It never ends

As with most projects that I start I always end up finding another. This time was no exception. While I had the wheels off my car I decided to take a look at the flexible brake lines and was horrified to find that the two lines that went to my front calipers had huge gashes in them.

I figured that since I was on such a performance kick and the front OEM rubber lines were $50 a pop from the dealer that I would upgrade to stainless steel braided lines.

Replacing the front lines was easy, it took a little PB nut blaster but they came off with out any major trouble. This sadly was not the case with the rear lines.

I ended up having to fabricate 3 of 4 hard lines for the rear of the car after trying for 3 days to get the flexible lines off with no avail. This required a bubble flare tool which was harder to get than I expected, but a small auto shop near me came through and got it with minimal fuss.

These are the lines I needed to remake.

Lower transmission mount

As I said before I was having some clunks during shifting. The other mount that is prone to go is the lower transmission mount. While mine wasn't completely gone I figured that as with the rest of the work I was doing it is better to get it out of the way now. Again the job was easy as pie.

Front motor mount

The last few weeks out in Michigan began to reveal a loud thud upon shifting. Since I had the car up on jack stands and the wheels off I decided I should look at the front motor mount. Well upon inspection it was obvious that the current mount had failed.

The sketchy part of this operation is lifting the engine by the oil pan. This is accomplished by using the edge of the pan.

Here is the old mount notice the oil splatter all over the place, another time though.










Here we see the old and new engine mounts pretty obvious which is which right?










Ta da all installed and cleaned

Upgrades

I must apologize for the lack of updates to the site here. I completed all of the upgrades that I had wanted to before I came back to RPI. By the end of the week I'll have a lot more to show here for your viewing pleasure.

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.

Inspection & repair of the HVAC system

Armed with instructions from Bay 13 and my trusty toolbox I tried to figure out what made my trip out to Michigan so wonderful.



First I needed to remove this wonderful cover, behind it is a knee bolster, even more removal fun.









The glove box also needs to come out which gives us a nice internal view of the dash.










We can see that I've already removed the fan assembly (large hole) and the resistor pack (small hole). If you look closely the door in the fan hole is what controls the air recirculation.









Notice how dirty this resistor is, the fan was even worse and had almost seized up causing those pesky blown fuses and a failed resistor.









To satisfy my own curiosity I activated the recirc control and nothing happened. Turns out this little guy broke, and notice that the material has changed on the new one, guess Volvo figured something out.

Everything gets put back and closed tight.

And so ends my first fix-it-yourself experience (with this car).