can you guess which year?

[Hans]

Of course you can!



It runs, finally!

[Geoff]

Oh, you're putting a rainbow on your hood. How pretty!

[Hans]

If by "rainbow" you mean laying out the wiring to connect to a bunch of explosives to blow the damn car to smithereens, then, yep, that's what we made.

It could be worse, I suppose -- the Volvo guys got crappy wiring for years...

It's Dan's (pictured) son's first car. Still need to install the AAA card with extended towing.

[Geoff]

When I was in college I had the honor of performing the maintenance on four '85 900s in my family. Mine: SPG, 900S, Dad's: SPG, Brother's: 900T
We also had an '87 Volvo 760T with the wiring problem.

I left a lot of wires in place and painted them with plasti-dip after cleaning with brake cleaner. That fix outlasted the bodies.

[DrewP]

I left a lot of wires in place and painted them with plasti-dip after cleaning with brake cleaner.

OMG. I am totally going to try this to get my interior lighting and central locking working in my '85. The 3 connectors in the driver's door jam have no insulation left on any of the wires, and I don't want to deal with removing and re-aligning the door to get to them.

What's the worst that could happen?

[Geoff]

What's the worst that could happen?

Just make sure you separate the wires before you coat them!

You know the central lock relays have a fuse in them that blows an you can fix it by soldering it back together, right?

[DrewP]

Just make sure you separate the wires before you coat them!

LOL, jerk....

I actually did not know that - but sometimes when the planets align just righ, and I slam the door hard enough, and it hasn't rained for at least 2 weeks, the central locking works for a cycle or two. I was guessing the switch at the lock cylinder was going open circuit.

One of these days...

[Nate]

LOL, jerk....

I actually did not know that - but sometimes when the planets align just righ, and I slam the door hard enough, and it hasn't rained for at least 2 weeks, the central locking works for a cycle or two. I was guessing the switch at the lock cylinder was going open circuit.

One of these days...

Mine only works when the temp is below 32.

[Hans]

So this 85 now has 50% 87 harness. The car has been running, but not well after warm-up, wouldn't idle or go unless you above 2k-2.5k. Strangely, turning off the headlights seemed to help, so we concluded that the LH side of the harness is also fubar'd. Still, we swapped out the dist. for good measure, to no avail.

Turns out it was the ignition control module (US-made Bosch, interestingly). I'd had one fail once -- dead in the water after a couple stumbles -- but not like this.

Car is finally running well; I got a thirst quencher for helping out. The other side of the can says, "You bet your barley these hops are real."