The Dark Wob

Sorry, I fucked up the pics in that post!

Should be sorted now.

It's little things like that windscreen trim that make a car look cared for.

Next thing to do was get an MOT sorted.
Naturally, it passed! Although I got an advisory for a blow on the exhaust so that needed fixing. In all fairness, I’d noticed this for a while but chose to ignore it as it sounded like it was coming from the manifold area!
If it was the manifold - head gaskets it was going to be a world of hurt as the studs and nuts are now just blobs of rust and would have been a nightmare to undo. Fortunately though a bit of examination showed it to be the manifold - front pipe joint instead. Still not pleasurable as the nuts and studs have been on there since the 80’s but better than the head studs!

Access from the top isn’t particularly nice!
New bits ordered and delivered. I went for a new front pipe and tail pipe as both were very rusty and not worth trying to refit. New front pipe gasket, and some service bits as I’d not done that for a while either.

I hate doing exhausts at the best of times tbh, but on cars this old it’s even worse as everything is rusted solid and you get absolutely filthy doing it while getting rust flakes in your eyes. Still, it’s cheaper than paying someone else and I had nothing else to do!

I started with the front pipe as that was the worst bit. The hot air tube and heat shield were pulled off which revealed the three manifold nuts and studs. They actually looked pretty good surprisingly. Even so I’d been spraying them daily for a couple of weeks previously with plus gas penetrating oil just incase. Trying to undo them didn’t work though! They were well on there and snapping them was going to mean having to remove the manifold to get them out - which I really didn’t want to do!
I’ve got a really good blow torch on my work van which managed to get the nuts cherry red hot. A couple of try’s with that had all three off with no damage whatsoever. Amazing what a bit of heat does.
At the other end, there’s just three long bolts and nuts holding the front & middle sections together which I could cut off if needed and replace them after. Using the blow torch they actually undid!
It was definitely a messy job, but it actually went far easier than I thought it was going to be! I gave the bottom face of the manifold and end of middle pipe a clean up with some wet & dry paper ready for the new parts.

Here’s the old gasket, proving my suspicion it was that leaking.

Refitting was easy. The new front pipe was non genuine so took a bit of wrestling with to get it into place properly. I’ve fitted new gaskets all round with a thin smear of exhaust sealer paste and new nuts/bolts for the front - middle joint, and new bolts for the heat shield bit.
Next job was the tailpipe. This bit is literally just a short S shaped pipe. The back box was actually in sound condition. The tailpipe though was absolutely rotten and looked a right state so I decided to just do it while I was doing the front pipe. Same again, new clamp fitted and a smear of exhaust paste.

Just the easy bit now!

New oil, oil filter, air filter, plugs and leads.
I didn’t initially get HT leads, but discovered the terminals on a few of them were quite corroded so bought a set of Bosch ones. The old ones were just cheapo eBay ones I fitted when I first got the car to get it running again and clearly didn’t last all that long! They’d gone hard too so a good time to change them.
It’s running well now, and most importantly, no blowing from the exhaust!

Nice to hear from you Dan....Glad the Volvo is still doing its stuff.

I love a good volvo. My favorite manufacturer till the Chinese or whoever got hold of them. Now they're just chocolate modern appliances like every other brand.

Even Ford Volvos were good. I really rated the 2007 S60 2.4D I ran 5 years ago. They were still proper Ovlovs then.

I owned a '55 v70 for over ten years till gf wrote it off against my van around two years ago. Best car I've ever had and I was gutted.