I've spent years reading through the builds and whatnot on the site but have never posted much of anything. I put my E39 540i up for sale a while back and pulled it due to some marital problems. I wound up selling it to an old friend in MI a couple months later and a couple months after that it was totaled after getting hit when traffic came to a stop on the highway and the driver behind him did not slow down. I am searching for a nice, rust free E39 body for an everything swap or an E38 for the 6 speed manual swap. Either way the rebuilt drivetrain will live on. In the meantime I started therapy, worked some stuff out and my wife and I reconciled our differences and everything is going well thus far. Which brings us to the present.
So, things are going well. what should one do to ensure things continue to stay that way? Trade the E36 318i vert that we haven't driven in over a year for two barely running, salvage titled Volvo S60R's of course. What could go wrong?
Well, first off we're still married and happy. I did get a fair amount of E36 M3 over the cars when they were dropped off at my shop. The "nice" car was missing carpet, the passenger front seat was dyed red for some reason, couple tires wouldn't hold air, door panels were broken, it wouldn't idle, etc. the "parts" car wasn't in much better shape. The sunroof is nearly missing, wouldn't idle, and many more issues.
So, I let the cars sit for a couple months while contemplating what to do with them. I could part them out and make a bunch of money judging what parts have been selling for on ebay or make one decent car and part the spare out. Well, obviously the title states I chose the latter.
I'll post a couple pics of the cars as I got them and start posting the work I've done since to get the 2007 silver car back on the road. The darker car, the 2005 will be getting completely stripped and sold, I'll take some pics of that as well.
Also, I may be a little slow going on updates. My wife recently tested positive for Covid and I have very little free time right this minute, on top of a really heavy work load at my shop right now as we are supposed to be going on vacation next week and I have a couple really big jobs that need to be done in the next few days. So, here are some pics.
Hope your wife gets over it quickly. The '07 is probably the better bet anyway. Good luck with the project.
So after sitting for a couple months I finally had some time to work on the cars and got to it. First off, both batteries were completely dead. OK, no problem, put them on a charger. Next day, I was ready to fire up the 07. Knowing what I know from past Volvo experience I cycled the key and did a throttle body relearn before starting it so I didn't have to deal with all sorts of erratic idle on top of whatever else was wrong with the car. Fired it up and it idled perfectly. I took it down the road and put some gas in it, hammered it and the turbo is spooling, transmission is shifting, and it is idling perfectly. Turns out the throttle body just needed a relearn, well .. it ultimately needs to be cleaned, but in my experience cleaning a magneti marelli throttle body on any Volvo is a no-go.
So, the car idles, runs and drives. I take it for about a 3 mile test drive and it is all over the road, like nearly uncontrollable. I knew the rear Nivomat struts were leaking, front control arm bushings were tearing, but had never felt something this bad in a similar chassis.
So, put both cars on racks and start swapping out parts. Front and rear struts. The 07 had brand new struts, but they weren't nivomat, the 05 had newer, correct struts. Get everything swapped over and the 07 is still all over the road. Put it on the alignment rack and found the rear camber and toe were miles out of spec. Set everything in the middle and took it for another test drive and WOW! it drives like a normal car.
So, with that I put a temp tag on it and drove it home. The next day it had passed all readiness monitors and I took it through emissions. Took that along with the salvage inspection the previous owner had done and a few minutes later I had an rebuild salvage titled 2007 Volvo S60R that was registered for 2 years in Arizona.
That is just the beginning of this junk to decent transformation. But, I've had it on the road for a month and only have two problems. The steering angle sensor is always reading left, swapped with the other car and it still reads left. I need to figure that out, I hate warning lights. Second is I'm only getting 15mpg. I'm not sure how bad this is, but my 2004 545i, 6 speed manual gets 18mpg in town. Still looking into that as well.
In reply to Dirtydog (Forum Supporter) :
Thank you, we are all vaccinated and she seems to be getting a little better every day. The 07 was always the car to save. It has the nav, pdc, correct bumpers, little body damage, and seems to be well cared for with exception of the carpet and the dyed seat.
