Volvo 480 Club Europe

Hello Sylvia,

Had the cat disintegrate on my first 480, a white ES non turbo. It went just as I was driving her home to Lancashire from Nuneaton - luckily I had a friend in a local village so diverted there after doing 15 miles on the A50 at 3-4mph! Took hours & was quite hairy at times due to looming HGVs. So I think you probably got off lightly with Lilly in Scotland - she looks AMAZING by the way!

All the best!

Martin

Glad you've got to the bottom of it!

i should of thought, I had the same issue in my ES 2 years ago, the cat broke loose from the inside of the box and flipped round 90degrees so that the air couldn't get through the honey comb!

Fraser

It now occurs to me that perhaps the cat started breaking up last year, and that was why I was getting power loss on sharp turns.

A few years back I bought a rear roller cover from evilbay, the price was a bargain because the seller hadn't taken the brackets for it out out of the car before it went to the scrapyard. My thought at the time was that it would be a useful spare in case the spring went in either of the 2 we had in our then fleet of 2 x 480s. When we bought Eva we found a complete roller cover for a reasonable price with little difficulty. However, by the time we bought Lily they had become much harder to source and much more expensive, so I took a bracket to Wayne at WR Composites. He wasn't able to copy it but he knew a man who could - only in black but that was fine as Lily has black seats. Here is what he made:



Fits perfectly !! Bear him in mind if you need any small plastic parts.

Lily's trials and tribulations continued when we tried to take her to the Hampshire meet last October and her alternator died. She came home on the back of a breakdown wagon and went into our garage on sorn for the winter. Full story is in the writeup of the Hampshire meet.
Off we went to Spain for a couple of months to refit a bathroom in our apartment on the Costa del Sol. On advice from James C., I decided to have her original alternator refurbed so Al removed it when we got back and sent it off to the same place that did James'. It's now back and ready to fit, just in time for Lily to go in for her MoT at the end of the month and (fingers crossed) take to the road again on March 1st.

Good luck amigos!

Lily came home today with a new heavy duty battery, two new bulbs and an MoT. Delighted to have her back on the road again, even de-tuned for the test she's a whole load of fun to drive.

Excellent - well done! You can't beat the satisfaction of an MOT pass

Will we be seeing your Lily in all her glory in Derbyshire? It's be good to see her performing properly rather than watching you in my mirror struggling to keep up at every slight hill!

David

I was hoping Snazzy would make her UK meet debut in May, but if not it will be Lily with nothing strangling her engine and roaring to go.

dragonflyjewels wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:34 am

I was hoping Snazzy would make her UK meet debut in May, but if not it will be Lily with nothing strangling her engine and roaring to go.

Ah well, in that case I'll have to settle for the view of her rear speeding away from my poor old n/a 2.0...

Well probably not, if I have the dash cam I'll be filming from the back of the convoy and my Lily will have to be reined in. Your Lily is not so dusty....

well well well.... We took Al's turbo Eva to our local blasting co to have the Pictor wheels checked and fitted, and the Vesas which came off given a full refurb ready to go on Lily. There was a fancy Audi on the ramp when Eva arrived, and when we went to swap the cars over the guy who does the powder coating told us that the Audi's owner couldn't take his eyes off Eva. Never seen a 480 before, stunning design, etc etc. Needless to say, we hardly gave his flash motor a second glance, just another blob from a wind tunnel if you ask me, even if his wheels alone did cost more than our whole car.
The Vesa wheels came up really well, kept to silver despite all the lovely tempting colours on display.

Looks like new - lovely!

Always pleasing when your 480 gets attention...justifies all that time and effort...

David

I seem to have rather neglected this thread.
Shortly after collecting Lily from the wheel refurb, I applied a lot of throttle at a roundabout to slip into a smallish gap and she leapt forward with an almighty bang. Al following in Eva saw loads of smoke and rubbish fly out of the exhaust. She seemed fine after her unladylike fart, so we came to the conclusion that she'd cleared the last of the debris out of her cat. However, on the Derbyshire run, it was pointed out to me that she seemed to have a ponytail hanging from her exhaust, so now we are wondering if it got blasted out of the back box. I had spotted a split in the seam on the end of the box and bunged it up with Milliput. Al was convinced it would just fall out but it's still there - it's never yet come off of anything I've used it on. Lily's performance has dropped off - the turbo still works but seems to take a long time winding up. Plan now is to try swapping her back box with Junk's, always assuming Al can get them both off.

What was coming out of Lily's exhaust on the Derbyshire run might have made me a passable toupe!!

Trying another back box is a sound idea - all that rubbish shifting about in the exhaust system won't be helping Lily to breath properly at all - or perhaps the better analogy would be to suggest a slight problem with trapped wind... No wonder she feels unable to sprint

Keep us posted - she needs to be running as well as she looks, at which point she really will be a superb example of her breed!

David

What was coming out of Lily's exhaust on the Derbyshire run might have made me a passable toupe!!

I'm not sure long wavy hair would quite suit you


damn, just checked the parts book and the back box on the 2 litre isn't the same as the turbo so it's back to the drawing board. Can't imagine Al's going to take Eva's off.

dragonflyjewels wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 05, 2019 5:39 pm

What was coming out of Lily's exhaust on the Derbyshire run might have made me a passable toupe!!

I'm not sure long wavy hair would quite suit you

that's what I quickly concluded on the day when we pulled a handful out and looked at it...!

D

I gave up on the idea of just replacing the back box, and decided to think big when I'd saved some pennies. Lily is now in Demand Engineering for a full stainless steel exhaust. It will be built to fit, including the back box and the empty cat will disappear. Viccy at Demand is a real petrolhead with huge knowledge of the science - they get a lot of very expensive cars in there which I took as a good recommendation as well. The other car in this morning was a full race Ford Mexico so I have the utmost confidence in her. Yes, she's more expensive than the Powerflow place in Norwich, but I didn't get a good feel about them at all.
On the sound side, I've asked for 'interesting' with minimal drone and no stupid boy-racer sound effects. The last thing I want is to sound like a big supercharged V12 and drive like a Volvo. It's a day and a half's work due to the tricky up and over, so I'm expecting a phone call mid day tomorrow. Hopefully when I pick her up my smile will be as big as the one on the owner of an AMG being collected this morning

Excellent news, Sylvia!

Will we be seeing Lily in all her new glory in Scotland?

David

O yes, and hopefully you will be hearing her as well, although I shall be more pleased to have her performance back. The new noise will be the icing on the cake if it's what I'm hoping for.