This is (finally) on the road after being sat on my drive for weeks while I waited for my insurance policy to expire so I could just start afresh. Praise, as ever, to
Brentacre who in my opinion, are the best broker going.
I've had a fair bit of help in various forms with this, so I'll credit people where I can..
Firstly,
kevfromwales hand delivered an instrument cluster for me in a surprise visit with
hairnet at the beginning of July quite early one Saturday morning. It was fitted with no real hassle other than arguing with the clips that hold the very heavy lump of aluminium trim that surrounds it. I know Volvo are, or were, renowned for being comfortingly over engineered, but there really is no need to make a bit of trim with no practical purpose out of a big lump of metal..
Butterz was breaking a 940 recently, so I was given the chance to grab all the lights and useful spares I needed for a very reasonable sum. The holed headlamp, and both front DRL/indicator units have been replaced and the rears will get tidied up and polished before putting them back on. The holed headlamp and manky DRLs went to
speedy88 because he likes drifting. Into walls. He thought spare freebies may come in handy.
I went hunting for a towbar on eBay and eventually gave up and called a proper reputable retailer,
PF Jones, who advised me on what I needed, took my order, and charged me less than I found on eBay. I was pretty slow fitting it, but it's all on now.
On the same day, I was struggling to find replacement boot struts for reasonable money, assuming that they were really cheap. Apparently not.
smellyferret picked up on my whinge on Facebook and spotted some end of line/change of stock number specials on the
ECP website for £15/pair delivered.
kevfromwales has also been kind enough to sort me out with these
They're 5x100 and 5x108 to 5x4.5" and will effectively
add 32mm to the offset of reduce the offset by 32mm on whatever I fit, so there should be a plethora of cheap interesting wheels available to me now!
I was fortunate enough to get a little bit of time to go and play at Area 52 on Friday night and some of Saturday.
Mystery Machine was kind enough to let me have a play with his nice hydraulic spring compressor so I could remove a bit of excess suspension. Actually, despite knowing my way around a spanner fairly well, I've always found suspension stuff a bit confusing so I'm incredibly grateful for the help given to me by
Mystery Machine and
jonovlov. I ended up taking two coils from the front and leaving the back as it looked alright with just the front done, and I will be using he car as a normal car that carries rubble and tows a trailer tent and stuff. I'm hoping Jon will furnish me with some extra pics of the work done at a52
Having already done a few miles, I topped up the tank and started tracking my fuel economy on
Fuelly and am really pleased at 32.5ish MPG. It's something to work from, for sure.
Finally, no Volvo purchase is complete without an impromptu (I think my partner had an ulterior motive..) visit to Ikea to eat some meatball and photograph amusingly defaced signage
