I looked up the parts on the 'tubes, and the original Volvo pump is mondo dollars. Maybe this is worthwhile, but I've got a lot of other money to spend on the car and the fuel pump isn't hard to replace. So I cruised around, and eeuroparts, it turns out, sells a nice kit to install the Walbro 255lph, a pretty popular pump, in the 850s. The kit costabout $60, and the Walbro 255 is a pretty common USA-made pump, so I decided to put a Walbro in my Volvo.
For the most part I followed the instructions from our favorite video tutor Robert, which can be found here. I found a few differences between the pictured car and my 99, though. Between the changes for the newer cars and the Walbro pump, I thought I'd document a few differences.
First up: the electrical connectors on the 99 aren't sorta tucked and zip-tied in. Instead, there's a really nice panel with all the connectors clipped in, keeping things super neat. To access this panel, it's necessary to pop the panel directly behind the seats, which would mean removing the jump seats in a car so equipped. Mine is not, so I had to pull up the carpeted panels on the sides of the cargo area (they just pull out, though the clips put up a fight) to access the screws for the fold-up cover, which I then slid back to remove. The panel appears as below:
Upon removing the pump itself, we see another change from the older cars: rather than two spade connectors, the fuel pump has a single plastic electrical connector:
The Walbro is not sized for this pump cartridge. The kit came with a closed-cell rubber foam tube that was supposed to be a sleeve to help the pump fit in the 850's cartridge. I cut a square of this out to help the pump fit in the V70 unit instead. It slid in without too much force, but the pump is going nowhere. With the pump installed:
The Walbro was surprisingly loud, a virtue for which it is apparently famous: turn the key and hear a little whir before hitting pressure. But a few cycles of the key later I had full pressure at the rail. Still have some reassembly of other bits to do before I start the car, but I'm happy with the result, and the price was great. All told, a pretty easy job at a relatively low cost, and I was really happy with the kit that let me do a drop-in replacement without having to use my brain.
