You can pull the cam with the engine in place, but you need to remove a lot of the front end hardware to extract the giant bump stick.
IIRC, the lifters can be extracted without pulling the head, it's a matter of removing the rocker cover, pushrods, and rocker shaft assembly first, then using a tool as per the pic.
Extracting and examining them needs to be done anyway before pulling the cam, but the condition of the lifters might give you an indication as to the state of the cam lobes.
The timing gears on the engine will hopefully be the steel set pair and not the part steel/part fibre set. The factory steel sets are a matched pair and never wear out. OTOH, fibre timing gears are crap and will break - hell, they even break on B20s which have two less pots.
Pulling the engine.... B30s are heavy muthas; they weigh about 550 lb, so this needs to be taken into account.
There's a couple of 164 Green Books (repair manuals) in the Oz Volvo Technical Archive.
