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Mike K's '79 242 Barn Car Revival

Thanks guys. Petrolicious usually features more swanky cars so I thought it was in good company. I met up with Alex (who was driving a european import 190e cosworth) a YEAR ago, so it's been a long wait to see the pictures! Glad the car shows as well as it does.

I have done a few more upgrades this year I can catch up on. First was to address some rear suspension complaints - mainly clunking and buzzing. Last upgrades back here before I finally put a real differential in it.

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Parts above are replacing OE Volvo rubber TABs, IPD poly panhard, and IPD poly torque rods which had a heim joint on the axle end. Altogether a surprisingly rewarding upgrade. Clutch engagement was smoother and the rear end was quieter just backing it out of the garage. I think the spherical TABs are a little bit of magic, it tracks really well.

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I also gave the underside of the car the annual detail and coat of wax. Still shining all these years later!

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I also wanted an interim brake upgrade, so I grabbed some Porterfield R4-s pads and good fluid. They want some heat to get good bite but better than the stock pads. The car is still too fast for its brakes, though. At least on the roads around here.

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Good time to put on a NOS master cylinder reservoir that Ian helped me get. So nice to get rid of the cruddy old one. Details matter!

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And last but not least another step forward on the interior. I liked having the OE Volvo accessory gauges but they were hard to read and useless at night. I settled on what I wanted and decided to just do all of them at once. The gauges came with sending units so I had to get in for the oil pressure sender. It also gave me a chance to improve on my turbo oil drain heat shield (spot a scrap of NY state license plate shaped to the hose :lol:)

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Gauges are Stack Pro Control digital gauges. I already had the fuel pressure gauge, so just had to finish off the top row. Really happy with them for style and functionality. The Pro Controls have some cool features which help justify the eye watering cost.

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Also they have a yellow option so they look like r-sport gauges and that's pretty much most of the reason I spent the extra money on them :lol:

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That's about it! Couple ideas lined up next but I want to get back to my truck first. For obvious reasons I'm a wicked homebody lately, so I'm hardly using the car. But when I want it, it fires right up and does it's thing. Getting to be pretty well sorted now which is rewarding.

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Your dash and interior have really come together. The black headliner and trim look great. And the steering wheel is perfect for the vintage vibe. Well done!
 
Those gauges are so nice. Good choice. You didn?t have to modify the gauge trim/bezel at all? Look like they fit perfect.
 
Well I've got a lot to update since this thread died off, I'm going to drop a ton of words and pictures for the record. Going to space posts out to try and get back to current...

Transport yourself to May of 2021, Spring has sprung in New England and it's time to check your valve lash. After all you spent almost $2k rebuilding the head in 2019 and everything needs to last now (foreshadowing).

When I pulled the cover to check lash I found this small bit of wear starting to develop on the tip of the #1 exhaust lobe. This is the lobe that had the bucket jam originally, so I figured it took a little bit of a beating. I had a brand new RSI 3 cam on deck so I decided to proactively install that so my precious head had no risk of damage (foreshadowing).

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resetting lash is a complete pain because of the lash caps/bucket setup. I have to measure lash, pull the cam, mic the lash caps, mic the post height of the bucket, do maths in Excel to come up with a delta, then have my friend use a magnetic surface grinder at work to cut the lash caps down to spec (a free service with .0005" tolerance... not bad!). Total hassle, but very precise results.

I then proceeded to do basically nothing with the car except install this fire extinguisher..

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until August when inexplicably, in the middle of driving season, I decided to tear into the car and strand it on the lift for a few months. The motivating factor (excuse) was a steering rack. The car had a CAM rack that I decided was bad. It didn't leak... I'm not sure it was even bad it just didn't feel good so I condemned it. With Jorgen out of business I had led myself to the easy justification that I needed to find a good rack... no a great rack. The only answer was Sweden.

