Gilda, the 92 240 GL

[RAPTOR479]

Big news!

She's at the body shop! Front end rebuilding will commence when she is back

 

[Jressman]

Great progress so far! I just junked a bunch of SRS components from my 92 240 because I did an airbag delete. I wish I had known you needed one as I’m local! Is your interior tan? I have a tan arm rest with built in cup holders i took out of my 92.

 

[RAPTOR479]

Great progress so far! I just junked a bunch of SRS components from my 92 240 because I did an airbag delete. I wish I had known you needed one as I’m local! Is your interior tan? I have a tan arm rest with built in cup holders i took out of my 92.

I do have a tan interior and I also have a tan armrest! The vinyl-ish one, but it could use some new cupholder slides and I still need the required bracket to put it into the car

 

[RAPTOR479]

Back at it again this weekend!

Rolled in in the dark and a slight rain to this staring back at me, surreal

The body shop did an amazing job pulling the inner wing back out to shape. I did replace all the generic black bolts they installed with the bolts that came off the car, as well as performing some adjustments to get everything to line up just right as they left that job to me

Still can't express how awesome this is, they left a ripple under where the washer tank goes because it was still present when they got the wing shape right, but it hides totally under the washer tank once it's installed, and I think it's a fitting memory.

They also lined the hood and fender panel gaps up perfectly, in pictures you can't even see the tons of scratches and terrible paint this fender has or the various rust down low =D

the hood is by far the worst, with a lot of rust in the leading edge, but both of these worked great for panel alignment with the added benefit of no worries about paint damage! And they work great until I can find a rust free fender and hood.

Now if you've noticed in those images in some the car is turned around the other way, you'd have a very keen eye. The reason for this is because the full cooling system is now back together and bled, STS heater core pipe and all!

After this I went after installing headlights and bumper, correctly lining up the headlights required positioning the core support but I think it looks great

This picture also shows another thing I've done, months ago I decided that when I reassembled the front end I would fulfill my desire to have EUDM headlight wipers on an American 240, and this picture shows that idea in motion

And this one shows it better. The car now has all the original components, wiper motors (which were very expensive and hard to find) Arms, blades, sprayers and even the stops that clip to the Ecodes. I have all the part numbers for the involved pieces if anyone wants them, along with wiring diagrams from volvo as well as Mitchell, and a diagram of how the washer hose is routed with the addition of headlight sprayers.

From the headlights, the next logical step is the bumper, which I drilled out for my Hella 550s, which survived the impact. This is where I ran into this weekend's problem.

When removing the original, smashed front bumper, the bolt on the right side, which bore most of the impact force and bent it's bumper shock, did not un thread and needed to be loosened and pried up on to remove. What has happened is I assume deformation of the blind hole in the frame rail by the force put on the bolt. I ordered some heavy duty threaded inserts which should solve the problem, but I can't install the bumper until those come in, hopefully next weekend, at which point I can install the horns, washer tank and setup for the wipers, as well as wiring for the headlight wipers and rewiring my foglights as my original wiring job was pretty bad.

That's all until next weekend!

 

[RAPTOR479]

It's been a crazy week, here's how we got here

To start out this last weekend, I revisited an old friend to grab a battery tray

Getting it out was moderately challenging and a bit cold, but successful

After returning to the garage, I decided to finish removing all the rust that bubbled up around the trunk channel

It turned out to be a pain in the ass to hand sand all the complex shapes in there so I took a pause to install the washer bracket and tank.

Getting back to the trunk, I kept sanding and started to tape off the spots where I was gonna paint, I didn't have any masking tape but I did have plenty of duct tape, so that's what that's all about

I used a 400 gold metallic aerosol can off ebay that matched the original color pretty good, and some new seam sealer where I had to peel off the old sealer

And here it is all back together, nice to have no more hidden rust

And now the reason I was in the trunk channel, to put in a new trunk seal since the old one was actively falling apart.

After finishing up around the back of the car, I went back to the front, and started to diagnose some weird panel alignment issues, and promptly figured out the scavenged passenger fender is nowhere near straight

The hockey sticks actually make for a great alignment tool, as compared to the left side of the car where the original fender survived

Unfortunately, this means I can't really run the front bumper trim until I find a better fender to be permanent, but I had other problems, like the rusty hood latch on the scavenged hood being misaligned and sticky and my good one being nowhere to be found. This lead to an hour long saga of the hood repeatedly getting jammed shut until I finally beat the latch into proper alignment (moving the bottom half in the core support was juuuust a little off) my guess is that the latch on the hood got bent somehow while it was in the truck bed.

I took this after - finally - getting it to a point where the hood will open and shut normally

After that the front of the car was together, grill, headlights bumper and all. I just had to fix one of the adapters I made up when I put the first set of ecodes on.

The next morning I woke up early, started the car, loaded her with all my tools and stuff out of the XJ and hit the road, I stopped at a gas station right before getting on the highway and took this

This is the first picture I have of her on the road out of the garage since the wreck, also does a great job of showing the crease in the salvaged fender.

