I just finished with another long day on the car. (I posted the previous marathon work session last week.) Today's goal was to replace the radiator and all hoses. The plastic radiator in this car is now almost 11 years old and I decided to go ahead and replace it with a Nissens 3-row unit.

All-in-all I did the following:

-Pulled off the throttle body, cleaned it, and replaced the gasket. I was surprised at how dirty it was. It was down right filthy. It will be interesting to see if the car runs better now. The last time it was supposedly done was about 40K ago. Not sure how fast these get dirty.

-Pulled off the entire intake manifold so I could get to the heater hoses. Replaced the seal when I put it back on. I know some of you guys are able to do the heater hoses without pulling the intake...I guess I'm just not as pliable!

-Replaced the heater hoses. I used the original Volvo ones, since these seemed to be of better quality and I don't want to do this again any time soon.

-Replaced the fuel injector seals, since I had the intake out anyway.

-New spark plugs, dist cap and rotor, and wires (it was time)

-Adjusted kick-down cable and checked throttle linkage.

-Replaced coolant expansion tank and hoses to it.

-Replace radiator and hoses...this was the easiest part today. The new Nissens unit is very substantial. It's at least twice as heavy as the old one and is thicker too. I inspected the old unit when I had it out and it did not seem to have any sort of impending failure. It might have gone for a couple more years. I was surprised at how much dirt was lodged between the radiator and the a/c condenser. It was about 1/3 covered. Based on that it would make sense to pull the radiator every other coolant change to clean out in there.