I bought a ZF core from Roy then shipped it on to Sellholm Tuning to be modified to a 10-tooth/2.25 turn lock-to-lock quick rack. Sellholm was great to deal with and turned it around quick. I've gotten this question from a ton of people due to rack shortage so I'll share up front it cost me around $1300 all in. So you gotta pay the cost to be the boss on this one.

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While I was waiting on Sellholm and "in there" I addressed a few other nuisances. I bought a clean crossmember from Roy because I didn't like how the bottom of mine was bent up. I also wanted to get rid of the Yoshi mount, which I hated, in favor of some beefy boys from Andersson Steel and Speed, and install delrin control arm bushings I had on the shelf.

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I had the crossmember and the bushing pockets powder coated.

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I put the whole thing together, in the car and was buttoning everything up when I noticed something was off. The driver's side control arms had a gap from the "washer" to the bushing. I scratched my head a bunch as it looked fine but was measuring bent. I swapped the old member back in with the old bushings/pockets and it was tight where it should be. So I dropped it all back out and measured the crossmember and it was checking out again. It looked perfect, no sign of any kind of impact or twisting. It honestly took me a little bit to notice that the TOP was bent. The mounting pad that pulls up to the frame rail was pushed down.

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When it was pulled up to the car that bend was twisting the whole thing forward and out of square... well damn. Roy was gracious enough to send out another crossmember gratis, and then I sent THAT one to powder coating. So I now have to really nice crossmembers and one's bent.

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that one was in fact perfect and in it all went.

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Also bought some plates and set toe for the first time. Not too bad to do. I made a set of "turn plates" from some scrap aluminum sheet and grease. What are you guys running for specs?

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It's hard to describe steering but it is not a small difference. It is among the best single changes I've ever made to a car, it's that good. Immediate, direct, responsive... all the good things. Worth every penny. I had poly bushings before so not sure how much I'd really feel the delrin but overall it's just extremely tight and quick to move.

It's now late September 2021 and I've got a tiny bit of time left to enjoy it. I took a trip out to Lime Rock for a show.

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Then took a trip up to Mass MOCA in the Berkshires. I drove by great looking factory and got my favorite picture I've taken of the car.

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Both excellent drives, aside from persistent interior rattles I couldn't have enjoyed the car more.

In late October I went out to drive around and do some tuning, car was running strong no signs of any problems. I pulled it back into the garage and thought "wow, where'd that valvetrain noise come from?". I've got a cam and perfect valve lash with like 350 miles on it, how could it be that loud? I pulled the valve cover to check lash and... 2021 season was over....
 
Are those engine mounts a bit stiffer without much NVH? Do you still run the STS third arm thing? I put a couple of rubber bushes in my STS mount to try and quieten the rattle at idle.
 
Are those engine mounts a bit stiffer without much NVH? Do you still run the STS third arm thing? I put a couple of rubber bushes in my STS mount to try and quieten the rattle at idle.

I took off the STS mount and that made things MUCH better around idle. The ASS mounts are really solid, just as good as it was with the third mount. I actually had a lot of NVH with the Yoshifab mounts, there's a little more NVH down low but otherwise actually improved it from 2800-3200rpm.
 
head carnage! Even though it only had like 350 miles on it I totally wiped out a cam lobe and bucket. The primary damage was on #3 intake, but there was signs of failure on a few other valves.

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My first instinct was to blame the buckets, and I still think they were the first thing to fail. I had them hardness tested and they only measured out to ~35 HRC. I called SuperTech and they told me they should be 60+ HRC, then walked it back saying I couldn't really measure them because of the nitride coating and needed to use Vickers which I don't have access to. I still don't really have a definitive answer; bad buckets, bad cam, break-in problem, valve spring pressure... or a combo. Extremely disappointing after pouring over the thing for so long in 2019. I did do a compression and leak down test and everything checked out fine.