And then we hit the highway, driving 200 miles back down to RI without a stop

For the first half hour of the drive it didn't feel real, six months off the road without this car, and while we're far from done, for example there's just no AC condenser in the car now because the box with the new one in it somehow has gone missing, we've moved from a garage rebuild to a rolling restoration, more updates to come

 

[aeug]

now show the headlight wipers working :^)

 

[RAPTOR479]

now show the headlight wipers working :^)

I will... after I wire them in

 

[RAPTOR479]

Got a Blaupunkt SQR46 for the car as a birthday gift, so decided to put that in

Looks the part much better than the pioneer, sounds good, install was easy. What wasn't easy was battling the custom speaker wiring from a few owners back because my RR speaker wasn't working. But I got it figured out and now we're back to four speakers and a cool head unit

The custom speaker wiring mentioned! Some of those spades weren't together very tightly

 

[RAPTOR479]

In today's episode of me never being able to catch a break

Sitting in the parking lot on campus, a friend cuts too narrow getting out of a parking space and introduces the side of his silverado to my good fender on the left, also mangles the core support where the trim goes, rips the inserts out of the ecode and destroys my corner lens.

Love it! Great day today!

 

[aeug]

bruh

 

[RAPTOR479]

Took the end of last week into the weekend to fix the results of that hit, so here goes

On Thursday I pulled the car into the shop at school for a long overdue alignment I was already going to do and also used it to patch the corner up and get her roadworthy so the headlight didn't fall out

Got the car patched up enough, fortunately I was just able to hammer the thread inserts back into the ecodes with some super glue and they were fine, the indicator took most of the damage

With that I drove back to campus and found the indicator hanging out when I got there because the crunched fender didn't allow it to seat all the way, so out with the tape

And with that I drove the car back up to Maine to get parts and repair.

Got there, stayed the night, woke up and helped my friend who lives up there extract their awesome M56 850 from their icy yard

Anyway, later that day I went back up to that gold parts wagon and got the driver's fender off it

The next day, I started to pull my car apart

The inner fender sustained the slightest bit of damage at the very top which I simply bent back with pliers

The old and new fenders, the new one has the same crap paint as all the other panels from that parts car but it's straight and more than good enough

While on that I also found one tab and the centering lug to be broken off my grill, so I guess it didn't come out without damage.

From that point I just worked at fitting the new fender on, and decided to put the smashed one to some use

I think this is going on the wall in the garage, it was about when I took that picture that I ran out of light for Saturday so I headed in with just reassembly needed.

Also got some fluid film on the inner wing just to help out

Sunday was just a lesson in panel alignment and reassembly, I think the new fender fit on pretty good

don't mind the color discrepancy, the car was just really dusty.

Bent the edge of the valence out the best I could, I've determined that I'm gonna drag a gold parts car with a nice non rusty front end up from Virginia along with my other, true project car (not a volvo)

And that's pretty much all for this, never count a 240 out =)

 

[RAPTOR479]

Finally getting around to replacing the old, grooved and worn out brakes on the car

New rotors, hardware and hawk HPS pads, excited to see how they do compared to the previous very cheap and dusty bosch semimetallics.

After getting the front brakes done I drove down to the Johnston RI PNP to check out a recent appearance

Now, what from a 960 would I use on a 240 you ask?

960 backlit power windows switches! These look killer in the car and I managed to grab 3, now I need only find 3 more to do the whole car

More stuff to come soon!

 

[302ftw?]

Good job keeping your head up and pushing on. I know I would feel seriously defeated if that happened to me.

 

[RAPTOR479]

Good job keeping your head up and pushing on. I know I would feel seriously defeated if that happened to me.

After doing all the repairs from the big wreck it was more of a mild annoyance than anything, as the guard in Monty python said, "tis but a scratch!"

 

[brendon_ak]

Nice work, motivational!!

 

[RAPTOR479]

Nice work, motivational!!

As my favorite volvo YouTuber says, "why don't ya get in your garage and fix something"

 

[RAPTOR479]

Got the rear brakes done and wired up my CB this past week, also found out why my brakes have felt weird for awhile

Now as you can see, new caliper on the driver side. This is because while compressing the pistons of the old calipers I nicked the dust boot enough to puncture it, and a bunch of brake fluid came leaking out. Turns out the cause of my issue was a bad caliper.

It also did this, left/right pads respectively. Brake force and feel are much improved now with the new caliper and Hawk HPS pads (they also generate WAY less dust, I can make a highway trip and not need to clean my wheels 100 times)

My Sharp 2460 CB all wired in, because I grew up on Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy

 

[RAPTOR479]

We're a couple weeks out from this whole event now and I've been delaying because it's a long writeup but here goes.

Driving up to Maine the last weekend of February, the car developed a pretty aggresive misfire. Initially I'd thought it was a symptom of the crack in the exhaust as the car had gotten significantly louder and had driven to Maine to help my friend with their 90' Jeep Comanche Eliminator. It was Sunday by the time I got the exhaust off the car and welded up

After getting the exhaust back mounted I started the car, and obviously as I know now, the issue wasn't fixed, we had much larger problems than a cracked exhaust

That's when we got to the first image, I could hear a miss, and did the tried and true dollar bill test, which the car failed, violently.

