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It's.. a long story. Call it a comedy or errors maybe.
I bought the car all the volvo guys wanted, a black, turbo, manual trans, wagon with 130K or so on it and good service history with a clean carfax and a shiny new engine harness. It had a rear main seal leak, original suspension that was tired but not shot, lazy overdrive (m46) and an exhaust manifold gasket leak big time. I drove it home twenty miles, leaked three quarts of oil out, covered my buddy driving behind me with the stuff. I pulled the exh mani and replaced the gaskets, pulled the trans and observed enough crank thrust wear that the rear flange of the crank had ate into the aluminum housing that holds the rear main seal. It was astounding how much play it had. I was thoroughly discouraged and couldn't believe the legendarily reliable B230 would be succeptable to this, as it turns out it's a crappy design and the thrust load from the clutch makes it worse, the auto's usually get away with it long enough for something else to crap out. So I got a motor from a 90 model, larger rods or some such, it's been awhile. Put new rod bearings in while it was out, recon'd the head and replaced every single thing under hood you could name that wears out, all of it. Put it back together, after re-sealing the trans and a new clutch of course, and new drive shaft wear parts, etc, etc, and met the next B230 deficiency. Did I mention I had to BORROW a car during all this time since the wagon was supposed to be a daily driver with a weekend's worth of work, and I had two other "project" cars? It was more than a little embarrassing. Anyway: Piston slap.
Ungodly, piston slap. Piston slap that had people for as long as I owned the car complimenting me on my diesel Volvo. That kind of piston slap. I swallowed that in time, sort of, and set about to renew the brakes and suspension, using Sachs gas dampers and poly bushes where were recommended and overload springs in the rear to fix the sag. I never did get it to quit thunking the damn driveshaft on take-off. New everything, nothing bent, shimmed the center support up and down, nada. I think altering the pinion angle with adjustable torque rods in the rear might have helped but they weren't cheap at the time and I was fed up. Five grand easy and I had a car you couldn't put a good load in the rear or 4 people without having to explain why it felt like there was a mad monkey beating on the underside of the car leaving a stoplight. Otherwise, it stopped and handled well enough but it just never had very good manners. I have jokingly referred it to a thinly veiled 1/2 ton Swedish pickup truck more often than not. I traded it off for a very original 117K mile W114 chassis 73 Mercedes 280(and lost my rear monetarily) that does have proper road manners and get's half the MPG, and haven't looked at the wagon again since, though till recently it was owned by a close friend and served him impeccably(since most of the damn car was new). I think I expected too much of it in retrospect, it was never going to be a BMW or Mercedes wagon, it was a Volvo, which cost half what this 280 did new and for good reason. Lesson learned. The 240 I just picked up, my 3rd one technically, one a parts car and one I gave to a significant other, is a little tank. They are technically very similar cars but the sum of the parts does not equal two identical wholes in the slightest. The interior is less pretentious in the 240, which is good because it's cheap plastic that hasn't weathered overly well just like the early 740, the paint is faded which is good since I hate waxing cars and the black 745 was quite handsome when cleaned up, and it has a hint of piston slap at idle, which is alright because it has 240K miles on it, has earned it, and is not audible a block away. It's hard to describe, but there is just something about a 240.
The only real complaint I have about it's design is the rocker rust and that whole setup, I see why they did it but it's kind of a bad idea with debris and all. I can live with that though.
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