I had to make time for it. I took a week long vacation from work and did the manual transmission swap on my Volvo 850 turbo wagon, my motivation was that "Auto repair shops finish these type of works in hours and I finish this in days."
The BMF intake install is basically a head gasket change away, if you start with a running car. I was down to 45 minutes to remove the head with the manifolds/turbo by myself with help from an engine hoist.
Well I didn't start with a complete bmf either. I designed a new 3 inch neck for it, had to modify and machine parts for the 76mm tb I'm using, machined down injector area so injectors sit further in, design and machine custom fuel rail and mounts, had to pull motor out of car, put different motor in. Mount tbi header, drop gt30r turbo in there. Design and machine wastegate actuator bracket. Purchase and route all an fittings and hoses, make custom bracket for hoses. Design and 3d print 4 inch intake elbow that clears the shifter cable bracket. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Bought a house somewhere in there. Now have moved out of house and renting it out, relocated 6 hrs away from vehicle and it'll be a year or 2 before I can buy a house at my current location and move everything down. Had 2 kids finish high school, had to buy one a car and maintain that, new exhaust, new turbo, new clutch, new brakes, fix coil overs that previous owners didn't install right. Bought myself a daily driver as well.
I'm not 25 anymore with zero responsibilities or obligations where I can just do my own stuff. It still might have to wait as I'm buying a race car in the next couple weeks too.
Ken mentioned an I-box.(Interrogator box) I just came across an interesting passage in the 1991 update and operation explanation for DRBII.
"INTERROGATOR
The interrogator function is used during engineering and manufacturing processes. It is not used for diagnostics and it is not supported in any diagnostic procedure manuals."
I don't know why they felt the need to put this in the DRBII manual unless it is a function that is easily accessible. I'm curious if any of you guys have ever messed with it or if anyone left alive knows how to properly use it. They way Ken talked, it could be a way to test for bad ECUs.
It was a pretty good size box. I didn’t think any of the old stuff would be better than modern test equipment so I passed on it. If anything I thought about hooking it up to an arduino for display purposes.
Working on clearing the decks.
Did they ever get the cam phasing mechanism working? I know it is big and heavy, and perhaps requires notching the frame. I would love to see someone have a go at getting that to work.
The interrogator mode is accessible via the DRB II. I'm not quite sure what it does, but if I recall correctly you could input what I believe were memory addresses and it would output live hex values. I assumed this was to monitor features not pre-programmed to view in the DRB normally.