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retired autox 244

A

adamdrives

Active member
Joined
Aug 9, 2010
Location
San Jose
In May of '21 a regular at the pizza shop across the street from my old shop noticed my 242 and we talked volvo for a few minutes. He mentioned he had a 240 project he couldn't finish and was interested in getting rid of. We went and looked at the car, and it was rough, interior all pulled apart and sitting since 2007. He said he was replacing the heater core when something short circuited in the steering column area and wouldn't start again. It was definitely a mess inside...





He said all the parts were there, but it was hard to tell. Overall the body looked to be in good shape, just weathered with moss growing on the paint from sitting for so long uncovered...







It did have some nice looking parts on it like a well made catch can setup...



some kind of old school aftermarket ignition





boxed trailing arms and ipd sways with yellow bilstiens





and some other goodies with tales of more in a storage unit...



He said he had autox'd the car before it sat and it ran well and had a shaved head for more compression. He didn't name a price, just said make an offer. It was interesting and I love a good rescue, but I already had two other 240s in various states of restoration and a friends car taking up space, so I pretty much forgot about it.
 
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In April of 22 he came back to the shop and said the car was actually sitting at his ex wife's house, and it needed to go. If I could take it, I could have it, otherwise he was going to call the scrapyard.

Challenge accepted!



Man was this thing crusty...









And that was after a power wash while still on the trailer on the way home!

Finally home:

 
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I like how your California Crusty is just a little bit of local flora growing on the paint

This is how I wish my car looked, nice score.
 
First things first, I checked the tank to see what we were dealing with after sitting so long.





Hard to tell here but it was filled with rust and varnish. Before I took these pics I siphoned out 10 gallons of the most pungent aged fuel I've ever sniffed

Turns out a new tank on rock auto was cheaper than getting this one boiled out, so that's what we did







The main pump was missing so that got replaced with new





Next step was send fuel distributor and warm up regulator out for rebuild, and try to start her!
 
Oooh, a kjet revival - this is bringing back warm & fuzzy memories for me. Do you have a tach/dwell meter, an old school analog one with a needle gauge? That helped me diagnose the lambda system on my '81.

Really awesome score - that car looks great. Keep it up!
 
I got a little demoralized by how crappy it ran and decided to focus on fixing the non-op ignition switch. It ended up just being blue/yellow in the wrong position. While there's not a pinout for the switch (which I wasted too much time searching for) the wiring diagrams do show the respective wires in their correct positions on various pages. Once I put it back together I didn't have to use a jumper under the hood anymore.



edit: I think this is actually the before pic, not with the wires installed correctly.

With that out of the way I went back to troubleshooting the rough running. I replaced all the crusty spade connectors on the Jacobs ignition and that helped a little. The primary coil had been relocated behind the bumper cover, and the connectors were in bad shape. I determined that cylinder 1 wasn't contributing as much as 2-4 by pulling spark plug wires. I decided I'd replace the injectors, since those were the only part of the fuel system that were original. In retrospect, I could have just swapped 1 and 2 since its constant injection, but oh well.



A week or two later with the new injectors, it ran about the same. I did what I should have done first, and checked compression. 2-4 were all around 220, and 1 was at 140. We got a camera in the cylinder, and it looked like the intake valve might not be sealing. There was no valve clearance on cylinder 1, so I fixed that but the results were the same. We ended up pulling the head off and putting isopropyl in each of the combustion chambers. cylinder 1 intake leaked and the rest were all dry. It also had (I think) ARP bolts installed. They had a 10mm internal hex head with large washers.



The PO said he had milled the head for compression, so I assumed he went through the rest, but the valve stems had a lot of oil deposits and there was also a lot of oil getting into the cylinder. I tried to disassemble the head myself to look at the valve seats and stem seals, but couldn't find a rental tool that would fit nor one at work, so I dropped it off at the local machine shop for a valve job.

 
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While I was waiting for the head, I started the put the interior back together. I was waiting until I knew the ignition switch was sorted, but I must have been thinking of 740, because this one is easy to access with just the cluster out.





Finally starting to look like a car! I love how easy these early 240s dashes are to work with.

While I was in there I noted some substantial rot on the ecu wiring...



bugger. covered them in e tape for now, will deal with that later. Pretty much the whole strand between sheathing under dash to computer was flaking off.

A few days later the head came back and I remembered one of the thermostat studs had pulled out when I disassembled it. It must have taken some threads with it, so I had to wait a few more days for an m6x1.0 thread insert.
 
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With the head work taken care of, I finally got the car back together and fired it up. And...it ran about the same. Needed way too much cranking, barely idled. Running rough, but not weak on any particular cylinder. :grrr:

I couldn't remember if I had ever checked ignition timing, and it did occasionally backfire through the intake, so I worked on verifying that. the distributor was frozen in the head, but I was eventually able to knock it loose. Unfortunately, timing was dead on at 10 degrees. I have a little bit of time before it gets dark after work to work on the car, and all these little obstacles and having to bring all my tools in and out every day working on the street really started to frustrate me. My 78 sat for longer, and started on the first try with a new fuel tank and alternator. This one I did right and replaced all the problem areas I had learned about, and it was still barely running. At this point the car had been sitting on my street for almost 6 months without being moveable.

I talked to the foreman at my shop about the car (something else I should have done sooner) and he mentioned checking dwell and adjusting the meter plate if the rest of the fuel system was good. I had thought about adjusting the meter plate, but thought it was more for fine tuning. I started preparing to check dwell and realized something...dwell was the duty cycle for frequency valve control for the lambda circuit...the valve...that thing that buzzes loudly...was not buzzing at all! I got out the wiring diagram confident that was going to be the solution. I remembered when I was getting my wagon running, one of the grounds to the manifold was dead, giving me no enrichment in boost. On this car I found the second ground to the manifold missing its male male connector, and the second I grounded it, I head the frequency valve start to buzz and the idle cleared up! D'oh!

The car was idling smoother, but still a little lumpy, and didn't start right up like my 242. After checking fuel pressures, and verifying that was ok, I went back in to check dwell. It was way lean, showing 90*. after I found the right size Allen I was able to get it closer to 40, and the car finally, FINALLY, started up right away and idled more or less smooth.

https://youtu.be/U95EzZwDZeI
 
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good stuff!!! Sounds like its running really nicely.

With Kjet, the more you run it, the better it will get once you get things to a runnable place.

Dont forget to drop some injector cleaner in the tank.

It should help
 
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