#245dl

Jordan here, and I’m Jim’s co-conspirator on all things vintage Volvo. We’re also roommates, which means that we poke at each other’s cars a lot.

Anyone who's owned a vintage car knows how much of a pain in the ass it is to find parts. My particular flavor of trouble is a 1978 Volvo 245DL (pictured above), which falls in the earlier years of the 240 series production. Thankfully, the Volvo 240 series was in production for 18 years, and despite minor differences, many of the parts are interchangeable between years. What this means for me, is that often the most economical way to get parts is by living off of the laziness/throwaway culture that sends older cars straight to the junkyard... I spend a lot of time looking up cars in junkyards. For anyone with a similar problem, I highly recommend looking at Row52.com. You can search by partial VIN number, and if you know what the VIN codes for, that means you can check if a local junkyard has a car with *exactly* the parts you're looking for.

So, off to the junkyard. Since I'll eventually be doing an engine upgrade to a B230FT (more to come on that ordeal in future posts), which has more horsepower than my current driveline and transmission can handle, I needed to find suitable replacements. I also needed an ECU, since the new engine has electronic fuel injection (LH 2.4 Jetronic), while my current car has some weird ancient pressure fuel injection system (K Jetronic).

Jim, my partner in crime on all things vehicular, went with me to one of the local pick-n-pull yards, and we set off to work on a 1995 940SE. I figured we'd start with the easy stuff first, so I let Jim tackle the ECU removal while I went to work on removing the driveshaft. Seeing as how the ECU lives inside the car, we first had to get in. It was locked, and the nice people at the Pick-N-Pull clearly didn't have keys, but they advised us that "Officially, we do not endorse the breaking of windows... but I didn't see anything." So we used Jim's fancy new Estwing 3 lb hammer to... *ahem*... "remove" a window.

Removing the driveshaft was a pretty straightforward job of removing each of the 4 bolts on the flanges at the ends, and unbolting the bracket that holds the carrier bearing, but as I moved on to remove the transmission, there was a problem. Despite all of my attempts with PB blaster, vicegrips, and a hammer, the bolts holding the transmission bell housing to the engine block simply would not budge. After about 20 minutes of uncomfortable and awkward hammer swinging and cursing, I felt a wave of laziness come over me, and decided that it wasn't worth it. So, all efforts were redirected to helping Jim remove the ECU.

While passing on the transmission was acceptable (there are numerous years and models that have the AW-71 I'm looking for), passing on the ECU was not an option here. The particular ECU in this car was suitable for all B230FT setups, and included the EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) control option, which had until then proven a bit tricky for me to find. I was *not* leaving without it. After a lot of pushing, pulling, and strategic guessing at which wires to cut, we finally managed to pull the damn thing out, bringing our total bounty to one driveshaft and one ECU. I was pretty happy at this point, but there was one more thing I wanted to check for before we left the yard.

The seats in my 245 are pretty much destroyed. When we bought it, they came with tattered sheepskin covers over both the driver and passenger seats, and based on what little original vinyl and foam was showing through, I knew that they were basically a lost cause. You can buy new foam and seat covers for these seats, but at the price they sell for, you're better off just finding a donor 240 with decent seats. Since the seat rail design never changed during the history of the 240 line, you can easily swap out seats from any year 240 to any other.

So, I went 240 hunting, and as luck would have it, I managed to find a mid-eighties 240 with almost mint-condition seats. Removing them was a quick job of just unbolting the 4 seat rail bolts and yanking them out. I also noticed that the car had the original Volvo door speakers and speaker grills, so I nipped those as well, since mine were some aftermarket garbage that were rattling around on lose screws with busted covers.

All in all, we left with a turbo driveshaft, ECU, seats, and speakers. Not bad for a few hours work! After getting everything home, I found some good news, and some bad news. The good news was that the seats had heating pads in them, and while that's not particularly useful in California, it's a nice bonus. The bad news was that it seems that someone had left a candle on the passenger side *heated* seat. There was a big white wax spot. Ugh.

So, in order to turn my misfortune into your personal gain, in my next post I'll be showing you how to remove wax from your seats! 

- Jordan