Dastardly diesel driving money saving strategy

I went and helped Roger stuff the D5 enginge back into his P2 V70 AWD yesterday. He had a perfectly good, fully functional V70 AWD P1 petrol. But apparently it used too much fuel. Therefore the P1 and an envelope stuffed to the brim with greasy used notes, otherwise known as investing, got traded on a P2 AWD D5. That'll save some money eh?

Unfortunately after some really hard long distance driving for some 13.3 miles or so it became clear the D5 had a small incontinence issue.

We refer to those 13.3 miles as the good old days or the golden era.

Volvo in their infinite wisdom drilled a machining hole just above the rear main oil seal on the D5 engine, This hole was filled with a rubber coated core plug. After a few years and a some mileage the rubber gets soft and slippery and falls out of the engine block, shortly followed by the oil making it way out of the engine in sympathy. This is called recession.


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Because the leak is so big, the car isn't really useable, this is called unemployment. The plug is cheap, $2 or something silly like that. The only issue is that the $2 plug hidden by a gearbox and a flywheel. At that point you lift the engine out of the car. We refer to this as saving the block.



Once the engine is out of the car you discover 3 things

1) The splines on the tranfer box are buggered
2) The Intercooler is split
3) The Radiator is toast

This is called a financial crisis. Also sometimes refered to as a sovereign debt crisis.

As this is a money saving exercise, fuel is getting expensive, and we've been watching the news on how the world financial markets are run all three of the above are ordered new. Because the bank was undercapitalised a little quantative easing was used and the crisis averted.

The transfer box is only $1200 or so, which coincidentally is roughly equal to the gold reserve of Greece.

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Once the transfer box is back on the engine we could lift the gearbox back in its hole. It slipped home pretty easy. Normally this stage is refered to as pumping money into the engine bay.

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This does have an upside. We're receiving offers from various governments on sorting out their banking crises. This micro economic money saving can easily be transfered onto an national or international stage.

We're going to be rich....

Looks like an exercise in futility to me.

The whole project sounds like a bailout to Roger. Did you even get to vote on the legislation?

Voted, you must be kidding. I was just told I was helping, much like a tax rise really

No witty comments. . . just lols!

eh, its either a slave cylinder, angle gear(transfer case)or auto trans on early models. One way or the other a p2 car has probably had some extensive work done to it.

Well bugger, the fuel savings this vehicle provides will never be greater than when it is broken. You are fools for fixing it!

F13ND said:

Well bugger, the fuel savings this vehicle provides will never be greater than when it is broken. You are fools for fixing it!

Click to expand...

Great point!
Don't fix it. Store fuel in it!
Think of it as the national fuel reserve.

car fixing

Thanks for the help getting it back in, Pete.
For every one else , this is my wife's car , my car is a FWD p1 V70R.
The car was got cheepish with most of the problems known, including the oil leak
and intercooler.
The AWD worked ok, I did a few hunderd miles in it before taking it apart.
The spline on the angle box/and sleve was badly worn, but not quite striped, through
it would likley go soon. This was not in the plan through I was expecting it to be knackerd ,
as most of the early(2003) ones are by now ,hence change well it was off, rather than
do the work again soon, also this was why a new angle box was used. The replament was of a newer type.

The same with the intercooler , I could have left it until it caused a running problem ,or limp
mode ,but as it's my wife's car for carting the kids about , it needs to be right.It could have gone back on ,but once split the split only gets bigger , was leaking on the lower edge.
The oil leak lost around a litre in 250 miles.
On the rad,the oil cooler pipe had rusted in the bottom fitting so that I had to cut it off
and when I got the bits out the retaining clip lip had rusted off ,so would not safely hold a new pipe in place.

The old car was in poor condition with lots of dents and was only got as a parts car, was ran for 6 mounths and sold for nealy twice what I paid for it with not much spent on it, as
her last V70 died when the head gaskit blow.
I could have done without the cost of the angle box ,but at least I know it is good now.

Regards Rogerb

Holy **** I laughed hard.

very good

And of course we know Roger bought an AWD to cope with the such harsh winters were having these days. As i sit here in a Mild November, where i've yet had to use deicer, i must say this is Climate Change.

Translation;

Roger bought a new car to save money.

New car turns out to be bollocksed

Roger spends copious amounts of money on new car to un-bollocks it.

Total cost of new car is now more than it's worth.

New car will now take so long to recover its costs it wasn't worth buying.

However, due to fancy PR he manages to convince us it was;
a, not his fault.
b, still worth it.
c, our fault all along
d, the best thing for the country.

God bless politicians, eh?

Not that anyone on here has brought a 960 ,not long a go with a
lpg conversion ,to save cash ,then prompty
Scraped it as it was knackered.
The words ketal , pot , and black ,come to mind.
Regards Rogerb

Ah........ yes...........well..........ummmm...........I was hoping you wouldn't spot that!!


Anyway, my comments were more of a 'poking fun at Pete's write up and PR bollocks' than aimed at you for falling into a very common, understandable and totally justifiable situation. It could happen to anyone........!!

Dont worry come 6 months, Roger will be bored of it and offer it up for sale at 50% of what it has cost him.

This is called a Debt writeoff.....

I knew we're onto a winner, you guys are now elected to the Super Committee; meanwhile Roger and I will sort out the crisis.

We're still struggling with the finer points of the quantative easing. In the absence of a printing press we set Roger's kids to drawing money, we felt 3 sub 10 year old kids ought to be a match for the finest brains in world economics. However Volvo is being a bit snotty about taking the notes they produced. They mutter about the Nordic model and having sorted out their banking crisis years ago. In the end Roger just produced a credit card, which we felt came to much the same thing.

We've not given up on the printing money thing though.

Don't knock Rupert's scrapping of the V90. This was a good thing. The Impairment Charge he experienced subsequent to his investment meant I now have the immaculate grey headling. This is called a Divident.