Hello Brickboarders,

I've got a '93 850 with 102k miles that has a bad rear main seal. I've had the car for about a year and a half now and I love it, very comfortable, decent handling, and a solid feel. When I bought it there were no leaks whatsever. Then around christmas I noticed a small spot on the driveway and sure enough, the under engine splash pan had some oil accumulated in it. I put the car up on a buddies lift and confirmed that the rear main was the source of the leak. However, over the next few weeks I determined that the rate of leakage was pretty slow, somewhere around half a quart between oil changes (3K miles), so I figured that if it got no worse I wouldn't even bother messing with it. My current toy car is a vintage british roadster so I'm pretty used to seeing puddles on my garage floor. Well, it has gotten worse, sometime during the last two weeks the rate has picked up substantially and it's to the point now where it's bothering me and I want to get it resolved. I should mention that the flame trap was clean when I bought the car and has been kept that way since I've owned it, so I think what I'm seeing is just plain old seal failure, not from high crankcase pressure.

Here's the point of my post. I'm going to take a shot at replacing the seal myself. I am an experienced home mechanic with a very extensive set of tools and gadgets. I've done half a dozen engine rebuilds, several transmission swaps, and three ground up restorations, so I feel pretty confident that this is something I can handle. Granted all my work has been on vintage muscle cars, vintage british sports cars, or 4x4's, never any front drivers, but that's beside the point. I wanted to see if anyone had a real good procedure for this job. I've looked through the Chilton and Haynes manuals but I wanted to talk to someone who had actually done it to see if there were any points that might not be mentioned in the books that I might get hung up on. I also noticed several special tools mentioned in the books and I wanted to find out if I actually need any, or all, of those or can I get by without them.

This car is really cherry, absolutely everything works, paint is nice, interior is so clean you could eat off it. Original A/C evap and the air still blows ice cold, original ABS control module, and the original trans. I changed the fluid when I first bought it and I think I got to it before any serious damage was done. I'd like to keep it in this condition so that when I get a new car next year I can pass this one along to my mom, and I don't want to give it to her with an expensive to fix leak. Oh yeah, out of curiosity I called around to some volvo shops in the central New Jersey area and the best price I got for the job was $675, is that decent? They were saying 9 hours of labor, which seems about right to me, it looks like an all day job even with a lift. Any advise or tips would be greatly appreciated and my apoplogies for the long post.

Scott