Rod through the block - Engine swap guidance 2000XC

[bjornfree]

As promised, here's a gore pic. I have no idea what the sequence of destruction was but there's a piece of piston turned sideways and wedged between the crank and the block.

[Ozark Lee]

The only other one like that that I have seen here was out of a T5R (manual conversion) and he fessed up that it let go at about 7000 RPM as he was pulling away from a hopped up Mustang.

[bjornfree]

It's alive and saved from the scrap yard! A slow but steady project. Thanks for all the helpful guidance. It still has the check engine light on but I expect that to be a minor issue as the engine sounds nice.

[precopster]

I had the knocking noise and then the rod cap separated from the conrod and out of both sides of the block on my 2001 V70 T5.

Goes great now after a LPT engine swap. Great work keeping it on the road. Enthusiasts and their Volvos!!

[bjornfree]

Long term follow up post to ask what the long term prognosis for this car is.

Not long after getting this running last April the angle gear locked up. We removed the gear and ground some teeth off and welded it into a fixed position with the plan to just drive it as front wheel drive only. That worked fine for a few weeks until the trans started slipping when in reverse. We pulled a junk yard transmission and angle gear and just recently go it all back together and running good. So far so good but but the splines on the coupling that joins the trans output to the angle gear input do not look good. These pics are from the original which is not in the car. We put in the one from the junk yard trans. It was in better shape but still showed the same kind of wear. The area between the blue line and the red line is where you see the transition from the worn spline area to the the shape of the unworn spline.

Is this a ticking time bomb? A common problem? Driven hard and put away wet? It is currently driven in granny mode only for fear it's a fragile thing. Any thoughts on a long term prognosis? It got a new timing belt, water pump, etc. while the engine was out. After the time and money dumped into this can we expect any return on the investment? We have less than 1K miles on it since purchase. Thanks for any thoughts.