Brynhildr

This here is Brynhildr.  She is a 1993 volvo 940 wagon naturally aspirated automatic car.  I picked her up just under 2 years ago for the purpose of v8 swapping it.  I have another volvo 740 wagon that has been my daily driver for the last 8 years.  I had planned to v8 swap it at some point but I didn't have another car to drive so I could do the swap.

I bought her as a non runner and they didn't know why she didn't run.  And no I didn't pay close to their asking price.  I did probably over pay a bit for a non runner but ahe has pretty much no rust except for 2 odd spots i found.  The drivers side passenger door piller has a rot spot which is odd and 1 spot in the engine bay which i will get to later.  I wasn't concerned about the fact that it didn't run due to the fact that I was going to replace the whole driveline.

Went and rented a uhaul pickup and trailer to tow it home.  I also found a tr6060 from a 2017 camaro that was supposed to only have 17k miles on it that I picked up for a good price Here she is following me home with her new trans in the bed of the truck and a couple pics of her in my driveway.

Wife knew I was bringing home a car to engine swap then was mad because the car didn't run.  I swear women do not make sense half the time.

Now on to the subject of why it didn't run.  The previous owners thought it might have something to do with the o2 sensor and bought a new bosch sensor to go in it.  The problem was when they pulled the old sensor out, the threads pulled out with it and then they stopped doing anything with it.  So when I got it home I decided to fool around with it to see if it was an easy fix.  First thing to take care of was the dead battery.  They had put in a new battery less then a year ago from Walmart so I took it to Walmart and got a free warranty replacement.  Installed the new battery, turned the key and listened for the fuel pump thinking maybe that died and that's why it stopped running.  Nope not the problem.  Pump sounded healthy, however I didn't hear it slow down like it wasn't pressurizing the fuel system.  I turned it on and off a couple times to verify what I was hearing and thought to myself it can't actually just be out of gas could it?  Well it turns out it actually was just out of gas.  I put a couple gallons in and primed the system a couple of time and it coughed to life.  She sputtered at first as the air worked out of the fuel system and then she purred like a kitten.  I bought an 02 sensor tap and installed the new o2 sensor and took her for a drive and she drove great! Minus the soulless 4 speed slushbox off course.  I decided to drive her around for a bit before I tore all of her insides out.  I think I drove her for about 2 months without any issue except for a bad brake caliper.

Wow, I've towed home a lotta non-runners over the last 50 years but I've never had one turn out to be outta gas. I think the stupidest one was a bad ground cable connection but that's a distant second to outta gas...

I'm jealous! I would convert that to turbo and daily it.

I like where this is headed, partly because I kinda know where this is headed. 🤘🏻😎

1993, is this a REX/Regina car? I had one in the gunmetal color and it made it to 350k miles and three significant accidents before it was finally sent to the junkyard. Great car! I think '93 is peak 7/940 in my opinion. Revised interior, G80 locker standard, generally well galvanized and rust free, just great cars. Are you swapping the rear or keeping the Volvo rear? 

I like where this is headed!

In reply to orthoxstice :

Yes it was a regina car.  My 90 740 wagon is also regina so now I have some spare parts!  I did not keep the rear end.  I swapped it for a Ford 8.8.

So first order of business after getting it driving was the suspension.  I went ahead and ordered a coilover conversion kit for the strut housings from BNE performance.

I cut the stock spring perches off of the strut housings and then welded on some collers for the threaded adjuster sleeve. Then I powder coated them along with the wheel hubs and misc brake parts.  (It's nice having your own powder coating oven)

Instalation is pretty straight forward.  I started with the back and installed an adjustable height spring perch with new springs in the back.

While I was in the front I decided to replace the inner and outer tie rods and ball joints.  The annoying part about tie rods for these cars is that there are 3 different steering racks that could have come on them.  A ZF rack a Koyo rack and a CAM rack.  Each one of these use a different thread.  The ZF uses a 16mm thread and the Koyo uses a 14 mm threads.  Apparently none of the parts suppliers know about the CAM rack because no one lists parts for it.  So since I couldn't find info I used a tie rod off of a different rack to measure the threads and found it used 16 mm threads.  I ordered a set for the ZF rack.  This became an issue on instalation.  I got one side installed just fine but when I went to install the other side, the other side wouldn't fit!  Turns out one side of the CAM rack has 16 mm threads and the other side has 14 mm threads.  What a weird thing to do.

So I have new ball joints, new tie rods and a coilover conversion and was planning on lowering the car about 2 inches.  I don't like slammed cars, I just wanted to lower it enough to get rid of the wheel gap.  So since I was lowering it a decent amount I also installed a set of quick steer roll correction spacers.  These are a nice piece also made by BNE who are one of the very few people that make suspension parts for the 7/9 series.

The cool thing about these roll correction spaces is that they have multiple holes for the tie rods to change how quick the steering is.  Stock is 3.5 turns lock to lock, the middle hole is 2.8 and the inner hole is 2.3.  I installed my tie rods in the middle hole.  I did have to shorten the inner tie rod a little bit to get the outer tie rods enough room to thread in farther.

I used a ratchet strap to help pull everything together during installation.

Also installed which you can kind of see are a set of caster camber plates to replace the stock strut hats also from BNE.

Did a quick driveway alignment using a tape measure and a digital angle gauge and some wood i had laying around in my garage.

Took it to get an alignment and I got it within 2 tenths of a degree for camber and I think half a degree for toe which surprised me.  I was pretty disappointed in whoever did the alignment since they gouged my brand new camber plates.  This was completely unnecessary as I was able to move them by hand when I did this in my driveway just a couple days before hand.

Next order of business was to upgrade the gauges.  I have a set of speedhut gages I bought 10-12 years ago for my XR4Ti that I had a while ago. These have worked very well for me except for the fuel level.  I am pretty sure that the fuel level issue is a fuel sender issue on both of the cars it has been in.  Unfortunately the only way to get a new fuel level sensor is to order a whole factory fuel pump assembly which is over $500 and I am not sure I want to spend that much just to get the fuel level gauge working.

So I made a new gauge cluster using a stock surround and a piece of aluminum I shaped to fit in the the stock surround and powder coated it semi-gloss black.

Not a good picture of it but I also found a guy 3d printing a little gauge pod that goes where the driver side vent goes which gave me a spot to mount my oil temp gauge.

Next thing I did was weigh the car to get a base line and to see how much weight I end up adding to the car.