Of course I was immediately sent out into properly torrential rain this afternoon. Unsurprisingly these handle surface water rather better than the tyres that came off, especially given they were far more worn on the inner edges than I'd realised.
I do sometimes wonder whether the legal wear limit needs to be reconsidered given how wide tyres generally are these days. There's a hell of a lot more tyre to shift water from under on something like this compared to the skinny 140-160 profile stuff that was the norm in the 80s. It also means that it's way easier to end up with a tyre that's damned near through to the cords on one shoulder but technically is still legal given the measurement is over 75% of the tread surface.
I am glad to report that with four new tyres, correct wheel alignment and properly balanced wheels the vibration at speed has been *completely* eliminated. Cruising at motorway speeds is now positively serene. Going to have to be very careful now as there is very little to tell you you're actually going that fast, this is a car which you could end up very easily speeding quite substantially after a tiny squirt of throttle for an overtake on the motorway.
Also dealt with the position light I noticed was out yesterday. No thanks to Halfords where I had an absolute fight to get these.
As I've mentioned before, our store a couple of months ago was "improved" and one of the changes that came with this was basically all consumables aside from oil being moved to be behind the counter. So you have to get someone to go retrieve it for you rather than just picking it up and going to the till. Bulbs, wipers, batteries, filters, they're all back there now. At the best of the time this is an utter pain as it means that the one till that's ever open is having to deal with significantly more workload. Queuing times are at least doubled since the change. It's also a royal pain trying to explain to someone who has zero technical knowledge and zero interest in gaining any to find your slightly oddball bulb for you (the 10W festoon ones for the Trabant tail lights took some getting). I'd hoped this would be a two minute job...but no. The guy wouldn't just go and get the bulbs I asked for - he insisted on taking my reg and looking them up. W5Ws are so obscure aren't they? Then kept completely failing to understand the difference between the daytime running lights and the position lights. After what felt like an eternity of going back and forwards, and a queue of about ten people having built up behind me, I eventually left with the bulbs, my patience however was nowhere to be seen, having utterly evaporated by that point!
Changing it was actually really simple - thanks to Volvo being sensible.
The holder in question is actually buried deep in the wing, however they put a really long extension on the back of the lamp holder so you can reach it.
It's the vertical white bit of plastic just visible in the void just right of centre frame. Once you've popped off the connector for the indicator it's pretty easy to remove. Here's a photo of it out showing how long that extension piece is.
The only reason for including that bit of extra plastic was to make it easy to change the bulb without having to remove the headlight. Other makers could really take lessons from that.
Driver's side is a bit more fiddly as the washer bottle filler neck is in the way so I used a pair of pliers to grab it instead. Reckon I probably could have managed by hand, it just would have involved more swearing.
I think one screw removed let's you unclip the filler neck, but it was so easy to just grab with the pliers it didn't seem worth messing about with.
I changed both as I figured if one had blown the other probably wasn't far behind. It was very blackened, so I reckon I wasn't far off the mark. Job done on both sides in about 15 minutes.
Shudder to think how long that would have taken on quite a few cars of this age where I'd have ended up having to dismantle half the front of the car.
Rear ones we don't need to worry about as they're LED based so shouldn't need any maintenance (or rather will write the whole cluster off when they fail).
To be fair I've never heard of them failing in these clusters, and I do admit that I think that little strip that forms the rear position lights does look smart. I don't think they're even obligatory lights in the UK anyway - they're over and above the actual daytime running lights that Volvo have had since the dawn of time.
Glad we really seem to have got the handling and vibration issues sorted. I hate to use superlatives like "it feels like a completely different car" but it's not actually that far off the mark here. It's uncanny how serene it is cruising now. Do kind of wish we could drop the wheel size down to 16" though as adding a bit of extra sidewall would help the ride a bit around town. It is what it is though, that's just the curse of modern cars.
