Well, looking at the list of vehicles you have in your driveway is it safe to assume you wouldn't miss this one if it was out of commission for a while? ;-)

I toyed with the idea of rebuilding my AW71 myself as it seems like I found a rebuild kit for not much over $100. Instead, I "fell into" a deal (like, free!) on all the parts to convert to the M46 so being the cheapskate I am... As Paul Harvey says, "Now you know the rest of the story."

A friend of mine (who is an ASE wrench and owns his own shop) told me the most important thing when working on/rebuilding an automatic transmission is clean, clean, clean... I suppose if you pulled the tranny, took it down to the car wash and cleaned the exterior real good and had a real clean area to disassemble/assemble it on you might have a good chance of succeeding. If not, you're not much further behind than you when you started!

I have seen the factory Volvo manuals for these on "that auction site" lately so you might want to watch there and snag one if you decide to rebuild it.

Good luck,

Justin B.