Hello, I have tapped this forum over the past several years and gained much advise on various technical issues just reading the forums. I am a brand new member because I have an issue that I need to post.

I have a 96' 850 GLT, non turbo, manual. First Volvo, have been strickly an American iron type of guy up until now. I simply love this car. Bought it strictly for commuting, highway miles only. It currently has 213K miles on it, doesn't use a drop of oil, 32 MPG highway.

The past few days the temperature here has dropped to below zero in the mornings and a curious issue has popped up. It is always garaged at 50 degrees F. The car is fired up at 5 AM, 2 miles to the interstate, gets up to operating temperature, pulls hard and smooth then its an hour at 75-85 MPH to the office and when I drop off of highway speeds, I get slight miss or shudder below 2000 RPM, above that it runs fine. No warning lights (yet). Any thoughts? Any help is appreciated.

 

Without any maintenance history I would start with plugs, wires and rotor. Have these things been replaced? If so, when? If not go to FCP, Volvo parts only is what I would buy. Hope this helps.

 

Thanks Rickford, that's where I planned on starting this weekend. The plugs were changed roughly 30K miles ago but I have no idea about the plug wires and rotor. I bought this car with 130K on it and I haven't touched them, probably time to do it.

It was acting up a little worse this morning and I got the infamous CEL. This car does not have a Self Diagonostic Unit under the hood so I will either get the parts store to read it through the OBD port or build a make-shift flash code reader.

 

Well that seemed to do the trick. Thanks for the assist Rickford. The rotor and dist. cap were toast. Probably shouldn't wait so long next time.

 

That's good news. How about the cel, cleared or not?

 

Cleared.