Confessions from a Dad and the Back Yard Mechanic
Lessons from a car? You can’t make this ……. Up! Where the story begins. In March of 2012, I purchased a 2008 Volvo S80. My 2005 Volvo S80 turbo started having issues with the turbo at two hundred and fifty thousand miles. As a regional manager in the medical device industry, I drove that car all over the eastern U.S. It served me well. When it came time to trade, I bought another S80, but this time it was a straight (inline) 3.2 6-cylinder. The car was not underpowered and had a tremendous amount of low-end torque.
The 2012 Volvo served me well, and I passed it down to my daughter at one hundred fifty thousand miles, barely broken in without going into detail as to why, suffice it to say that in the spring of 2024, the car was sitting in Maine and had not been driven in about eight months. I went to Maine from Pennsylvania to check out the vehicle and decided the car needed too much work to register and drive the eight hours back to Harrisburg. The engine was misfiring, and the check engine light was on, which meant it would not pass the emissions for an inspection sticker. It could have meant anything from spark plugs and coils, fuel injectors, or even faulty wiring if the mice had been making the car home.
My son-in-law, an engineer who shares a love for cars, drove back to Maine with me a few weeks later, rented a car carrier, and brought the car back home. The body was in fantastic condition, with no rust and very few scratches for a now sixteen-year-old car.
Missteps and Misfires
This is where the story gets interesting or frustrating, depending on how you look at it. We plugged in a diagnostic scanner and saw we had misfires on cylinders 1, 2, and 6 and then a random misfire. The car now had one hundred ninety thousand miles on it. The shop said everything looked good except for a catalytic converter leak. Five hundred dollars later, we had that fixed, and the check engine light was reset. The light came back on, and when we could not inspect it, we brought it home again.
Determined to do as much of the work ourselves before bringing it back to the local shop or dealer, we replaced the spark plugs first. No luck; the misfires were still occurring, although the car had power and the engine was running okay. We swapped the coils in the 1 and 2 cylinders to see if the issue might be coils. In a car's ignition system, the coils that house the spark plugs are part of the ignition coil system. Their primary function is to transform the battery's low voltage into the high voltage needed to create an electric spark in the plugs. This spark ignites the air-fuel mixture in the engine's cylinders, which powers the vehicle.
When we swapped the coils, the car began running very rough. We swapped them back, and it continued to run just as rough. Still reluctant to bring it to a garage, we went to AutoZone and bought after-market coils. Now, the car had Bosh plugs (not Volvo plugs) and aftermarket coils, which were less expensive than the Volvo coils by a wide margin. This becomes a key point later.
The plot thickens here because the car ran just as rough with the new coils. What to do next? We limped into the local service center, hoping they could help. Unfortunately, the next day, they said we had gone as far as we could with this, and because of the codes we are now getting, it needs a Volvo dealer. Not only is the plot thickening, but we have about one thousand invested in the cost of hauling the car back to Pennsylvania, the parts thus far, the exhaust, and the diagnostics from the local service center.
When do You Call it Quit?
I wasn’t ready to give up on this car yet. I called the local Volvo dealer, and they told me some things. First, they said the car does not like non-Volvo parts. Okay, here he was, speaking about the car like it was a person who walked better in sneakers than shoes. Then he said it also sounds like you have bad fuel injectors. While I felt like I was getting somewhere, Volvo injectors were thousands, not hundreds, of dollars to replace. I was also having trouble buying into the fact that the car “didn’t” like the new parts because they were not original, but okay, I’m listening.
Working on a shoestring budget hanging on by a thread, I opted to get used injectors from a scrapped car. My son-in-law and I replaced the injectors the following weekend, but the car ran just as severely again. At this point, the only positive is that I got to work with my son-in-law on a project, but sad to say, we were both as frustrated as ever.
The next stop, you guessed it, was the Volvo dealer, who was very accommodating and did a great job. We needed to get a compression test to ensure there was nothing internal going on and see if there was too much wrong to justify fixing. I wasn’t giving up on the old girl just yet. Wait, did I say that? I admitted that the car had sentimental value, but as I learned that sentimental value was costly, I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
Good News
The next day, the dealer called with a list of things that were critical to do, not so crucial, and would be nice to have done. Of course, this was about a three-thousand-dollar list. Fortunately, the essential things for them to do were about a thousand dollars. Well, that was better than the three thousand dollars. First, they replaced the plugs and the coils I had replaced with Volvo parts. Miraculously, it cleared the misfires, and even better, the compression was fine, so there was no internal damage to the engine. We had replaced the faulty injectors with the original that came with the car, so it looked like things were coming together. They said front and rear brakes and an engine mount were needed before we could get it inspected. After a discussion with my son-in-law, I opted for the engine mount and decided we would order the brakes and do them ourselves. This was great news overall.
I was excited to pick the car up and happily paid the bill that was now well over a thousand dollars; however, as I pulled onto the interstate, the car was running rough again. This time, though, the engine was not misfiring; it pointed to the oxygen sensors. Finally, narrowing it down, we felt we were close. It was evident the car was telling us something. I was now talking to it like a person, but it also encouraged us that we didn’t need to scrap this old girl.
We ordered the front and rear brakes and the sensors and decided to regroup the following week to get her back operational. We even ordered new headlamps because the original had severely yellowed over time. Another issue I haven’t mentioned to this point is a rear door actuator that we also ordered because the car thought the back door was open due to the faulty switch.
Back to our story, we were able to replace the brakes but even with the right tools to remove the old oxygen sensors, we couldn’t get them loosened. Enter the local service center once again. It was Saturday, just before noon, so I called them and was able to get in for Monday. We figured if we could drop it off, they would just need to install the sensors, and after they reset the check engine light again, and if it didn’t come back on, we could get it inspected.
The Saga Continues
The story doesn’t end there; the bad news is that the O2 sensors didn’t clear the code because of a potential problem with the catalytic converter. Oh no, say it isn’t so! In that car, it could be up to a three-thousand-dollar job, and that would be where we would have to draw the line. But there is a silver lining. The car passed inspection with a waiver for one year, and the catalytic converter and exhaust system were functioning with no other issues or leaks.
Nothing is Perfect
On Tuesday of that week, almost two months after bringing it back home, the 2012 Volvo S80 passed inspection, was running like a new, well nearly new car, and had a new lease on life.
Why did I do all of this? It was more for the love of a daughter than it was for a car, although I am attached to the car. My daughter came back from Maine the week before, a few weeks before I picked up the car, having left two years earlier and needed a new start, a reset. She is a highly talented person who plays guitar and piano and has a beautiful voice. She works with horses with much more intuitive sense than I do and has so much potential. Just like the Volvo, we just needed to piece some things together. We never gave up on each other, and sometimes, if you listen, like the car, the circumstances were telling us something.
Nothing is perfect, but good things will happen when you persist, invest the time, and never give up.
Note: Special thank you to:
The service department of Lehman Volvo, Mechanicsburg PA
The Tire Mart, Harrisburg, PA
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