When I pulled the head I also found some odd spots of pitting/corrosion on #1 and #4 that I didn't like, so the whole think got yanked to go to the machine shop. They told me 3-4 month lead time, and I laid awake trying to think of other engines I could swap in that I'm actually interested in. (currently unless I can somehow fit a Ferrari F131 v8 in there I'm not that excited about it).

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I also found two things which made me glad the cam ate itself, in a roundabout way. These are things I wouldn't have seen until they caused some kind of problem. First was the alignment nub broken off of the timing gear. It didn't appear to have slipped at all but will be replaced with a steel gear from KL Racing.

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This one was kinda scary, transfer tube o-ring into the block was pushing out! I never had an oil pressure problem and the bearings bear witness to that... but I'm not sorry the cam drove me to find this before it blew out.

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I dropped the engine off at the shop on December 4th, they didn't touch it until memorial day weekend. I just got the short block back on July 8th and don't even have valves for the head yet. But they're the best shop for Volvo stuff I can get to around here so I just had to wait.

The block was thankfully an easy job, they checked bearings which were all fine (Mann filter did it's job handling any material from the cam), refinished the cylinders and put in a new set of rings (for posterity rings were gapped to .006"/bore-inch).

The head turned into another total snowball. I needed new buckets, easy, and a new cam... I'm not going to run an IPD cam so I started reaching out to Sweden. Looked into Enem and KL Racing then started emailing with Erland Cox. After discussing my setup he recommended a cam grind he has done at Kyrk Motorsports for his cars.

Specs are: 14,7mm lift in, 14 mm out, 267-264 at 0,050" and a lobe separation of
108 degrees. Pretty big compared to the RSI cam! It should be a better match for the turbo size. Pretty aggressive ramp angle on the intake lobe too.

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I had the cam and the new buckets REM micro-polished then dropped them off at the shop. Then it got all complicated. The Erland cam has a ~3mm smaller base circle than the RSI cam and it's more than I can compensate for with different lash caps, which means I needed to have Ferrea cut me a new, slightly longer set of custom valves. To top it all off the valve springs were binding on the new monster lift... because of course.

Step one was to address the coil bind. My spring install height is at 1.550" and needs to be more like 1.650". There wasn't an easy way to get there. It took several calls with Ferrea and a lot of me thinking to come up with a plan. The basics are: the valves need to be slightly longer so that length can be added into the install height, I can remove .025" from the lower spring locators, and I can use .050" offset keepers. This adds too much height, so I then have to move the groove down the valve stem to hit the 1.650" target.

There was one more problem with it: with the .050" offset keepers they would interfere with the shoulder of the lash cap on the valve tip. They're .080" lash caps with a .090" shoulder, Ferrea said they would not remove any shoulder from that unless it was a really tight fit on the valve. So, I added .020" in length to the valve tip and bought .060" lash caps from KL Racing. They have .125" shoulder that also would have interfered, but luckily I have a generous friend with access to a magnet surface grinder so he's going to cut them down to .090" for me.

To prove how annoying it was for me to figure this out, this is the spreadsheet I had to make to get my head around how all of the measurements interacted.

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One side benefit of this whole thing is that I'm going to end up with better spring pressures. I'll be losing 30lbs on the seat down to ~100lbs and be at 265 over the nose. Both of these line up perfectly with what Erland recommends with his own springs.

All of the back and forth with me, Ferrea and the shop ate up a bunch of time and was honestly just stressful. I was hoping I was paying the other people to figure it out for me, so now I just have to hope everyone's measurements tie off. The new valves are on order and will hopefully be here in the next week or two. If I'm lucky the rest is assembly (if you haven't noticed I am not lucky).

After I dropped all this mess off back at the shop in December I needed a way to keep myself busy. So I decided to tool up and try to learn new skills. I bought myself a luxurious Christmas present in the form of an Everlast 210ext tig welder and a W375 water cooler. I have barely used the mig, my Dad always ended up doing most of the welding, so I was coming into this COLD. Thankfully I really took to it, have been enjoying the challenge and spent the past 6 months looking for stuff to build which I'll get caught up on next.

