Hey folks,
It's actually @jaykenneally here but since I'm now with someone who loves Swedish cars as much as I do, and we share an Instagram and YouTube account for all of our Swede Projects (hence the name), I figured it was better to just keep that theme going.
Anyway, let's cut to the chase. Those of you who were at the OzVolvo Nationals probably saw our V8-Converted V70 wagon on show. We have made a few YouTube videos about the swap but otherwise we haven't really talked about it much within the Volvo community and it's definitely time to change that!
The backstory:
I think everyone who discovers that Volvo shoved a 4.4L Yamaha V8 engine into the S80 wonders the same thing as we did, why didn't they put it into the S80-with-box-on-the-back-V70? It seems so simple, they're the same car from the B-Pillar forward!
I think you can see where this is going...
It started with finding a donor car in February 2020. Gumtree strikes again! This 2008 Glacier Blue V70 began its first year of life as a Volvo Australia press car/company car (we're 99% sure it was the one below)
It was first privately sold to a couple a year later, and they'd owned it since then. Raised their kids in it. I think there was also a dog. Or maybe the leaking windscreen just made it smell like a wet dog. Anyway, the interior was stuffed. The engine ran but not well. And the transmission? Dead. Well, mostly dead. I was able to drive it around the block with the accelerator to the floor but not really achieving any sort of speed. I still saw a lot of potential in the car though, all the electrics worked and the exterior was pretty tidy. At the end of the day it was going to get a V8 chucked in it so we only really cared about the 'body'. We just needed the wagon part, really.
$1800 later and it was ours. We came back a few hours later to pick it up, and try and drive it home. Apologies to anyone travelling on the Bolts that night for closing two lanes. We, um, we didn't make it...
Thanks to the City-Link tow truck, my XC60 and a quick late-night trailer hire, we made it home!!
We didn't yet have the "V8" part of the swap, but we did spend the next few weeks working on bits and pieces of the car. One of the first jobs was to replace the windscreen to stop the leaks. With that done we were able to replace most of the interior. My partner Tyler had an S80 T6 which was unfortunately crushed by a tree and written off. We bought it back from the insurer and used the interior from that in our V70. We also tried to fix, or at least improve, the transmission so we could more easily drive the car around our yard (which did not work).
Not much else happened with the car until July 2020, when @iceton1975 made us aware that he had an S80 V8 in at Berry's for wrecking, it was in a mild front-end accident and written off, but still ran and drove. It sounded exactly like what we needed, so we went and looked. We were satisfied with how it was running, everything we needed was there (all the computers, keys and so on), and the price ($3500) was very reasonable, so with that transaction done, we had the remaining piece for our puzzle.
We picked it up from BMG just hours before Melbourne went into a 7-week COVID lockdown, so now we even had some time up our sleeves (we both had our hours at work reduced heavily). The stars had aligned!
Let the swap begin...
We parked them both up in our (recently concreted) garage. The first thing we did was a quick assessment of the two cars. The cars were pretty much identical in specification apart from the difference in engine, as in, they both had park assist, both had heated seats, both had Dynaudio, both had standard cruise (not radar), both didn't have a sunroof and so on and so forth.
The only difference was the S80 was a 2007, and had an actual car phone in the centre console, whereas the V70 was a 2008 and had no phone ability, car phone, bluetooth or otherwise. However this wasn't a big deal and the cars being otherwise identical in specification was good news as we knew we wouldn't have really any issues trying to get equipment to work that wasn't there originally or vice-versa.
In terms of mechanical differences, we could see the engines mounted differently. The V8 engine is more like how a P80 or P2 engine "sits" on the subframe, where as the T6 has mounts on the chassis rail and it "hangs" from there. But we could tell that was just a subframe swap and nothing else.
The quickest and easiest way to remove the engine from either of these cars is to raise the car up on a hoist and drop the engine out from the bottom. But given our garage isn't high enough to have a hoist in it, and we couldn't access one, we had no choice but to pull both front ends off our cars and remove the engines out that way
This is more or less what you're left with after engine, subframe and other bits and pieces all removed (and you clean the 12 years of caked on oil).
I don't really know how to explain the next step in words because, honestly, it was surprisingly simple. We removed the T6. Removed the V8. Moved the V8 over to the V70. Bolted it in, and called it a day. It's just easier to explain in film...
There were probably a few important steps. Obviously we replaced the ECU and the engine wiring loom. The latter actually has a junction point at the fuse box where the engine loom connects to the car loom. So we disconnected the T6 engine from that point and plugged the V8 into that end and just hoped (well, assumed) that the body loom would be the same.
The heater hose was different, the V8 one had an electric module with a wire and connector of sorts going to it, which the T6 didn't. It kind of reminds me of the heater tap that like 240s and 740s have, only electric. I'd find this to be an odd addition given no other P3 engine uses this that I know of. We were concerned that the connector on the car end wouldn't exist, but it went straight to the ECU so, that solved that problem.
