The Bluebrick Turbo 760

I just picked up the oldest, biggest, and cheapest car I've had. I picked it up from perhaps the ideal Volvo owners. They had just purchased a newer car, and so they were selling this one because they no longer needed it. It's been carefully maintained, and the person they took the car to was a one-man-show kind of guy who only worked on Volvos. I got a folder full of records going back to 2013, and the manual had some records from the 90's, which is pretty cool. Paid $950 for it.



The Car

As of 7/16/18, the car has 150k miles. It runs great, feels pretty good, and even looks decent. There's minimal rust, although there are a few spots underneath that I want to address. The plans for the car are to make it as comfortable and solid as possible first, and then make it a but more fun to drive. Don't get me wrong, I love the way driving this car feels, but a bit more umph and a bit less roll would give just that little bit more.

What Needs Done

The two first things I want to do are pretty greedy I must say. The A/C and the cruise do not work. I'd like to get them working, as I have a 12 hour trip coming up in August. So two quick questions: Is there a common weakspot on the cruise control? For the A/C, it's been retrofitted to r134a, but it leaks out pretty quickly (2-3 weeks). There is some well reviewed stuff called Super Seal that I'll probably try. It doesn't harm vacuum machines (and it can't even be detected by the ones which look for sealant), and it doesn't harm the compressor. But if this doesn't work, which wouldn't be surprising, is there a common place where these cars' A/C leaks?

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll keep this thread updated as I have time.

Here are a couple more photos. (Editing--resizing images)

Can you resize your pictures to somewhere around 800x600?

Love the car.

A/C - It's usually either a rotten radiator or, more likely, o-ring seals. Just test it, fix it, and be done with it, don't put bandaids in your system - best case, it'll work marginally and with decreased capacity, worst case, it'll still leak but also be full of sh't...

Cruise - it's 30 years old, and so are vacuum lines, most likely. I'd replace them all, starting with the ones in the pedal area and work from there.

What model year is it? Does it have the multilink rear end?

740turboPatrick said:

What model year is it? Does it have the multilink rear end?

Click to expand...

Wagons did not have this until 1995 and 960 only

Nice color. That will be a good runner after a little maintenance.

Fixing, breaking, leaking, traveling.

(PICTURES TO COME)
A lot has a happened since my last post. I went ahead with a good stage 0.

Started with some basic stuff.
Here are the old cap and rotor. The car seemed to be running okay, except for an occasional cutout on heavy acceleration (more on that later). For future reference, are these visibly bad?


My main fuel pump seemed kind of loud, and the car would cut out once or twice per gear above 4k rpm. So I replaced them both. The in-tank one...not fun. I also replaced the fuel pump relay, because it's pretty cheap.

Ended up having to dremel some of the clamps off. That was a buttpuckering experience.

Of course, I also cleaned the PCV system. It wasn't pretty, but didn't seem clogged. I actually ended up cleaning it twice....more on that later too...

The last thing I did was cut the cat out. No pictures there. Unfortunately, I think a combination of the sawzall and a little bit of hammering damaged the turbo. So when I test drove the car when all was said and done, I started having white oil-smoke come out the exhaust in pretty large quantities, especially on decel. Pulled the intake off the turbo, and it had significant axial play. This, of course, was a little over a week before I was supposed to drive 800-some miles to move to NC for school.
I scrambled to find a turbo, and eventually got one from a forum member via FB (Shoutout @Skyshadow). It arrived wednesday, I was leaving saturday. No big deal, right? Except I had 1,430,789 other things I had to do. Started working on it Thursday. Everything was going great. Right up to the very last nut holding the turbo to the manifold. Somehow, after loosening the nut, it got stuck, and I managed to let the socket slip in such a way that it initiated the rounding-off process. By the time I had finished, it was pretty much completely smooth. That's when things got serious.



The first thing I tried was a combination of welding and JB welding the socket to the nut. Let it sit overnight to cure. Tried it Friday morning. My welds were **** and the JB weld failed almost instantly--no dice. So I decided to give it another shot with the welder. Access to the socket on the nut was abysmal, but I preheated the socket and nut with a torch till they were both red hot. I buzzed it on a second time. This time, the weld looked a lot better. It clearly had penetrated the socket, but what about into the nut? I put my ratchet on...it was holding, but it wasn't turning. I heaved. It began to creak. The weld was flexing. but then the creak became the squeak of thread-on-thread friction, and it came off.

Putting the new one on went fine. Smoke was gone

I packed the next day, and left the day after. Only one day late.

It was a little saggy...


The drive was interesting. First, it turns out the tires were older than I thought. The previous owners had said that they had replaced them recently, and they had lots of tread, so I didn't look that closely at them. I started to get a vibration. The pressures were okay, and I didn't see any cracking on the outside. So I just took it nice and slow, and went ahead. Yesterday, I had the tires turned almost all the way over, and I notice that they had a good-sized crack all the way up the inside-most tread gap. Yikes. Fortunately, I'm only about a half mile away from school, so I can hold off on getting new tires for now.

But there's more. Replacing the fuel pumps was a bit of a debacle. At least one of them is still pretty loud, and the cutting out under load is still there. I'm guessing one of them has a bad ground or something. I'll be whipping out the flukemeter here pretty shortly. It's got a new FP relay, so I don't think it's that, although the connector for the relay did seem to have some have been burnt at some point. I also discovered the 5th injector had been disconnected. That's just for starting though right?

The only fuel system part that I can think of that hasn't been replaced is the regulator, but given the fact that the pump is loud, I'm guessing its fuel delivery related. Also, my fuel gauge stopped working. Also also, the filler hose for the gas tank seems to be leaking. Everything I touch is ruined. But the car made it, so I won't complain.