I have been back on the road for a while. I figured I could find a white parts car if I waited, but I got tired of waiting, so I have installed a blue hood! Ha ha. I just straightened the driver's side fender. Ordered one new headlight. The junkyards around here crushed all the volvos from this era, but they are still showing in car-part.com inventory. So that was a bust.

I am currently replacing the fuel pump and filter as a preventive measure only. The car has 172k on it. I don't want to get stranded.

 

While I was working on recovering from my wreck,I noticed that the S70 T5M needed CV joint boots. I have not replaced a boot since, I guess, I was a teenager. Axles used to cost a lot, and now they are very cheap. However, my joints are still good, and rather than to go cheap new axles, I kept my volvo axles and replaced the outboard boots only. I thought I might post some pics of this as we have very little discussion or none.

Generally, to remove the axles I separate the ball joint. Then, if you just pull the steering knuckle away from the car the best you can, it allows you enough room to get the outboard joint out of the hub.

The passenger side of course is easy to remove; you just take the bearing out. The driver side always worries me as sometimes you'll get a snap ring that won't snap out. On this car, it's quite difficult to get any sort of pry tool in the right place. I was able to pop the short axle loose easily with this flat pry bar. It's really a carpentry tool.

I don't know how long these axles have been on the car, but I was not able to remove the big axle nut on the driver's side. In fact I broke a craftsman 36 mm socket. My brother removed it with a Milwaukee electric impact M18 Fuel. These advertise 1400 ft-lb in reverse. I have an impact here that advertises about 1100 but that did not bring it.. He is a retired industrial mechanic and it turned out he had 3 1-7/16" impact sockets (close enough). I was looking for a 3/4" drive socket, but ultimately we didn't need it. Anyway, no pictures of that.

If you've never take a CV joint apart, the inner joint doesn't really require capture, but it could be captured by big internal snap ring in the shell. We are ignoring that. The outer, steering joints are always captured by a snap ring that is accessible by cleaning out a lot of grease. This is hard to see:

 

The snap ring is shaped like this, with no holes and no prescribed amount of space between the ears for a tool; it's not easy to get snap ring pliers to actually move this, but it can't get away, essentially. You keep fumbling until you get snap ring pliers between the ears somehow. There is always grease available to move in the way, you can't can't really ever see what you're doing.

Once the snap ring is expanded, you'll need to tap this gently to remove it. The fit is very precise and very tight but not interference.


Once the axle is out of the joint, you can fully diassemble it by "steering it" too far as we see here. If you take all the ***** out, it'll all come out. I didn't take them out all at once because I just didn't want to have to reassemble it.

You are supposed to clean all the grease out. The instructions say don't use a solvent, but soap and water is okay. I wasn't too excited about soapy water, so I clean it out mechanically as well as I could. Then you start trying to get grease back into it, which is quite nasty, and I don't have any pictures of that.

To reassemble, you put the boot on first. That is, in fact, the only reason we separated it to begin with. Then, the joint and axle are designed to be assembled at the factory without a lot of drama, just by force. It did work on these joints. Keeping the internals pointed straight is a non-trivial exercise.

Once that snaps in, you can put on the retaining clamps. I bought a brand new tool for this. These used to be exotic, but people use them for PEX now, so they're very common.

 

For those of you that never snap these axles out, here is a picture of the snap ring that holds the short axle inside the transmission. This thing is sort of a curiosity in that you never know how hard it's going to fight back.

These things are a bit of a curiosity in that there is a lot of slop, free motion, in an axle retained this way. Not just on volvos, on practically everything. When people start feeling vibration, naturally they'll look at the axle's looseness and wonder "is this supposed to be this loose"? They are surprisingly wobbly in there.

The passenger's side (long) axles is dead straight as it runs in this pillow block:

 

Well, I'm back, with a punctured/failed rubber elbow right at the throttle body. I ordered a URO brand replacement from IPD and put it on as this is currently my daily driver. They're bad on the connection between the main hose and the idle hose, in particular. The failed one, I think, was also a relatively young URO. It appears that URO may have stopped making them and IPD showed they only had one in stock. FCP doesn't offer a part at all. The volvo part costs about 10X the money, and they last about 10 years or so.

If I had a perfectly made bulkhead fitting, I think I could repair the other one. I may see if I can put something together appropriate.

I also ordered some supplies for the 1/8-ish hoses including new rubber elbows. I need to do some hose replacements due to the old age and I'll post more about that later after I dig into it.

 

I have some failed control arm bushings, and some people here at work are working on convincing me to take a car to the track, so I decided to make an effort to install polyurethane control arm bushings.
I was surprised to find that Powerflex bushings were coming from Dublin, VA, and so arrived here in one day.


Generally speaking, control arms bushings are HARD to remove. In theory, they could pressed out, but the part which is actually interference fit is relatively thin-walled pipe and on some cars the end is also tapered and is the weaker part. So anyway that's not how I did it.
The first step in my way is to get the internal pipe out. Mine were "bad" so they came out easily, but an alternative here is to run a hole saw through the rubber.

So, I found it easy enough to get a recip saw in there, and you want to cut just enough to cut through the sleeve without cutting the control arm forging. This seemed to be the most usable angle, but it's okay to not quite cut all the way through as you will see.

There must be many ideas about how to knock the sleeve out, but in my case I tried to bend this sleeve over and then send a cold chisel down there there breaking the sleeve in any spot where it's not fully cut.

 

So this will break and with a hammer you can just knock it out.

The powerflex bushings just fit and are very easy to install. They have one "flange" bigger than the other, so I put the big sides on the same side of the arm, at first. After driving the car, you could tell the control arm was moving back and forth a little so I turned one of them around.

 

I was a little concerned about how tight these may fit in the frame (the whole shape is different from the original) but they drifted in just fine.

 

Yikes! Just got a coolant leak under the turbo. Boy is that a hard area to get to. I have plenty of spare stuff, but I worry about corrosion to the steel coolant tubing back there. I think the leak is on the turbo coolant supply hose, but I admit I didn't verify that 100% before seeing if I could remove it. Ugly ugly place to get to. Ordered the silicone replacement from FPD.

On a more positive note, I need to replace all my turbo control tubing due to age, and I really didn't want to. Now I am just right there and I will be getting that done. I bought a bypass valve rebuild kit, but I don't think I am that enthusiastic.
I am grateful that these hoses are still available. I took the silicone from FCP. These are branded do88 whatever that means. Here is the new hose. Horrible to get to, but hose clamps all worked okay and it's not leaking. I ordered silicone turbo control hoses and and you can see the red one there.

They sell this in a kit which includes the other hose over near the water pump, but that is really really difficult to install, even though you can get to it easily. Neither line will move away to allow you to put a hose between. I left that one alone for now.

 

I am mildly concerned about corrosion in the coolant pipe, but I do have a spare. I just recently went though a system like this on my Turbo 1988 Thunderbird and converted that to waterless coolant. Also mildly concerned about heater hoses. I did not replace them and that is now the only original coolant hoses anywhere on the car.

 

One of my outer CV joint boots has gone bad in 3 years. Quality is not good, but they are very cheap. I got into this thread just to see when I bought them.

FCP says that GKN is the OE supplier for Volvo and that GKN is equivalent. I am going to try that. OEM Volvo is still available at $55 a joint, which is not bad.