In the summer of 2013 I had just sold my 1987 Volvo 740 GLE to buy this car. I was looking for a project that I could do, and drive around a bit to Volvo car shows. My friend had bought this 1974 164 local to him after it had sat for a long time in a barn. I was fired up to get this car, as it ran and drove, but needed a little bit of work. Looking back this was a car that I definitely should not have gotten.
The car was Seafoam Green, with a saddle color interior. Minus the driver seat, the interior was great. The 164 came standard with AC, and this one had a sunroof. Being in Michigan, I thought the car might be covered in rust, however the car had Ziebart back in the 70’s. Not one spec of rust, and the paint was decent. I kind of think of the 164 as a mini luxury car. Small, but it had the appeal that it was luxurious without the high price tag.
The 164 was located in Millington, Michigan, which is about an hour north of Detroit. Like I said, my friend had found it for sale locally, but had very little history on the car. He told me it smoked really badly, but it ran great. Having done a little research on it, I knew it was either due to the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection system making the system too rich, or bad seals in the engine. He did not tell me how bad it was smoking, just that it smoked. I called another friend of mine who was familiar with this type of Volvo fuel injection system, and he said he would be willing to help me diagnose the problem.
So off to Michigan I went. I was going to rent a U-Haul trailer when I got up to Michigan, but found out it was cheaper to rent a trailer in Arkansas and haul it empty to Michigan. I left Friday after work, and made it to Indiana that night. Then the next morning I made it the rest of the way, loaded up the car, and headed back down south. I stopped in St. Louis to visit some Volvo friends, and got home that Sunday.
Once I had the car off the trailer my friend Craig helped me replace old hoses, and figure out what was wrong with the car. The title of this post really does relate to how badly the car smoked. When I picked the car up, it really didn’t smoke at all because all I did was start it and load it on the trailer. When I got it home, and took it around the block, woah. Let’s just say the entire city of Bentonville did not have mosquitos after that. After seeing this, Craig and I looked at each other and thought “it’s the seals”. We still muddled on, and checked various things on the car, like the valve clearance, and how rich it was running.
In the end our efforts did not pay off, and we had determined that the seals in the engine were letting some oil past, and burning it. Nothing seemed to help, and the car still smoked like a freight train, so we decided to pull the engine. The plan was to pull the engine, and have it rebuilt to be good as new. First though, I had a friend who happened to have a spare B30 engine used only for the 164. I decided to go and pick it up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and take a chance on it. Once we pulled the 74’s engine, we compared the flywheels, and the donor engine, and they have different bolt patterns. Darn it! So I continued with the plan to have the original rebuilt.
Finding a shop nearby that would even touch a Volvo engine was tough. I finally found one that could get replacement rings and pistons. He quoted me around $1,000 for the rebuild, and paint for the engine. I went on with it, and about a month later the engine was ready to pick up.
Once we got the engine installed back into the car, we could not get it started. We tried and tried, but each time the B30 fought us. For some reason the machine shop wanted the distributor to “test fit” once the engine was done. I dropped it off, and never thought anything about it. Well, as we would discover the machine shop had pinched a wire going to the distributor causing it not to start. Luckily I had a brand new distributor that I was going to put on eventually. That seemed to do the trick, and the car fired right up.
At this point I had already lost interest in the car, because of the roller coaster ride it had given me. I decided that I was going to try and sell it, just to see if I would get any interest. Surprisingly I got a few hits, and a guy in Maine wanted to buy it. Rightfully so he wanted a shop to check it over before he bought it. So he paid to have the car hauled to an import mechanic that he chose. The mechanic had no idea what he was doing with this car, and that soon became apparent to the buyer. The buyer wanted the car test driven and a number of things checked on. The mechanic didn’t know where to start, so he just kept putting it off. After about a week, the buyer got impatient, and just agreed to buy the car after some haggling. I got the payment, and dropped the title off with the mechanic to never think about the car.
About a week later I got a call from the buyer, and he said that he was going to get the car shipped to Maine. He wanted to know if I would drive it to a big parking lot so the shipper could load the car. I of course agreed, and went to pick up the car assuming the mechanic who still had it knew what was going on. The mechanic handed me the keys, and I drove the car down the street to the car hauler that was waiting. The driver loaded up the car, and he was on his way. When I went to get my car at the mechanic’s, he asked me for payment for the work he did. Shockingly I told him I had nothing to do with that, and he would need to take that up with the buyer. The mechanic shrugged his shoulders, and held up the title saying “oh well”. I left pretty fast never to hear from the buyer or mechanic again.
I had really loved the 164 styling, but decided that I really needed to save up, and buy one that was mechanically sound. So, this is exactly what I did, but I had to find one first. If you know anything about 164s, they really didn’t make hardly any of them. The ones that they did make were not around long. This 164 had left me with an empty feeling. I was still needing to fill my 164 void. The hunt was on to find one.
Great story – best of luck with your Volvo quest. Jim.
Great colour. My grampa had two 164s, the second an Australian market big bumper that was IIRC one-year only over here. I realise you probably won’t have many options to choose from, but the first version with curvy thin bumper has that extra panache. Best of luck in your search.
