The 960 powerplant is not the best choice.

There are no manual transmissions except in europe for
the 2.5 liter version of the I6, and those are rare and
expensive (the M90).

The automatic tends to overheat the fluid in hard
driving, which then tends to destroy the transmission,
which is no good.

On the early ones, the timing belt needs to be
changed often, every 30,000miles for the oldest
versions (they improved to 45k then 60k later).
A loss of timing belt will destroy the motor.

Most importantly, though, the valves tend to coke
up. When they coke up, they can get hung up on the
crap and then bonk into the piston. This tends to
happen when driving hard, but the only way to prevent
the coking up is to drive it hard.

The engines themselves are un-rebuildable. The
heads are glued together from lots of pieces, they
have many very very very expensive parts, and if
the motor is running poorly it tends to destroy
itself. I doubt anyone will ever just "re-ring"
these, because when they get to the point where
the rings get tired the motor will coke up and eat
its head.

There are better choices of engines for a 164
out there. My personal favorite is the B30. The
B30 fits quite well into the engine bay and can be
modified to be quite a hot little mill. They are
limited in transmission choice between the rare
manual, the rare manual with overdrive, and the
horrid automatic. The manual, once located, is a
joy to drive, though.

A ford falcon inline 6 (also used in the 60s/70s
mustang and probably others) will fit perfectly
and has a lot of choices for transmissions and can
be a reasonable performer.

For the same price as a volvo 960 I6, you can
probably go with a BMW I6 or an american smallblock
V8 and have a much better motor. And if you go
with a chevy V8 you can get volvo penta valve
covers so it will look like a real volvo V8...


There was a guy in sweden who made a 165 using
a volvo 960 I6. His project looked amazing. I'm
not sure I would have made the same choices he
did, though. Like throwing out the B30 because it
wore out the timing gear (that would be like
throwing out any moter because the timing belt
needs to be replaced, in my opinion). It looks
like he did an amzing job, but not a job that i'd
have done.
chris