elbows. So I cut the tube and installed new elbows.

 

I can get how the spring seat might get warn bit how about the upper strut mounts? I'm thinking that if I might have to disconnect the struts then it might make sense to just replace the upper spring supports but what is the chance that the strut mounts are bad?

 

As far as replacing other parts; ck the upper spring seats and LCA (lower control arm) balljoints for play or torn boots. If you replace these items, spend the $$ and go OEM; otherwise you'll be doing it again in 50K mls or less...

If your struts/shocks have over 120K mls, strongly suggest you replace the front upper spring seats (go with either OEM or HD ones from IPD) and strut mount bearings (definitely go OEM here; had to do the job twice once because i didn't use OEM parts the first time..) while you're in there.

How are your struts/shocks? Now would be the time to do these too.

And of course get an alignment when you're all done!

 

Among other things I was checking over the weekend I checked the toe setting on the front end and I have a toe out condition of about 3/8 to 1/2 inch that I need to re set.