Greetings from the top of a mountain in Ireland

[Aidan]

Hi folks, a little about me, born in England, did a mechanics apprenticeship with a Ford main dealer, worked in the motor trade full time up to 1990, got fed up of it, been building houses since then, moved to Ireland 9 years ago (seemed like a good idea at the time, not so sure now, lol). I put a band together 7 years ago and thats what got me into Volvo's, need a big wagon to carry all the gear around and found a nice '89 740 SE Estate 2.0 petrol auto, 108k miles, FSH etc. Its now got 534k miles on it, the engine has never been out or had any major work done, the only major work I've had to do is change the rear springs once and replace the shox, other than that its all origional and is now taking a well earned retirement, as the big ends are just starting to knock a bit under load and its not really cost effective to do a rebuild on it so I've now got a really nice '95 940 SE Estate auto with the LT6 2.4 TDic engine, it's my first diesel so as a die hard petrol head it will be interesting to see how it works out. Generally I'm very pleased with it, drives beautifully, a vast improvement over the 740 especially comfortwise and handling. There's a couple of very minor items need doing, heater fan resistor needs changing (full speed only) the temp guage has an odd fault, it goes straight to normal temp as soon as you turn on the ignition, but give the dashboard a whack and it drops down to cold and behaves normally then, and its got no "fast idle" when starting from cold, it idle's at barely 600rpm and gradually gets up to 1,000 rpm when hot but I'm not overly concerned about it. The only thing I am concerned about is the injector noise, compared to other diesel's this is really noisy, it sounds as if something is broken in the engine and is flying around, but it goes like a bullet, smooth as silk, no smoke at all, so maybe its just the way these engines are, a few people have said the LT6 is a very noisy engine so hopefully thats all it is, but it does sound excessive to me. Anyway, thats a bit about me and no doubt I'll be pestering you all with lots of silly questions over the coming months, best wishes to all,
Aidan.