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The first thing I wanted to make with the tig was a good "bench project". Decided to try and make a replica of a group-a oil pan. I already posted a thread about this but repeating it here for posterity.

I'm not solving any problem I've had, just wanted to give it a try, add some oil capacity and hopefully net some potential improvements.

I've seen some people add "bump outs" on one side near the pickup, but couldn't find many examples of a real flat bottom b230 pan. I pretty much went from/copied these two that I could find from back in the day.

this one made by Sten Parner I think

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and this one I don't really know the pedigree of (actual group a?)

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I mocked up my version of these in cardboard

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I cut pretty much the entire hump off of the pan (this ended up being the practice-pan)

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the basic idea mocked up at the angle it sits in the car (precision wood bucks)

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The cardboard templates ended up being minimally useful. I found that because of the multiple curves it felt more like trying to build a custom gas tank for a chopper. Lots of bending in the brake, checking, bending again, tweaking with a hammer and dolly etc. It took a lot of time but I was able to get a very close fit all the way around. I used 14 gauge steel which was pretty close to the same thickness as the stock material.

I made the "side panels" tall, then tacked them in place. I mocked it up again at the appropriate angle for the engine slant then shot a laser level at it to draw a horizontal line all the way around. I set the depth based on the stock drain plug location (lowest part of the stock pan)

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trimmed up and made a filler piece made for the front.

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I made relief cuts in the remaining flange of the stock pan material and folded it over against the new walls and tacked it together. Probably unnecessary but felt cleaner.

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baffle box location was mocked up in the car. I drilled out the stock drain plug fitting and welded it onto my bottom plate.

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Went through and finish welded it. I'm a novice tig welder but was happy I got it together and it didn't leak. I was worried about the flange of the pan warping during welding, so my Dad made me this plywood torque plate.

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Last of many test fits into the car. It pretty much hits perfect, bottom is parallel to the ground and up above the bottom plane of the cross member.

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I wasn't really sure what to do with the tray, so I kinda split the difference between the two examples I had to copy :e-shrug:

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I sent the finished product off to be powder coated and it came back looking pretty good for something built in the basement.

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The new pan picked up ~2quarts in total volume compared to a stock pan (as measured by filling it to the flange. 7 vs 9qts), which is a good thing.
 
Oil pan looks really good. Where did you get the internal baffles from? More importantly though, what are you going to do about the oil pickup tube o-ring popping out?
 
Oil pan looks really good. Where did you get the internal baffles from? More importantly though, what are you going to do about the oil pickup tube o-ring popping out?

Thanks! The baffle box came from Ian (HiPerfAuto on here), believe it's made for b21 engines. Yeah the o-ring was concerning, especially since it was an orange OE seal and there's less than 5k miles on a careful assembly. The first thing I decided to do was not to install a high pressure spring on the Melling pump I installed. I figured if I never saw any oil pressure issues, and was about to blow a seal out more pressure isn't going to help anything.

When I was working on the bottom end over the weekend I had four oil pumps (ancient OE Volvo, Meyle that was in previously, and two new Melling 181). I also had three different transfer tubes from various engines. As I was mix-and-matching things to test fit-ups something started to stand out to me. The transfer tube that was in the block before is perfect and brand new looking, but didn't seem to be seating the o-rings the same way.

I'm not sure how but the tube I had in the engine is shorter on the short radius by the width of the rolled bead. Both of the tubes I had from scrap engines were the same, and longer. This seamed to cause one of the o-rings to be out towards the surface of the bore, which one depending on how it was installed.

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I think that might have been the problem, but to be sure I tacked a cut down stainless washer onto the tube. It's a tighter fit to the bore which seems to help keep the tube squared up and gives more shoulder for the o-ring.

