I’ve now owned five 240’s, most of them 2 door, not one newer than 1985. My affinity for this car is unexplainable. They are generally slow, not very well styled, and have all the amenities of a horse drawn carriage. I still love them. My current 1978 242 has 248,000 miles on the original engine and trans and runs without flaw, and it can almost out accelerate a runaway helium balloon. In an ever expanding effort to gain some respect for the 240 from the performance community at large, I decided that I would follow my own advice around what to put on the car and in what order.

So the task begins. Since my stage 0 was already done (Stage 0 = completing basic maintenance) I was ready to delve straight in to my suspension. To begin with I installed a set of ipd sway bars. By and large the best upgrade for the buck! Now shocks/struts and springs were next. I knew that I wanted a nimble suspension but I also knew I wasn’t willing to compromise a reasonable ride so Bilstein Touring Class shocks and struts were an obvious choice. TME sport springs provided the support for the chassis and matched well with the Bilsteins. I wasn’t sure how far I was going to go with the suspension but blown out trailing arm bushings meant I couldn’t stop yet. After installing the polyurethane upgrades to that bushing I was sold and replaced all the suspension bushings with poly. I opted to wait on chassis braces since the handling with these new components was spot on for what I wanted. Suspension made all the difference in handling, even the blisteringly stock 87 wheel horsepower could propel me into a corner faster than the car could handle in stock form.

So now it was on to performance and I knew that if I wanted power from a non turbo engine it would mean opening up the engine and altering the compression ratio. Instead I chose to add a turbo to the non turbo engine. I began collecting parts. Matt Plourde hooked me up with a turbo exhaust manifold, my friend at the Volvo dealer gave me an S60 intercooler, I got a used 16T turbo (from an 850) for $250 from a fellow on the Oregon Volvo Tuners Website www.ovtuners.org, I found some left over silicone connectors at our service shop, went to a local hydraulics supplier for my oil lines both feed and drain $25, and got some remnant stainless tubing for plumbing the whole job for $50. The big issue on a turbo conversion lies mainly in the oil drain, in the later engines there is a boss that exists for models that were turbo but it isn’t drilled in a non turbo car. My earlier 1978 block does not even have this boss so I couldn’t use that. To make this job as easy as possible I broke a cardinal rule: “Don’t drill a hole into your engine block”. Both Bud and Cameron here at ipd had already done their turbo conversions by welding a fitting into the oil pan. I wanted something easier, pulling the oil pan is not exactly a picnic. So I drilled a half inch hole in the lower point on the block between cylinders #2 and #3 (Be sure to clean up any excess shavings). I threaded the hole with a pipe tap and screwed in a 45 degree barbed fitting made to accept a rubber hose. Once completed I just took the factory turbo drain line from the 16T (which was hard line) and cut it and rolled the edge to accept a rubber hose. So now I have a rubber hose that connects the barbed fitting in the block to the cut hard line in the turbo. The 16T turbo did have to be rotated (called clocking the turbo) to fit onto the 4 cylinder turbo manifold but that was pretty simple. I tapped into the oil pressure sensor on the block and used a T to feed the turbo oil. Then I fit the intercooler just before the radiator, and fashioned some brackets for it. Finally, I took my time to route the air lines from the turbo to the intercooler and from the intercooler to the fuel distributor by cutting and welding my stainless tubing pieces and silicone connectors. I used a Hallman manual boost controller to regulate the boost and started at 4 psi. I also had to reroute the factory crankcase ventilation system, I essentially just copied the way it is done in the later 740 turbo engines and this worked quite well. So now I am under pressure.

I haven’t done any fuel tweaking yet to run additional boost but so far I have picked up 30hp just at 5 psi of boost pressure. I am frequently burning out with one tire so a limited slip has been ordered from Randy’s Ring & Pinion www.ringpinion.com but for the time being I am going to weld the differential solid which is known as a “Lincoln locker” since back in the day, it was a “Lincoln” welder was used to weld up and “Lock” the differential. However this is not recommended and should be avoided by all. I’ll be expanding on this build in the next newsletter, stay tuned.