Brake lights

I've always kind of suspected that my brake lights weren't coming on early enough, but never really got around to doing some real testing on it; however, last week I was stopped at a traffic light with someone stopped behind me. I decided to stretch out a little bit and noticed that the car behind me just got a little redder.

I fiddled with different brake pressures and realized that I was able to stop my car without having the brake lights come on at all. Not only is this dangerous it is also annoying for other drivers.

This morning I dug around under the dash and found the brake light switch and readjusted it, so now my brake lights activate the right pressure.

Strut brace installed

Well apparently the factory brace isn't designed for cars before the 1996 model year. All this really meant was that I needed to modify a bracket and reroute a harness on the driver's side strut tower. The whole process took about an hour since I had to make a trip to Lowe's and Autozone once I realized that I needed to make some modifications. I didn't realize this until I had undone all the nuts first though.



This is how the strut tower on the driver's side looked before the strut brace.










This is how it looks now. I unplugged that wiring connector and rerouted the one end back underneath a wire tunnel on the strut tower and back up to where it is shown in that picture. Since I modified the bracket that it was originally attached to I zip tied it to the ABS module and what was left of the bracket.

Strut Brace

As in my last post I mentioned that I was going to put a strut brace on the front of my car in addition to a few other performance modifications. Today ladies and gents is when I'm going to put the strut brace on the chiseled brick.

There are a lot of different strut braces out there, but probably the two most common are the OEM and OMP braces. I went with the OEM brace. I was a little concerned when I got it because it had some dents in it, but the guys on the Volvo Speed Forums lent me a hand.

Here is the plan. I'm going to take a quick drive around the apartment complex and see how the car handles before the brace is installed then repeat the same loop when the brace is installed.

Performance

Volvo's that are have NA (naturally aspirated) engines are pretty limited in their performance abilities. That is unless you do some major work which typically involves swapping the engine and tranny out, something I don't plan on doing. The one area that can be improved is the handling, and to be completely honest I almost prefer better handling to raw power. Now again you can go crazy in this area too. Right now my car has a 100% stock suspension from a 1995+ 850 since the dealer was an idiot. So technically I could replace just about every component with performance components (shocks, springs, control arms, bushings, ect...).

I will be replacing the following components:

• Sway bars (front and rear)
• Sway bar end links

I'm also putting a strut brace in the front and possibly the rear.

New Wheels

I went home this past weekend to swap wheels with my Mom's totaled 1998 V70 XC. She had what Volvo calls Silver Naiad wheels while I had Argo wheels. I asked a lot of questions on different forums and it seemed that everything would match up with the exception of the tires, which in the end wasn't a big deal since my tires have more tread life left.

We got to the body shop put the car up on jack stands and took the wheels off. We looked at the diameter difference and yeah it was big, but like I said my tires had more tread life so swapping them was worth it.

We went to STS and had them mount and balance the tires. On the way back to the body shop we noticed a slight vibration, we didn’t think of anything of it. We swapped the wiper blades and the rear wiper arm. I also snagged the mats from the trunk. I was real tempted to swipe her driver seat, but the insurance company would probably throw a fit and I’m sure there would be another problem.

As we were driving back home the vibration got worse and because of time we couldn’t get back to the STS we delt with earlier, we had to find another. The problem then was that they too were closing and couldn’t take us. We ended up at Sears where they rebalanced the tires. 2 of the wheels were off by 2 oz, 1 was off by 1.5 oz, and the third was on the ball. In the end it all worked out, took a little longer than we thought, but all is well. The car looks great and the ride is probably as smooth as its ever been.

Before:

After: