Thanks to all readers in advance! I am new at both posting notes and Volvo's here's my tale.

My friend has a V70 T5 Wagon with a 2.3 liter five cylinder motor. He has had it for sale for several months for about $12,000.00 dollars and has had few takers till this weekend when one of his co-workers decided he may be interested and took it for a test drive. When he returned the low oil pressure light was on an their was a noise in the motor. After hearing my friends tale of whoa!, I found out he had problems with this car in the past, and the dealer had installed a new set of oil pump seals under warranty last year. The dealer also said the motor should be flushed because of a "sludge" build-up, which my friend was sorry to say was never done. The car was taken to the local (not a Volvo Mechanic) garage and upon inspection with out opening the car up, was told that the car had spun a piston rod bearing based on the sound alone. Fearing further damage I have not heard the "hell of a noise and squeak" which I and he was told was the bearing spinning on the journal. In the hopes of not putting good money after bad maybe some of you guys can help or make some suggestions to the following questions. Again all thanks for your time and help.

1) Can you replace one rod bearing with the motor in the car, like I have done in the past on older model cars.

2) Good sources for both rebuilt or new motors.

3) Other causes for lowerend knocks peculiar to this motor which could mimic bad bearing knock.

4) Feasability of a shade tree mechanic pulling off an engine swap ( I know it depends on level of expertise, but assuming I am quailified are there special tools that only a Volvo mechanic would have that would make this swap more difficult).


The local Volvo repair shop has suggested that they can do a complete diagnosis, pull all engine codes at time of misshap, drop oil pan and inspect the bearings to the tune of between $500 and $750 including the tow. The garage mechanic says he wouldn't drive it much less start it again for fear of it seizing up. Is that enough to just assume or should we spend more dough to really know its dead or does this engine have some quirks that could sound like a fatal knock and in actuality be something minor. potatocreek

 

I would find a used motor and swap it out.
Nothing is common on a lower end knock.
If you really wanted to you could drop the oil pan and check it out.
The Bearing are either lettered or Numbered depending on the Year of the car.(I forget the exact year for the split)

If it sounds like a rod knock then I would guess a Spun bearing as well.(which is not Very common on these engine's)

I made a post for replacing oil pan o-rings in the top of the section. You can follow the instructions if you like to remove the oil pan. On sone cars you might have to drop the Subframe slightly on the right side of the car to get the oil pan out.

It can be done by the average Shade Tree Mechanic. It will take some time to do on Jackstands but can be done. Alot of Tech's leave the trans. in the car and pull the engine.
Keep us posted on what you Decide.

 

To begin with, remove the oil filter and cut it open and inspect for aluminum and steel particles which would be generated by spinning a bearing. If you have such particles, also drain the poil into a clean container and check for the same. If you see contamination along with a knocking sound with the engine running, the next step would be to remove the oil pan and check the connecting rods for play or any indication of heat or particles. Otherwise, remove the rod caps and inspect the bearings individually. Do not mix them up. If you have one bearing failure and it spun in the connecting rod, you must disassemble the engine, remove and re-bore the rod and grind the crankshaft. There is no short fix for this.

 

I totally agree with everyone else. There are no quick fixes with these engines and if something goes wrong with the bottom end, the repair can be as much as a replacement engine. However, buying a reground crank and bearings is not cheap. This is not an old 350 Chevy engine.

If the oil pan was pulled to change the O rings, then there was already a low oil pressure complaint and probably scored the crankshaft. Fixing it was a hope-and-pray repair whether they cleaned the sludge out of the pan, or not.

Used engine is the way to go here.

 

Grinding the shaft and installing new bearings is a possibility. It depends on how many miles is on the engine and how it was serviced and maintained, what oil was used, etc. I happen to have an engine for that depending on whether is has VVT or not. Let me know. I am located in Rhode Island.

 

You may want to take note that you have replied to 12 year old thread. I suspect that the issue has been resolved one way or the other by now.

 

WOW. Do they actually keep threads around that long? Seems like a waste of space.

 

data storage is cheap these days - for example, AWS charges about $.02 per GB/month for its S3 data storage - and my guess is this whole site can be run for cheap as most of the content is text of image files and probably totals less than 100 GB. The benefit of retaining threads is it allows people to research topics to see any prior comments/advise given. Too bad not enough people use the search feature to find that their questions have been answered multiple times already (and that there may even be a Youtube video as well)...