The brake booster was also different, for some reason the V8 had a sensor in the booster assembly which the T6 didn't have, and unfortunately it meant the whole assembly had to be swapped out. Luckily it was completely compatible and no issues at all after the swap.
The last electrical difference that we found was the fuse box had some different fuses. Its interesting that they changed the amperage of which the fuse blows, but all the wires were the same colour and appeared to be the same weight. I explained more about these electrical differences in this video.
Anyway, I think it's time for the money shot.
Ahhh, bliss. It fits very nicely. Too nicely. I honestly think Volvo designed the V70 to have the motor as well and then pulled the pin at the last minute. I couldn't find a single reason why they didn't do it. It was stupidly bolt-in.
As I worked in the engine bay doing the more mechanical side of things, Tyler was on the inside of the car pulling the interior apart and swapping over every single electronic module in the car (body control, radio, climate control, airbag, you name it, he swapped it). The only real oddity we found was the airbag sensors were a different brand in the S80 than the V70, we think that was a model year change. We also swapped the ABS control module, alarm module, the ECU and a few other smaller modules under the windscreen cowl. All these modules needed to be swapped to ensure all the points of the security system would speak the same language and let the car start.
With the engine now in, it actually started on the first go which was a little surprising and very reassuring that it was safe to put the 'V80' back together again. We actually did have an issue reconnecting the lower front sway bar, because as it turns out despite looking very similar, the sway bars are actually different between a T6 and a V8. They're basically a mirror image of each other.
We also had a VERY small difference (literally 1cm) in the length of the transmission gear selector cable. Given they both use the TF80-SC 6-speed auto, we assumed they'd mount in the same spot and connect using the same cable, but no, the V8's one for whatever reason was about 1cm longer than the T6's one. Of course we only discovered this after the engine was back in and the interior was back together so that was a huge PITA to fix. But with that done, we bolted all the suspension back in, threw the front crash panel back on, the front bumper and headlights back on, closed the bonnet and took it on its first run.
Now this, surprisingly, wasn't the end. When we previously drove the car as a T6 we did here some noise coming from the rear, either stuffed wheel bearing or diff, but we could never drive it long enough or fast enough to really diagnose it. Obviously after the swap, the noise was still there but we could at least figure out it was the rear differential. We also left the T6 exhaust (from the centre muffler back) in place when we did the swap. Let me tell you, the T6 exhaust certainly mutes the V8 grumble. It sounded like a vacuum cleaner.
We figured we could kill two birds with one stone by dropping the rear subframe. We could swap the rear exhaust, the rear subframe assembly with the replacement diff from the V8, and put it all back in over a few days, and we did exactly that:
We also had a persistent oil burning smell. Silly us forgot to check for leaks from the V8 engine before we put it into the wagon.... Valve cover replacement time!
With that done we were now prepared to get the car through a roadworthy. We had previously retrofitted a TFT gauge cluster from a 2014+ P3 car and up until this point we just left it in. However our steering column lock wasn't working and we had an error message on the screen for that. So we decided to fit the original watch-face gauge cluster from the S80 donor car. Bad idea, or maybe in hindsight it was good. This swap killed the car, and even swapping the clusters back didn't get it running again.
Here's what happened. There was one wire missing that communicated between the CEM and the DIM (Cluster). It was part of the security system and somehow tied in with the steering column lock. Im not sure why our other gauge cluster was working, and we just got the message on the screen, but I'm guessing when we plugged the original cluster in, it was able to communicate correctly and realise that part of the security system was missing and therefore 'bricked' the car until it could find that missing signal. And I guess the CEM must have memorised that part as when we put the TFT cluster in it didn't 'bypass' it like it used to.
To cut all of our tedious hours trawling through wiring diagrams to find the correct pins to add this missing wire into short, we added the wire and just like nothing was wrong, the car fired right up into life.
So we booked the car into Berry's to get it through its roadworthy and begin the process of being able to drive it legally.
And it passed! We then booked it into VicRoads, who deemed it as a "high risk vehicle inspection" because of the engine change. Now on that note, we perhaps read between the lines a bit, but VicRoads were prepared to accept "any engine that was available in that particular model range" without an engineering certificate, which they agreed that an S80 and V70 are the same model range (as they are identical cars in two different body styles, if they were called S80 sedan and S80 wagon no one would know any different). After some paperwork and checks, we were done and were finally able to fit our very appropriate number plates that we ordered months earlier;
Now this was back in October 2020, so a fair bit has happened with the car since then (and yes we still have it and yes we still drive it regularly), but I think that'll just about do it for this introductory post, and I shall comment below with some more updates in due course!
Thanks for the long read and we hope you enjoyed this introduction into one of our favourite project cars.