Cool car! I’m really warming up to “brick” Volvos. Being from Michigan, I should be surprised you found a car that clean here, but I’ve bought a few decent cars of Michigan descent. If the original owner takes care of them and/or doesn’t drive them too much, even the salt belt can be home to a fairly solid car. My ’74 Firebird was Ziebarted originally as well, and the undercarriage is in surprisingly good shape. Every bolt and nut is a bear to get off, however, partially because of undercoating, but mostly because of rust.
Oh, c’mon man, a rust-free Ovlov 164 with a new engine you’d paid for and you gave up?
I’d say “I don’t get it”, except that I do. I’ve done it, twice actually. Thinking back, I just felt kind-of personally insulted by the things, which is irrational. But they’d exhausted me.
Anyway, it was a nice Wolsley 6/99 you had there.
I can’t believe there’s someone else who calls them Ovlovs! Me too … though to be honest, I haven’t used the term for about 55 years. But when I was 8, that’s what I called our family 122S.
I can’t claim originality. I seem to recall the term was not entirely uncommon in Oz years ago, the product of a peculiarly Australian cynicism about anything a bit new or different, as these very cars then were. (Must add that that cynicism is often amusing enough, but sometimes also insular and crude and unwelcome). As they weren’t cheap things here, it was (again) rather typically Aussie to be mildly derisive of the pretension they possibly represented, here by re-organizing the spelling.
You’ve reminded me too that older folk couldn’t understand why someone of means might buy a Volvo instead of something like my Wolseley above, especially when Wolseleys were long-standing Brit Empire posh, and this Swedish car had a name that sounded greatly like a then-popular local biscuit, the “Iced Vovo” (which, incidentally, was a dreadful thing that looked and tasted like some granny had put a bit of her pink fluffy slipper on a bit of dried-up and compacted dust). Though we had a Queen back then.
Oh, bugger, that’s right, we still do.
In the spring of 1982 I had (once again) returned to college to get the elusive college degree that I thought I needed to be a “success” in life.
My around town ride, a ’71 Buick Riviera GS, gave about 11 miles per gallon on the 105 straight interstate ride to & from my chosen college. Loved the car, hated it’s Exxon bill.
I decided that I needed a better fuel sipper for the 5 times a week college commute.
My specifications were: Air conditioning (SO desirable in hot and humid New Orleans!), a ride quality that wouldn’t beat me to death on the two hour commute, 20 miles per gallon at a composed, strain-free 75 miles per hour cruising speed (thanks to my state police buddies & my fuzz buster radar detector I gave a big raspberry to the double nickel speed limit), room for an occasional friend (or 2 or 3) and a max purchase price of $2500 (my entire checking account balance at the time, after tuition, books, dorm & meal ticket fees).
My Dad’s “foreign car mechanic” (as they were known wayyyyyy back then) offered me a ’75 164E, 4 speed with electric overdrive, A/C, leather interior, silver exterior with black leather interior and an add on black vinyl roof (to cover the wavy & rusty roof I was told.)
He freely admitted that it was a theft recovery car he had bought at an auction and “gone thru it”. He loaned it to me for a weekend’s test drive. It seemed, peppy, reliable and adequate for what I needed. Rowing the gears thru the 4 speed manual transmission, clicking the overdrive in and out for two lane passing was great fun.
The Volvo seats were quite comfortable, even for my 6-1, 240 pounds, 48-Long suit weight lifter body. The hour’s run to and from college passed by quickly.
At first…..
Quirks stated to develop with this 7 year old Volvo. It was always mechanically reliable, always started, but……
The black leather seats started to dry out severely and flake off on my clothing. I developed the habit of liberally soaking the seating area with leather conditioner & letting it sit in the sun at home, on the weekends, while I enjoyed the boat tail Buick. Early Monday morning I would wipe off the excess conditioner with my most grubby bath towel before taking off for college. This procedure at least slowed down the seats decay.
After about 20 minutes of steady state interstate driving, A/C and add on stereo both running full blast, the A/C would freeze up. A gauge check showed the freon levels “on point”. Then 2 or 3 minutes later it would defrost and start freezing me out of the car again. After several pulse pounding reps of this routine I learned it for what it was and got used to it.
The fuel injection system that gave the car such pleasing pep and instant starting was also somewhat….quixotic. Sometimes the car would idle idle so slow it would barely chug over at stop lights. If I raised the curb idle by twisting a small black round knob on the FI system (pointed out to me by the above mentioned mechanic), it would be ok ….for a while….then start racing away at 1200 rpm at stop signs. (Gotta love the tiny, rectangular factory tachometer!) Then I would back down the curb idle to around 600 rpm and all would be ok for a while. I’ve always suspected that the non-detergent gasoline of the time period stopped up the fuel injectors? I started tossing in a bottle of STP gas treatment every other tank full. This helped, but didn’t totally eliminate the idle issue.
About a year later, after finally graduating with a “marketable” college degree and finding a full time job, I decided that it was time for a brand new, zero mileage car.
