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.

Man, I had the same early 760 steering wheel in my '93 after it got wrecked the first time...

In reply to orthoxstice :

A 15 inch steering wheel is way too big.  My leg rubs hard against it every time I try to heel toe shift.  This car originally came with a 14 inch wheel that looked the same, but it was in poor shape and the rubber had separated from the inner part of the steering wheel and liked to twist in my hand.

After i installed the suspension and gauges and drove the car around for awhile it was time to start tearing the car apart.  If you have never worked on an old rwd volvo, they are really easy to work on almost everything.  Tons of room to work on which is why a v8 fits so well!

After I took off her face it was time to remove the engine and trans. Which weighs just under 500 lbs.

My car time got interuppted for a week as I took one of my students to the Skills USA nationals competition in Atlanta since he took first in states.  Downtown Atlanta was definitely a different place then I am used to.  People all over tweeked out on drugs and tons of homeless people.  Met some very interesting characters walking around too.  We took a voluntary flight bump on the way down since they offered us i think $4-500 to take the next flight which sounded pretty good  to me (Free car money!) and my student.  My student ended up taking second in the nation for aviation maintenance which was pretty awesome.

So on my way home from the airport, my daily which just so happens to be another rwd ancient volvo in the shape of a 1990 740 wagon which has the exact same engine and computer as the one I just took out of the black car, started to act weird.  I got about 2/3 of the way home from the Detroit airport and it started to act like it was running out of gas.  I didn't think it was because I remembered filling up before I left (gas gauge doesn't work and neither does the odometer).  So I stopped to get gas (did not take a full tank) and continued to drive home thinking that was weird.  Got about 10 minutes from home and it does it again.  Acts like it's starving for fuel.  Now I am thinking that the fuel pump is dying on me even though it's only 2 years old.  And of course this is right after I tore the whole drive train out of the black car.  Luckily I am off work for the summer and have time to work on it and luckily I have a car I can steal a bunch of parts from if needed since a lot of parts won't be used in the v8 swap.

Now we are going to go back in time about 3 weeks real quick to when I was doing some maintenance to the 90 wagon and I accidently knocked the exicter wire off of the alternator and didn't realize it till I couldn't restart the car after I stopped to get some fuel.  Luckily or not so luckily as I willcome to learn, there was a guy there who was willing to give me a jump.  I got my end hooked up and he proceeds to hook up the cables backwards twice before I tell him to stop since he is hooking them up backwards.  Get the car started after hooking the up right and went home.  Right away I notice that the Bluetooth on my radio no longer works which obviously didn't make me happy but nothing I could do about it.

So back to the future where I'm thinking I have a bad fuel pump.  I steal the fuel pump out of the 93 since it needed upgrading for the v8 swap anyway and go for a test drive and the problem not only isn't fixed but has gotten worse.  By this point what is going on is as soon as the car is warmed up it just looses all power and could only keep the car moving 25-30 mph. The new problem that started after changing the fuel pump is that the car would still out after taking a turn. I end up stealing pretty much every sensor off of the motor I just pulled to put on the car and nothing fixes it.  I end up also putting back in the original fuel pump which fixed the stalling issue.  Turns out the pump from the 93 was Defective and I made the issue worse when I installed it in the 90.  The 93 liked to act like it was out of gas when it still had 3 or 4 gallons left in the tank and I never investigated the reason.  

I installed the engine computer and also the ignition computer from the 93 and none of those fixed the issue.  The ignition computer did make the engine start a lot faster as it always took 7 or 8 revolutions to fire off and now it fires in 2 or 3.  So at this point I am just shot gunning parts at it since I tried everything I could think of that has to do with fuel.  I even swapped distributors even though I was pretty sure it wouldn't do anything.  I think on day 4 of this I realized I never touched the o2 sensor.  So I swap in the o2 sensor from the other car and it suddenly works!  So take it for a longer test drive and about 10 miles down the road it starts acting like it has no fuel again.  I couldn't really drive the car home barely running 10 miles so I said berkeley it and just unplugged the o2 sensor.  Instantly the car ran like it should!  So the cloud hooking up the jumper cables backwards to my car fried the o2 circuit in the computer which caused the computer to think it was running extremely rich and causing it to pull a E36 M3 ton of fuel.  It ran so well with the o2 sensor unplugged and didnt seem to affect fuel mileage that I forgot about it for over a year before finally buying a new ntk o2 sensor and plugging in the computer from the 93.

Getting back on topic, let's talk about the engine and trans I have for this project.  I ended up for a gen 3 6.0 ls from a ups truck for $150.  I picked up a set of rec port heads for around $200 and i found a guy selling an ls3 intake with injectors and a fuel rail for around $400.  The tr6060 came from a 2017 camaro for I think 2700 which also came with the flywheel and clutch.  If you remember i picked this up from a junkyard on my way to pick up the car.  The transmission is supposed to only have 17k miles on it.  The story the junkyard told me is the owner of the car let a buddy drive it and his buddy somehow shot a rod through the block which sprayed oil on the hot exhaust and caught the car on fire.  I have no way to verify the mileage but the bellhousing has fire extinguisher residue on it and the shifter was melted so maybe it's true.

Now my plan was to just reuse the stock flywheel and clutch to help keep costs down.  The clutch looked like it had lots of life left on it and the flywheel didn't look too bad.  However what I didn't know when I bought the transmission was that when gm went to the lt series engines they changed some stuff with the transmissions and flywheel.  Ls series motors have a 6 bolt flywheel pattern but they went to an 8 bolt pattern on all the lt motors.  They also changed the design of the input shaft so I couldn't just use a stock ls flywheel and clutch.  I ended up calling a bunch of clutch companies and found out that most places had never dealt with using this version of the tr6060 behind an ls and didn't know if they had a clutch that would work.  McCloud clutch said they had a clutch that would work but it was a twin disc to the cost of just under $1500.  I obviously wasn't thrilled about that but it seemed like the only option at the time without finding a new transmission and most tr6060s around me seemed over priced or broken and over priced around me so I went ahead and ordered the McCloud clutch. 

