Lets recap here. This is a project thread for my $300 1994 855 Turbo that I am rebuilding while I finish school. The wagon was "not" running at the PO's house, they said they it started running rough, pulled into their driveway and parked and it died and would not restart. I picked it up from them with a very nice interior, exterior is fair with a couple dents and dings, slight rust on the tailgate, and dent on the hood near the grill.

My plans for the wagon is almost a full rebuild, new motor, exhaust, wheels, hood, manual transmission swap, and few other bits and pieces. When I'm all done the last thing I will do is bondo the small dents here and there, fix the rust on the tailgate and respray the car (yes I am going to respray it, I've heard enough people tell me their thoughts on the topic of me respraying my own car, so if you have negative thoughts about, please do not post them).

What I have so far:

The wagon
Rear spoiler
R floor mats/door sills/ and door panels
T5-R front bumper
Replacement hood
Rebuilt 16T w/ 15k miles on it
T5 motor with 104k miles on it
M56H gear pack swapped into M56L casing w/rest of swap kit
99 V70 Black leather rear seat skins
Front passenger seat skin
17 x 7.5 Tethys (S60 T5 wheels)

Coming in the future:

Full suspension kit from FCP
Full engine tune up from FCP
New brakes
Bilstein Touring shocks/struts
Tint
OBX

Here are some pictures in case you have missed anything, and mostly just because I know how much you all like pictures.

When I first went to look at it




At her current resting place

The amassing amount of goodies...


When I first got my motor and getting it on the new stand




And of course my newly acquired wheels



Over the winter I will be removing all of the accessories from the motor, cleaning it and painting it silver, the top will be probably be black along with the intake manifold, but yet fully decided.

Currently the front of the motor has been disassembled, and I will most likely finish removing the rest of the pieces this weekend. And of course pictures will be added as progress is made.

I hope you enjoy watching me dig this giant hole and at times wonder "what the hell did I get myself into", but in the end it will be worth it.

And my reasoning behind all of this? I don't have one...

Gabe

 

Nice find at a great price. Good luck with the build, she will be an awesome hauler once you are done.

 

Thanks, and I'll be coming to you guys for just about everything, so thank you for that nice little 10% off code you have.

 

FINALLY

Now, get epic.
Quick.
Nao.

 

But wait! If this is the UN-official thread ...................then where's the official one? Lol, Just messing, good luck with the project!

 

It's so official that it's unofficial. It's a time warp thing.

 

Can I has flux capacitor?

 

Can you go 88 mph?

 

 

LOL, your crazy man, your crazy.



welp, back to homework.

 

I finally returned the engine hoist back to its owner, I got the hood out to my wagon (now I just have to find some help to put it on and dispose of the old one). I think this is the most I've ever utilized just about every aspect of my car.




Then stopped at my parents house and picked up an old workbench that I made several years ago when I was in 4-H. And now my little spot behind my car is my new favorite place to be, since it's practically a full blown workshop now.



Either tonight or tomorrow night I am going to work on my motor some more and hopefully get everything off of it. I will have to go back to sears though to get another torx because the torx bolts that hold on the crank sensor/upper motor mount are still larger than a T30.

Oh well. It will be a lot nicer now working on this with some more room and less clutter.

 

Today I finally got the engine just about stripped of all accessories. I need another torx bit because there is one bolt that holds on one of the timing belt pullies that is larger than T30. So, now the cleaning begins probably next weekend or something.

But for the time being, here's some pictures of the motor because I know I haven't shown any of it yet and some of you were getting pretty antsy.







And my work station, I know I showed a picture of it before, but it's so nice to have a place to work, that I took another picture of it.



That's all for now. In a week or two I should start having some pictures of the cleaning, which I still have no idea how I'm going to go about doing that, if anyone has any ides I'd be glad to hear them. All I can think of is toothbrushes and Qtips. . Maybe I'll try to find a hand held steamer or something. Thanks for looking and comments/suggestions welcome.

 

Started cleaning some of the motor.

Clean intake manifold:


Did the majority of the cleaning on the top of the motor, got all the debris out of the divots:



And I found some old speakers that I've had new in the box for several years and cut some holes in the peg board of my work bench and stuck them in there, this way I don't have to run my battery down in my car.



That is all for now. Thaaanks.

 

With all that stuff bundled up, looks like a Safari Vehicle, now u just need some chairs on the roof!

 

And a ridiculous amount of fog lights.

 

Well, I have the back side of the motor all cleaned. I finally got a T40 for the torx bit that holds the "swivel" pulley for the timing belt so I can take that off and the t belt cover, however, I put the bit in and tried to loosen it and it didn't budge and tore the hex bolt up a little bit. I got the bit from Autozone because they had a torx socket bit set, so I am going to go to Sears and get a quality torx bit and see if that makes a difference, and if it does, I will never get cheap tools again, and if it doesn't work.....then I don't know what to do.

I also have the intake manifold all cleaned up and painted. I'll post pics later of what the intake, and eventually the head, will look like.

 

I found this picture today. The guy who swapped the M56H internals into the M56L casing took this for me to show me the progress. Just thought I'd put it up here since it's going to be my favorite part of my wagon.



I also finally got that torx bolt off of the timing belt pulley so now I can clean the rest of the motor. Hopefully have more pics this weekend and one of my intake which is freshly painted...that is if I can find some time between my homework and projects with the school year winding down.

 

UPDATE: Well, after some serious pondering, I feel like the project thread may be taking a different direction. After signing up for classes for second semester () I realized that I am going to be able to finish college in four years and not five, which means less time and less money to finish the wagon or at least to get it to the point that I want it at.

So with that, I may turn the rebuild onto my sedan, which as many of you know, has received a serious tune up in the past couple years, many many new parts along with a new exhaust. I will save a lot of money if I rebuild my sedan as well as get it to the point that I would really like to before I move.

This decision is not yet completely final, but if it is, I will be parting out the wagon, using some of it for myself.

The rebuild will go as scheduled, maybe even a little faster since there are some expensive parts that I won't need to purchase. Everything that I was going to do will still be done, e.g. three pedals, wheels, etc, the final product will just have four doors instead of five.

I love wagons so much that I wish I could rebuild the 855, but it just doesn't seem feasible in the time that I have. Oh well, this isn't my only opportunity to own a wagon. I also hope to have some pictures this weekend. I've been extremely busy with work and school and finals are right around the corner. I'm going to try my hardest to work a little bit on the motor and get some pics of the intake.

Gabe

 

I guess I missed something???

4 years is good, this should be your priority. But you can R&R the motor in 3 or 4 days. Forget the outside,you can do that next time around( it means nothing). Pull the old one, remove the automatic, put it on the new motor and drop it in. Now you have your wagon and your education. Nothing at all wrong with that.

 

It's not just that, if that was my only concern than I would be doing the wagon. But when I'm done with school, I don't plan on staying in WI, so I'm not going to be able to work on a car like I can now. The wagon has 300k miles, the PO had it for a couple years and didn't know how to maintain a car, I'm afraid that when I start to pull the motor and the wheels and suspension, I'm going to find that I'm going to need to replace more than originally planned (axles, hubs, motor mounts, rack and pinion, etc., and that adds up in a hurry).