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Next chapter: heat exchangers. My old setup worked, but the fan kicked on a lot when I wasn't moving and I wanted to upgrade the old CX Racing intercooler. I ended up shooting for overkill on all fronts and hoping that gives me a ton of headroom. New stack is:

24x12x3.5" Garrett intercooler core
24x16x3" Ron Davis Racing stock car radiator, chevy pattern PN is 1S-24163
16x7.5" Setrab oil cooler

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It's a lot of meat to package up front, and I needed to figure out the IC end tanks.

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Because the core is so wide, the best way to package it and keep it as far forward as I wanted was to do a rear entry and exit. I looked really hard for the right set of cast tanks but never found anything so had to figure out how to fab something. The "easier" way would have been box sections which seems like the most common path, but with the rear inlet I really wanted the tank to have a radiused face because in my simple mind that would improve air flow across the core (instead of hitting a flat wall and turning it can flow along the bend). This was the basic idea in cross section..

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to help visualize things I downloaded fusion 360 and bumbled my way into making a basic solid model. I tried it in sheetmetal to get bend calculations but got annoyed and gave up.

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The outlet on the efr is 2" so I did a 2.5" inlet and a 3" outlet. Thought being do a 2>2.5" expansion on the hot side pipe and match the cold side to the throttle body.

Rolling the 3.5" radius and bending the 90* return made it a little more difficult so I settled for 4 pieces and a seam along the back. The radius was bumped/formed over a piece of pipe. Used .100" 5052 plate for the material. The mounting bosses are 1" rod drilled and tapped. The inlet/outlet fittings are weld on bungs from Treadstone that I really liked (unlike their cast end tanks I bought to check out, which were considerably crappier than the CX Racing tanks).

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Rather than add stock style top-brackets for the radiator I added bosses to the IC and the rad to allow them to be tied together with a simple L bracket. Cleaner look than some bent pieces off of the upper panel. I found this welding to be pretty challenging, and welding the thick boss to the .063 tank of my extremely expensive radiator was VERY intimidating. Didn't come out beautiful but it gets the job done.

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The 1 3/8" fittings on the radiator fit stock Volvo hoses which is nice. I did need to add a bung for the overflow bottle and for the vent. The RD radiator did come with a vent bung up top but it's rear facing which was going to be kind of clunky, so I just capped it and added one to the side.

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Everything is a tight fit. Tanks are just wide enough to get the fittings to clear the sides of the radiator and leave room for couplers. I strongly considered a wiggins/clamshell clamp but decided it was an unnecessary expense and complication that I really only wanted for style points.

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Fitting the big oil cooler was a bit of a pickle as well. It's too tall to mount below everything where I had the stock one, and too wide to mount off to one side without having to cut some things anyways. So, I ended up putting it smack dab in the middle.

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in order to un-block some of the intercooler surface area the compromise was to split the difference and drop it down so the bottom edge was down flush with the bottom of the lower radiator support.

In order to catch all of the new coolers I made a big steel tray and through-bolted it to the lower radiator support. The intercooler stands on 1" rubber isolators and the top catches brackets tied to the upper radiator support. The radiator sits in rubber lined u-brackets and the top ties back to the IC. To hang the oil cooler off the front of it I made super fiddly end cap brackets which also have room for rubber isolation pads on the mounts. I had to cut and bend 4 versions of those before they fit just right; when the 3rd set failed I chucked one of them across the garage in a bit of a fit, where it perfectly nailed the side of a full gallon of stain which proceeded to empty itself onto the garage floor. Car work is fun, I do it for stress relief!

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With the cooler dropped down like this it does not clear the hood latch support bracket no matter how much you notch it. I took some inspiration from Alex Buchka's custom support bracket, but then realized I'm not half as talented as him so I did less than half of the job. I sectioned the stock bracket to retain the upper portion.

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Then made a separate lower section that ties it into the lower radiator support. Just some 5/8" steel tube with some simple plate brackets. This got everything mounted and tied together so it could all be plumbed.

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