Qwkswede's Other Volvo 1988 740 Sedan

I have had this car for 2 years now, and mostly just been driving it. But its a decently fast and fun 740. With my other "big project" Volvo, I never got around to documenting progress and tweaks with my daily driver. So its time to get on with that.

Lets see if I can assemble a brief history of the last 2 years.
Summer 2010
Day 1, I picked this up from Turbobricks member Volvofly. It was a wonderfully kept Volvo when I got it. I felt a little bad putting it into daily driver duty, because it was so nice. But I've done my best to not destroy the car.



This is winter trim... raised up on the coilovers a little, and studded snow tires mounted.




And thats all I can dig up for pictures right now.

Reserving for more details

Mechanicals
Summer 2010
Here is rundown of the drivetrain when I got it.
265,000 mile B230FT
Stock LH2.2 efi
Stock injectors
Heavily worked 530 head 46/40 Valves
Enem V15 cam
Turbonetics BB T3/T4 60 trim
MVP 3" exhaust in stainless
Manual Boost Control set to about 10psi.
Stock AW71
Stock rear end with 1 tire burnout feature

All said, it wasn't very fast considering the money invested but it had nice parts and drove great. I swear my last stock 740 turbo with a boost control was faster.
It needed a good tune badly but everything was very solid.

Summer 2012
I gathered some parts to build a fresh bottom end for the car. I didn't want to be down if/when the small rod B230FT with 300k miles decided to throw a rod. I had been pushing it harder and harder.

Big rods and oversized Mahle's with new rings.


Freshly bored 1992 block. Squirters installed. Nothing fancy, just the good Volvo parts.



I didn't really like the T04e 60 trim, or the big valve head. So I ended up assembling some other parts I had around the house for an experiment.
-Chinese 50 trim from ebay for $100
-A 531 head with mild port work and a fresh valve job with
-M cam from a B230F.
-50 lbs. injectors so I can run E85.

I did the swap in a weekend, never missed a drive to work...


I repaired and rebuilt one of my old MS units and put it into service too.


Best ET I could muster with the new engine combo: 15.37 Lots of work to do, yet its alot faster than it was.

Chassis and Suspension


The suspension setup consists of coilover struts in front with Koni Race Dampers. The rear has adjustable spring perches and Bilstien Sports. It has IPD sway bars front and rear; Kaplhenke camber plates in the front. And in the rear Kaplhenke torque rods and panhard bar.

I shortened up the front strut tubes to use short Koni race inserts. I wanted some suspension travel at really low ride heights. Its tough to get 740s low. Even with 2" cut from the strut tubes I still run out of downward travel on small to medium bumps.

rear decor panel and tail lights could provide so many moves in tetris.

Oh yeah. I like the later model tail lights. But these ones are so identifiable as Volvo in the 80s!

500dollar744ti said:

rear decor panel and tail lights could provide so many moves in tetris.

Click to expand...

Oops, this might be an appropriate thread for the PROJECTS subforum. If moderators catch this, please move.

I love how that car looks. So much red...mmmmmmmm

Sweet!

This is a pretty cool DD, I must say.


are you running lh2.2? what's the setup if so?

I set it up with a megasquirt 2 extra plug n play setup just before swapping the engine this summer. I'm running about 18-20 psi now, and its fine on pump gas with a good tune and appropriate spark advance. For extra detonation resistance I also installed a thin Cometic gasket for about .030" squish. So with squirters cooling the pistons, and tight squish, and careful spark advance tuning. It seems to be helping the detonation resistance.

Should be faster though...

Where is the big valve head? I want it.

Car is looking great, I'm a 240 guy but can appreciate a well done 7 series

I added a couple more pics above. The big valve head is here still. I'm keeping it for now. But it really is too much for a street car. The motor had really lousy throttle response and low end torque with that head.

A couple boxes of goodies arrived this week.

My AW71 has been making some bad noises that seem to be coming from the torque converter or flex plate. Nothing confirmed yet. But I have a spare trans that I wanted to put together for this car. Some nice Alto clutches and Kolene steels came. The part number you see here gets you the entire set of 11 clutches needed for all the clutch packs.


I needed a converter too. So I had revmax open up an AW71 converter and adjust the stall speed. They also tig welded the stator fins for strength, and sprayed some Krylon on it...

Do you still have this? What did they raise the stall speed to?

I think I got an extra 200 rpm out of it. It has been a while ago. It felt completely stock unless you did a brake stance. I'm not sure it was a great gain in performance. But they did a rebuild while inside and rebrazed fins, etc. So it should have been a bit tougher than stock. I wouldn't call it a "race" converter though. I'm not an expert, but it seems the range of stall speeds is somewhat limited by the diameter of the converter. And since this wasn't a new converter, but simply a cut open Volvo unit, you can't really move the stall speed very much.

when sam had FTI do the converter for his 71L it would stall up ~300 more than stock, they said it couldn't go much over that (and for a street car with no ability to lock it up out of OD, you don't want a loose nuts converter). properly setup though, a couple hunnnert rpms will do a LOT to your short time.