The slow cleanup of a neglected 240 wagon - ongoing

yes sorry an '88 GL wagon

cheers mate, i am chasing blue door cards and the rear boot inner covers at the moment.

cheers

Adrian

so I "worked from home" today and found a few hours to rip all of the gear out of the back of the car, cleaned about an inch of dust and dead bugs out of the rear of the car. Looks like it was converted to a 7 seater, but no spare seats, not that I am after them. The third row seatbelts are free to anyone who wants them, otherwise the green sulo bin gets them.

I found the rear inner covers in the pile of crap that was in the back of the car, the drivers side rear cover looks like it has seen better days and will need some work. The rear carpets feel like greasy seals had a rave party on them, fornicated and then gave birth on it then repeated it over again. so it looks like it will all need to be ripped out and replaced with marine carpet, lucky I have some left over blue marine carpet from my old Hiace van project.

Roof racks are off to clay bar the manky roof and years of collecting tree sap and bat shit.

Thanks Ian, yes indeed, I used plywood instead, slightly thicker the original but coming along nicely still needs a lot of trimming to fine tune the fit, but the original cover should fit over it nicely, still needs a good clean up.

Did some work on whilst I was waiting for someone to come pick up some early beetle seats I had up for sale

work has been slow on the wagon, a few other little jobs on, 4 cars to maintain, in that the money pit needed some love, I fitted new struts and springs to the XC70 (2007) recently, and the nose just seemed to sit too high for my liking, the old hot rodder in me said it needs more rake, I fitted these IPD spring adjusters and I seemed to gain enough rise in the rear to make the front lift not so obvious. Both sets of springs needed replacing as they were saggy, the fronts seem to be higher than normal ride height.

So far it looks a lot more betterer...

So I noticed a petro-chemical smell from the garage the other night, and over the few days it got stronger, had to move the wagon and the concrete floor was all stained and has this rusty stinky mess on it. A quick look under and the tank had a slow leak.

It looks like water got in the tank and mixed with the fuel and slowly rotted out the base of the tank. Tank is rooted. and the sender and attaching gear looks pretty manky too, Good excuse to pull the tank and stuff out and remove the towbar whilst it is up on jackstands, might get the pressure cleaner under there as well and clean all the red dust and cobwebs from under the rear section while I have access.

holy crap i thought mine was bad, that one looks toast. I hit mine with a pressure cleaner after i cleaned all of the red dirt and spider webs from under the back of the wagon. It looks recoverable, the float will need a continuity check to see if the resistance changes with the float level moving. I would hate to think what a new assembly would cost.

thanks dude, most of the stuff like pumps, suspension components, engine consumables and gearbox consumables are in the process of being replaced or assessed. The fuel tank started leaking in my garage which hurried up its removal, made a bloody mess of the floor too, rusty fuel stains dammit.

Need to suss out the float assembly and replace the mandatory bits and see if the float works.

FInally got the stick shifter knob adapter machined up and loosely assembled. I bought an eBay one and it fitted like a cock in a sock, even with the screws adjusted in it would have the ability to work loose.

I sat down and drew up a plan for a revised adapter so I could fit a Hurst styled shifter knob, as the old volvo one had pretty much fallen apart and I just didn't like the look of it. I took my drawing and gear to the local machine shop and he made an alloy adapter with a stainless centre for me. It just needs some 5mm grub screws so it doesn't look like a Frankenstein head

Reverse lockout still works and the fit is very tight on the stick shifter shaft. Pretty happy with that little mod. :)

Cheers

AdrianW

Cleaning up my $50 tailgate is a bit of a laborious task, removing the windscreen sealant is a time consuming detail, the stuff sticks to you like crazy and takes a bit of scrubbing with scaping with a plastic scraper, and scrubbing with metho and rags.

Once this is cleaned up I need to remove a window out of a silver tailgate and fit it to this, no tailgate glass at any glass place so as seems to be the case, recycle old tailgates for their glass, although I had to update from an '88 to a '92 tailgate in the process.

Anyone know what the paint code is for the late 80s to early 90s white 240's, I have no code on the engine bay and the code on the VIN tag doesn't make sense with the paint codes available.

Cheers

AdrianW