To put it briefly, this began a diagnostic wild goose chase until the idea eventually came up that the issue might have been a broken valve spring, something I hadn't thought of initially, this of course being easier to remedy than a burned valve, the car having a clean 0PSI of compression on 3, I got to investigating.

Including my days long struggle would be long and boring so for the sake of brevity, I got the old spring out, which had actually managed to fail spectacularly and blow into three pieces. I checked the cylinder with a HF borosocpe and confirmed that the B230 being non interference had most likely saved us again, the valve hung open but did not hang open more than max valve opening.

To compress the spring, I had only the most improvised of solutions at my disposal, prybar, scrap metal and cam studs.

The parts were overnighted from IPD, except i ordered on Friday, so they weren't. For some reason the new stock replacement springs have a larger diameter than the originals, my best guess is maybe the spring alloy changes so a larger diameter is used to achieve the same spring rate?

Rope trick FTW

Mister valve seemed alright, we'll be getting some therapy for him as this has undoubtedly been a traumatic experience

Getting the new spring installed was an ordeal, but a successful one. The engine went back together and the miss was gone, it ran as normal (except I got the tbelt a tooth off and fixed it yesterday) but we once again had a 4cyl redblock rather than a 3cyl

All in all, a great and fun ordeal, stranded at a friend's place 200mi from home with a car down, wouldn't recommend!

That said, to restate the closing of an earlier update, can't keep a 240 down.

 

[RAPTOR479]

Car has had what I can only describe as a somewhat uneven idle for awhile, after checking for vac leaks and actually finding and fixing an obliterated pcv hose I, for whatever reason looked toward the injectors. Now I know a lot of the history of this car and to my knowledge the injectors have never been out of the car, combine that with it not doing much driving in the intermission between purchase in 2021 and me getting my drivers license and the 6mo of repairs during the wreck I figured I might as well put a rebuild kit in them.

It appears my assessment was correct, and the little filters in each injector were pretty crusty and old.

Now, rebuilding the old Bosch injectors that 240s (and apparently some old peugeots?) Use is not very difficult at all, but there are some funny tricks I'd like to share. First off, since I've heard lots of stories of people bending fuel rails with prybars trying to get injectors out of these cars, remove the retaining clips from all the injectors after relieving fuel pressure before you start trying to yank on the rail. Some injectors like to stay in the manifold and some come with the rail, I was trying to pull them while attached by hand before I figured that out and it wasn't happening.

Two more tricks you can see there are how to safely remove the pintle caps AND little filters on the injectors.

For the pintle caps, carefully cut each side with a razor blade until you reach metal, this makes the old plastic the caps are made of significantly less structurally sound and then I yanked them off with needle nose pliers.

For the little filters, which are pressed into the top of the injector, I used an ez out, yes it seems really sketchy, yes it also worked really good and didn't seem to pose significant risk of damaging an injector. You put the ez out in a vice, spin the injector onto it till it bites good into the brass ring on the filter, then pull on the injector with your body weight while twisting it to keep tension on the filter, if you do that they should all come out clean on the first try.

To install a new filter, I pushed it into the hole with my finger till it stayed put then tapped it on the table a few times until it was sitting nice and flush.

To install new pintle caps, I heated them in some hot water and then pushed them on. It's important to use care when handling the injector with no pintle cap as you don't want to touch or damage the needle The caps do a petty good job centering so that won't happen. Make sure you put your spacer and o ring on first.

After doing this you'll have yourself a nice set of rebuilt 240 injectors. I'd have liked to run them through an ultrasonic cleaner or something beforehand but didn't have one. The filter on these is also very fine, something like 40 microns, so they should catch anything before it ends up deeper into the injector itself.

After doing this I reinstalled everything back into the car, and a quick note I'd like to make is when disassembling the rail the two middle bolts will have ground wires, be careful with these so you don't spin them into a solid part of the manifold and break one of the ring connectors. Also use a healthy serving of dielectric grease on the injector o rings to make sure they slide in nice and don't fold or tear.

After a startup and confirming no fuel leaks I called the job a success. The car feels somewhat more responsive and the idle is better than it was before. However as of writing this the symptoms of a sticky iac have returned, where after throttle input there is a hesitancy before returning to idle (so I wanted to ask, do 240 IACs fail? Or just take if off and spray it out like I did a few years ago and the problem is fixed)

There's a few more things to take care of, most notably the clutch is definitely due, I have all the parts so that should be soon, also if anyone has a clean, non rusted, 400 gold metallic 240 front end (hood, fenders, core support, bumper) I'd like to replace what's on there with something i can call permanent soon, especially since the hood is actively disintegrating and the core support and bumper I would've kept were wrecked by my friend crashing into it with his truck (see earlier post) and the passenger fender i got is warped anyway. But as usual, stay tuned and wish me and my old gold brick luck.

 

[symbioticsamba]

Wow its so great to see your brick back on the road. Congrats and much kudos for all the work you've done I might have to steal that 960 window switch idea someday