I dropped the block, heads, crank and rods off to a local machine shop called level performance.  My plan was to have the machine shop hone the cyli der 0.005 and get some pistons for that bore size to get me 10:1 compression ratio.   I had originally planned to run around 9.5:1 compression ratio but I was convinced to bump it up to 10:1 by the guy who specced my camshaft out.  I had a guy named Tony Mamo design me a camshaft based off of my expectations and my expected use of the car.  My expectations and use included

Running on 87 octane

Hopefully make 400 rwp 

Work with exhaust manifolds since no one makes headers for this application and I wasn't will to fork over 3k for someone to make me a custom set of headers.

Be easy to drive

And I expected to autocross and hopefully do some track days with it.

The camshaft specs i ended up with are as follows

Intake 219 degrees duration @0.050 and 0.615 lift

Exhaust 233 degrees duration @0.050 and 0.615 lift

114 degrees lobe separation angle.

Tony also convinced me to buy a set of YellTerra rocker arms.  These are supposed to have better geometry then stock and not wear out valve guides as fast.  I was a little iffy on ordering these due to cost but I went ahead and ordered them.  I will say that they are nice and beefy.  The exhaust and intake rocker share a shaft and it also gets rid of the stock rocker arm bridge.

Now that I had the engine dropped off at the machine shop i went looking for pistons.  While perusing mast motorsports website I found something very interesting that I hadn't heard about yet.  They have a rotating assembly using a l8t crank and rods with forged pistons for just under 2k. Now this got me doing some math in my head.  I already had to buy pistons and I needed the stock crank polished plus have everything balanced so that was going to be around $700 plus the really expensive clutch I just bought for $1500 puts me over the cost of the l8t rotating assembly.  The big appeal of the l8t crank is that it is from the newer 6.6 liter truck motors.  This means that it is a factory 8 bolt crank (i get to use the stock clutch and flywheel!), is forged and has a center counter weight, and the best thing is it's a factory stroker crank with a 3.86 stroke instead of a 3.622 of the stock 6.0.  This will make my 6.0 into a 6.4.  So I called up mast motorsports and placed an order.  I also returned the very expensive McCloud clutch which cost me I think close to $350 between shipping and a restocking fee.  I don't think I have every paid a restocking fee before but I can now use a $400 factory clutch that I can get from most any parts store instead of a really expensive twin disc clutch only available from McCloud which I have heard the greatest things about quality.  I called up my machine shop and asked them not to do anything with the crank or rods as I bought a whole rotating assembly.

Keen to see how this comes together! That steering rack issue must have been frustrating!

Ohhhh...  this looks like a riot!

Sweet build! I'm very curious if you are going to have to clearance the block at all for the L8T crank.  A lot of 4" stroke LS engines have high piston skirt wear because the piston is not very well supported by the stock sleeve at BDC, I'm curious how much the 3.86" stroke of the L8T changes this.  Also, Tony Mamo is like "the guy" for LS7 stuff so that combo should make some steam.  What's your plan for engine management?

In reply to RacetruckRon :

At this point i had already bought a terminator x for the 24x reluctor wheel on the 6.0 that I had bought.  This will turn into an issue later but before I bought the rotating assembly I had called holley to see if a 58x reluctor wheel would be an issue with the setup I bought.  They guy I spoke to said it's not a problem and would be an easy fix.  Also the only grinding i ended up having to do on the block was around the center main caps to clear the center counterweights that most cranks don't have.  Apparently you do not have to do this on an aluminum block.

Alright so at this point I have the engine dropped off at the machine shop and the original drivetrain removed from the car.  I needed a mock up block and went searching on Facebook marketplace.  Found a guy that had a few damaged blocks for cheap which was perfect for what I wanted.  I was originally looking for a cast iron block because they are cheaper but for only $75 this guy had an aluminum 5.3 that got a bunch of water in it when his buddy left it outside so I grabbed that motor since it's about 100 lbs lighter then stock.  Got that home and tore it down to see how bad it was and the only thing wrong was the crank journals had some rust starting but all the cylinder bores were fine.  SCORE!  Now I have an aluminum block for mockup and something I can sell when I am done with it to fund more car parts.  I also picked up a set of gen 5 camaro exhaust manifolds and I found a nice morose road race pan for cheap that didn't even look like it was used for a few hundred less then new.

I go ahead and put a mockup engine together with some cathedral port heads I had laying around, the morose oil pan, the transmission and a set of motor mounts i bought from a place over in sweeden called anderson steel and speed to start mocking things up.

First thing I had to do was to notch the crossmember a little bit due to the large kick outs on the oil pan.

Once I trimmed what I needed I also had to do some transmission tunnel modification using some percusive persuasion.

Turns out that the shifter ends up right in the center of the shifter hole using the last set of bilt holes on the motor mounts which is awesome as that is also as far back in the engine bay that the mounts allow.

Next was to trial fitting the exhaust manifolds and the accessory drive.

Well the manifolds won't really work as the passenger side points right at the firewall.

I also ended up ordering a set of accessory brackets from ICT billet for the alternator and powersteering pump for the truck spacing to go along with the ati balancer I had already bought.  I also scored a nice set of tall valve covers from holley for around $50 when they had a huge clearance sale on a bunch of stuff 2 years ago.  These were for an ls7 so didn't have an oil fill on them so had a buddy weld one on since I fail at welding aluminum.