Propav8r's '87 XR4TI Project

[propav8r]

In a moment of weakness and boredom, I purchased a 1987 XR4TI yesterday. I've been in the turbo Volvo world for a long time now (HI JVAB!) and have always liked messing with oddball cars. For a grand and a tank of gas, I couldn't resist this thing.

I know nothing about these cars, other than they look rad. So here goes nothing! I did sell a number of 16V Volvo heads to Lima guys who wanted to build Folvo motors back in the day, but I doubt I'll be doing that. If I do anything swap wise, it'll get a 2.3 Ecoboost from a newer Mustang backed up by an MT82. But I digress.

Disconnected the driveshaft and loaded it onto my raggedy ol dolly, and then proceeded to trundle the 120 miles home at about 50-55mph because anything higher than that would result in some sketchy swaying of the dolly.





The Volvo is 5.3/T56/8.8 swapped, and has been dead nuts reliable for the year and a half it's been on the road. Towed this combo with no complaints.

Got it home and unloaded, and promptly hooked up the jump box to see if it would fire on brake clean. It did.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/y6_UAlrRTdk



Then I got busy with the buffer, and the paint cleaned up surprisingly well.







https://www.youtube.com/embed/ry8DquNDlJk

I've already got a Fox Mustang tank ordered up since this car doesn't have a fuel tank at all currently. The one that came out was swiss cheese and beyond saving.

[merkurdriver]

Congrats and keep up the good work!

[jkxr4ti]

That’s one heck of a before and after shot.
Welcome aboard!

[propav8r]

Alrighty, not quite as productive of a weekend as I hoped, but it's got a fuel tank in it now.



I made some extensions using 5/16" nylon fuel line and new quick connectors. I tried valiantly, but I wasn't able to get the metal union pipes into the line, so I used these things from Dorman that look like mini sharkbite connectors:



Those may prove to leak yet, we'll see.

This was really just kind of a quick and dirty solution to getting a tank in the car. I don't love the idea of any sort of splicing on the fuel lines long term, and I've actually got a setup that makes it fairly easy to make the nylon stuff. I'll probably just make complete new lines from where the steel lines terminate near the factory high pressure pump to the sender.

I need to talk to Adam Brock of 9hio about a cage. He's very good at what he does, and a number of people have wrecked in cages he's built and walked away unscathed.

Really the plan for this car is to do probably 2 road course weekends and one hillclimb a year. There's no such thing as cheap racing, but Lucky Dog, Champ, and Lemons make it about as accessible as possible. I have a couple of close friends with lots of road course experience, so I'll likely be leaning on them pretty hard to help steer this build.

[MarkM]

Thanks for the update!

[propav8r]

Alright, so far so good.

I finished up the tank install last weekend and got that all bolted in, along with my filler neck (which is now mostly rubber hose, but hey, it's the right rubber hose and it fits.)

Initially with the key, I couldn't hear the pump prime, but just a little bit of searching revealed some corroded fuses. A quick cleanup and the pump started buzzing away. Dumped in some fuel and it sort of hit one one or two but wouldn't run great. I suspected clogged injectors, but when I went to pull the rail, I realized that the distributor cap was sort of springy. Turns out that one screw was too long, so I added a washer under the screw to pull it down flush and it ran much better. That allowed it to run well enough to move under it's own power!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYHliD5 ... l=Propav8r

Today I went back to the seller's house to pick up the rest of the parts...a spare engine, transmission, diff, two spare doors, a hatch, a hood, a turbo/manifold (in addition to the one bolted to the spare engine), plus some extra parts in boxes.

Digging through all that revealed a set of new Motorcraft plugs and wires, so that went on along with a new distributor from the parts store. The ignition tuneup didn't do much to smooth the motor out further, it definitely still has an off-idle miss, but that may be the injectors. I also need to replace all the vacuum lines, some of them are pretty crusty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwwowXJ ... l=Propav8r

I started working on the brakes a bit. I fear the master cylinder is bad, it doesn't seem to move much fluid with the bleeders open but we'll have to see how that goes.

Update: my wife helped me bleed the brakes tonight and they bled normally and came back to life. First drive tomorrow!

Forum related: can I not embed video here? I've tried a few tricks with no success so far.

[MarkM]

Vanilla phpBB doesn't allow embedding videos, but there are some plugins/extensions available that will enable it. I'll take it as a suggestion and the admins will discuss the possibility of adding that feature.

[propav8r]

Sweet, thanks.

[andyofcolumbusmerkur]

Wow 3 turbos and a ton of extra parts. Seems like you got a great deal. I would try to locate an adapter to run the thunderbird mc. Or find a rebuild kit for the late (87.5+) style mc. Good luck getting it road worthy.

[propav8r]

Wow 3 turbos and a ton of extra parts. Seems like you got a great deal. I would try to locate an adapter to run the thunderbird mc. Or find a rebuild kit for the late (87.5+) style mc. Good luck getting it road worthy.

Yeah, I agree. Pics of the parts haul:





Didn't know about those options for masters, thanks a bunch. I think the one that's on the car now is good enough for some road testing, but it'll definitely be getting replaced with either a new replacement, or adapted to something else before the car hits the track.

[propav8r]

Took it out for a spin tonight.

It actually runs pretty good, the off idle miss seems to have cleared itself up. It stops, it makes turbo noises, it doesn't overheat, and it leaks oil

The wastegate line is just disintegrated, thus the overboost buzzer.

Next up: stage zero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D89gmWt ... l=Propav8r