Well .. as to be expected my son and also tested positive for covid this afternoon. We are feeling ok, just a little under the weather. I've got some interior pictures that I will post probably tomorrow. Steam cleaning is amazing for old, dirty leather.
IIRC no P2R had Nivomat, in that they all had Four-C and there wasn't a Nivomat version of that.
No P2R has a Magneti-Marelli throttle body! All Bosch all the time. The M-M units were only a few years of P80. Cleaning is mandatory when you get a P0101 code, I think the code sets when "leakage past throttle body" calculation goes over 9. Or under 4.5. I forget which.
Still trying to figure out what is up with the one passenger seat.
For fuel economy, I also have a 6 speed Geartronic car and I have noticed that the absolute worst thing is cold starts. I have seen 4mpg indicated cruising at 35mph before the converter wakes up. They do ALL the cam and ignition retard to light off the converter. I'll take that versus air injection any day. On the open road I have averaged 30mpg but this takes careful driving: basically drive so that you never see more manifold pressure than 8-10 inches of vacuum, or over 65mph. I also have the 2.4l engine from a late P2 T5 car, which is basically a P2R engine with stronger cylinder walls and slightly higher compression. Can't really notice a difference.
That said I also saw 24mpg average towing a trailer in 5th gear at 3000rpm across the Appalachians, before I had a boost gauge, with the original engine.
In town though.... 16mpg sounds about right. It's almost 4000lb, with an aluminum (inefficient) engine with very low compression (inefficient!) and port injection (this is now old school) and it relies on a turbo to get out of its own way...
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
Ah, yes. You're correct, I misspoke when I said nivomat. Those are the self leveling shocks. The P2R does have 4C, but 4C is also in vehicles with nivomat like the S80.
Hmm, ok. I haven't actually looked at the throttle body, well because of where it is. That's good to know.
Ugh, I have no idea what the p.o. was thinking. I did wind up switching the passenger seats and found that the 07 is equipped with seat occupancy, while the 05 is not. Wound up pulling the lower cushions and ocs bladder and swapping them.
I have read a bunch about swapping the later engine because of the weak cylinder walls. I may look into that down the road. I was gonna try to sell the complete drivetrain out of the parts car and see what that'll give me towards upgrades.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to get great mileage but I was thinking it may do a little better than the 545. I think average is actually 13 mpg, and I calculated right around 15. It is quite heavy, awd, no real power until boost.
A lot of the cylinder wall weakness is a bit "overblown". I will allow that after 210-220k or whatever it was when I had the head off of the 2.5, the bores were noticeably bowed in to the channels, and the channels were narrower in the middle where the thin point of the bores is. I made some shims out of .030" stainless and hammered them into place. Should be noted that the engine did not burn any oil at all, so the bore warpage was apparently not that important.
I'm also running a stock tune, not turning the boost up to and beyond the turbos limits with a sketchy tune or anything. THAT can cause problems...
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
That makes sense, I seem to recall most of the complaints I was reading about the cylinder warpage were on performance forums. I wonder if anyone sells a "closed deck" insert for these 2.5's? I remember that being a big thing when we were throwing turbos on every honda engine we could find. I guess I'm fairly lucky with the mileage also, the silver car has 127k and the grey car has 150k and both seem to run really well.
It seems like this engine is tuned to about the peak of its performance range in most aspects, I couldn't imagine a tune would give it much more that a headache in the long run.
In reply to Slinds99 :
The only real weak part of the deck is the channels that need to be shimmed. Shim them and the rest of the engine is (allegedly) good for 550-600hp if you can fit a big enough turbo. The engine/trans mount is right up on the turbo so this is a bit more difficult than it needs to be. It seems that most high power people with this engine (B5254T4) have Focus RSs not S60Rs, and most of those are in Germany, so gear up your Google Translate or brush up on your multilingual skills.
Or just start with a B5244T5 engine (2.4l from '05-09 S60 T5) which has smaller bores and smaller channels between the bores, so a lot more bore strength. I think the channels on the 2.4 are .023" or whatever metric equivalent. So between the two there is 1.1mm more wall thickness at the weakest point. This engine is otherwise 100% identical, same crank, same rods, same special head, same cams, same turbo even.
It's all conjecture if you don't plan on turning up the wick.