I deep soaked the leather seats once again, washed & waxed the still shiny platinum silver paint, installed new spark plugs….and parked it until I sold out, lest something else break on this (indicated) 130K miles car. I composed a flattering, deftly-skirting-on-the-truth description, selected my best Polaroid picture of the car and listed it in the “News On Wheels” car selling weekly booklet. It was gone 2 weeks later!
The guy that bought it drove all the way from PepsiCola, FL to buy it, saying that he had searched the southeast coast are for a 4 speed/0verdrive 164 (this was before internet searches and advertising became the new normal). He happily paid my asking price, roared away in it and waved at me, grinning “like a possum eating a sweet ‘tater”.
That’s a tough spot – having picked the car and then invested in a major component to rebuild. There is usually a heavy gravitational pull into “Well I’m this far into it, may as well keep going” land. It is probably good that you resisted that pull.
It’s excellent that he resisted the pull. Me, I failed to do that on a very similar car, so my story is two decades and deliberately-uncounted dollars long, and does not end with me having an assembled 164. Details at length one day.
I just got tired of it needing “one more thing” every time I turned around. Yes, that is something that comes with older cars, but I just got tired of it with this one.
I agree with JP Cavanaugh. You sold the buyer from Maine a car with a newly-rebuilt (and untested) engine, and while that may have solved some problems, it’s still a major wild card. That’s before any other issues made themselves known. Could be that you dodged the bullet on the first 164, but I’m still curious about the next one…
Quick question: How does the Cheech and Chong reference tie in? I swear I saw them riding in one of these in “Next Movie”. It was the one where Cheech’s “cousin” and Chong were partying with some high society types.
The smoke clouds, that’s the Cheech & Chong thing.
Had an RX4 that had bad oil control seals and did that. I only drove it at night…
I think he refers to a lot of smoke being blown.
Hmm, the Swedish version of seafoam green doesn’t look familiar to me and I have two seafoam green cars. Now I am puzzled by your comment mechanically sound. Generally the biggest issue with a project is the engine rebuild. Once it is done you are well on your way. In your case, unless the rebuilder didn’t know what he was doing, you too were well on your way. Everything else is small potatoes once you have a good engine.
I bought my Mustang in 1984 because I always wanted one and wanted a project like many others. No rust but lots of body work, the interior was shot, and the engine you could tell was on it’s last legs at 115,000 miles, but the C4 automatic was fine. First thing was pull the engine and get it rebuilt. It drove great after that while I spent the next five years on the rest of the car.
There was no Volvo colour such as “Sea Foam Green” in ’74. Per PaintRef, this car is probably painted “Green Blue”, one of three metallics offered that year.
What an interesting website PaintRef is, but am I correct in presuming it’s USA market colours? My grandparents’ ’73 New Zealand (ie UK) market 164E was a gorgeous blue-green colour, but much darker than the ‘Green Blue’, yet lighter than the ‘Dark Blue’. Their 264GLE was a much starker white than any of the ’76 colours shown.
I’d be a little surprised if Volvo were offering different whites and different blue-greens for cars built in the same plant for different markets. Cars built in different plants, though, might have been painted different colours. I don’t know when Volvo started building cars in Belgium, or where they sent those cars.
One thing to keep in mind: physical paint chip charts are often inexact even when new because paper doesn’t take paint like metal does, and they age badly like old colour photographs. And on-screen representations of paint colours (like the ones at Paintref) are necessarily even further off.
In 1971 Volvo did offer a California White, which I believe were only offered on 164’s sold in California.
The car was repainted at one point in time, and I think they tried to get it as close as possible to the original color.
“California White” was one of the names of a paint colour offered for a fair number of years, not the name of the only place it was offered. More info on PaintRef (also see AutoColorLibrary ’69-’72 Volvo paint chip charts).
My grandparents’ 164 suddenly appeared for sale today after being lost for 42 years, looking at the for sale photos it’s not as dark as I recall and would appear to be Green Blue as per the chart. The memory does play tricks!
Well, unfortunately that is not always true. This car had a complex fuel injection system that at the time had expensive parts to replace. I replaced a lot of it with used parts, but that sometimes does not help. It also had a wiring harness that probably needed replacing and could be attributed to a few gremlins
I had a 1975 164E in 1989ish. Had low mileage and looked great. I loved the styling but not its reliability. I had a theme where it was costing me $300 every three weeks. It wasn’t the engine giving me trouble it was the suspension, the electrical etc. The picture in the post of it sitting on a flatbed tow truck was how I most rememeber mine.
I am not a Volvo guy, but I know many Volvo people. Pretty much all of them warned me off of 164s. Back when 122s, 140s, and 240s had reputations for longevity, the 164 did not. IIRC, I was told that the engines had cam bearing lubrication issues before they had fuel injection issues. Much of my exposure to them was in the mid to late ’80s, when they were often available for a fraction of the price of a similar four cylinder Volvo.
The local independent Volvo sales, service, and national parts place tended to give the 164 trade-ins to his daughters to turn into art cars rather than risk burning customers, just as they would later use all their 850s as courtesy cars rather than resell them. Imagine an ethical Geely dealer today! The Volvo guy now has as many hybrid Toyotas and Subarus as “Volvos” on his lot.