Its been a while, the last one I had was in 2007, back when you could buy them for £225 with a long MOT and 4 spare wheels in the back!
Having finally admitted after six months that I simply don't like the way my C70 convertible drives, my wife and I agreed I would get it through the MOT and sell it and return to what I originally wanted to do when I decided to give my company car back, which was to find an uncomplicated redblock engined saloon in decent condition to use and tinker with, which prior to Christmas seemed almost impossible without travelling hundreds of miles to look at rusty things.
Lying in bed one Sunday morning looking at my wifes facebook (I don't do 'the socials', and an '89 G reg 744GL appeared reasonably locally - 82k miles on the clock, looked fairly tidy, and a nice clean MOT history confirming the mileage, so we arranged to go and see it the next day after work.
(I've cropped out the sellers name etc)
I was determined not to mess this up, so I made myself a list of everything I wanted to check, everywhere I wanted to look for rust, everything I wanted to see.
I spent an hour going over the car, I lay down on the wet road to check the usual rust traps and it passed everything on my list, There was no rust in any of the usual structural places. The only faults of note I could find were already noted by the seller - the back box was rotted out, both rear lights were leaking, and one was cracked. There are a few dings that I reckon a decent paintless dent remover could fix.
Couple of minor things like the electric aerial doesn't work, a heat crack on the dash and its probably going to require some dedicated waxing to keep it red.
The car drove like something 1/4 of its age. I went back 5 years through service history and couldn't find any evidence of it [edit - It being the cambelt] having been done so managed to knock a bit off for that and the exhaust, did the deal and set off for home, me in the C70 and my wife in the 740.
I literally said to my wife, "We'll get it home, park it up and do the belt and exhaust before it moves again".
Should have kept my mouth shut
I was so embarrassed I didn't tell anyone for 2 days until I had time to a) calm down, and b) investigate what had happened.
Somehow, the crank managed to do about 320 degrees independent of the cam, got round to the point where it created enough compression to fire, and kept running!
I was pretty sure that the Kjet motors were interference, but found conflicting opinions on this both here and on other forums. My last experience of a cambelt snap (on a diesel S40) resulted in a s/h head going on as the valve guides were mangled, so I was contemplating a head or even a whole engine going into it, but a post on the 'cambelt horror stories' thread over on the 200 forum persuaded me to throw a belt on it to see, so a genuine belt and the crank tool (I can't be doing with jamming the ring gear these days!) was duly ordered.
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In the meantime I spent some time going through the history file.
It's more of an adoption pack.
The car was originally a demonstrator for Fisher's of Buckland, with the first owner paying £11,200 for it in June '90 (less the part exchange of a Y reg Golf) and kept it for just shy of 30 years
There is a copy of the invoice, a copy of the cheque used to pay for it, a newspaper clipping about the salesman - a Mike Simmonds, - who sold the car. A copy of a completed questionaire about why the original owner chose the car and how they were getting on with it.
There is almost every old tax disc, a copy of every single MOT from when it was 3 years old, a file of correspondence with the servicing dealers and every single invoice.
A bit of research also turned up this!:
https://www.carandclassic.com/magazi...989-volvo-740/
As well as a twitter thread from a previous owner where (on the bit I could see without a login) it sounds like the car very very narrowly avoided being banger raced before he rescued it. I won't link to that, I have reached out to him and wil give him a link to this thread if he is interested he might pop up here.
The oil has been changed every six months without fail, right up until a few months ago. Sadly, for some reason they stopped changing the cambelt in 2008??
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So back to the cambelt, the tool and belt arrived, so yesterday evening I set about putting it on.
First I pulled off the camshaft sprocket to make sure the key hadn't been sheared - all good there.
Next I spent some time cleaning all the bits of old belt out from between the teeth, and checked the harmonic balance damper thingy hadn't spun - all good there (so the crank MUST have done 320deg, to end up ~40deg behind the cam!)
After all that the belt was refitted, checking It was definitely at for TDC for Cyl1 by looking in through the plug hole, and checking the cam lobes were obliquely up through the oil cap. Using the marks on the volvo belt I ensured the intermediate sprocket was timed, even though that doesn't actually matter on these, and then, after having spun it over by hand a few times there was nothing for it but to stick the plugs back in, hook up the battery and turn the key.
[YOUTUBE]
https://youtu.be/f9SxQUIQd8I[/YOUTUBE]
This is actually two videos smooshed together - the first start was with no other belts on, as I thought it would be immediately obvious if there was a cylinder with no compression.
The second part is once I had put the alt/water pump belts back on, run it up to temperature and adjusted the idle speed back down (aa guy had wound it up to keep it going so it could be driven about a mile to a layby so he could safely load it up - it hadn't broken down in a nice location)
As you can see, it starts easily, idles smoothly, and revs up cleanly on all four cylinders.
So why am I not jumping up and down? Well there is a slight metallinc clinking that you can hear in the last few seconds of the above video that I have convinced myself wasn't there before. That said, looking at the sale video I found, I can't hear a difference! Obviously I have over-sensitised myself to listening for bad noises from it, and if it had bent a valve, how is it running so well?
I can't test drive it as it is currently uninsured and SORN. so idling and revving (not too hard) in neutral is all I can do for now.
My plan now is to do a compression test next, If that comes out OK then off with the valve cover to check the clearances - if none of them are massive then work out the shims I need and do them and declare it golden. If anything looks off, then its 'Off with her head!' I want to be certain the engine isn't going to grenade itself before I get rid of the C70.
A decent Gunson compression tester is on it's way (decided against a cheapy one as I know I simply wouldn't trust it if it said everything was A-OK - found a review of one where every engine the put it on, it sad exactly the same) along with some new feeler guages to replace my rusty ones.
Before it goes on the road there are a few other bits of tinkering I want to do - replace the rear timing cover, the noisy cambelt tensioner, all the V belts, flush the coolant and change the oil+filter (pretty sure its got/had fuel in it from the timing being so far out)
So that's the story so far. Not quite as planned, but I'm still really pleased with it!