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It's interesting that you mentioned this because, just last weekend, I replaced the rear pads on my car. For a change, the pedal is hard now. I had complained about the mushy GM-quality brake pedal feel since I bought the car, used, 35k miles ago. I'm at 57k now.
This was probably the first time they were replaced, even though they were only about half-way through the pad material. For some reason, they were scoring the rear rotors, and I could feel it at the pedal. Like I said, I was only half-way through those pads. Volvo brakes are weird.
Anyway, as I had just flushed the fluid a few weeks earlier when I replaced the PBR front pads, I did not flush or even bleed the fluid this time. What is especially curious is that the pedal feel did not improve at all when I flushed the fluid, but it's solid now, only after changing the rear pads.
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Hmmm... actually, now that I think about it, I DID, in a sense, bleed the brakes. When I did the rear pads, I also took off the aftermarket front rotors and painted the hats. When I expanded the front calipers to ease reinstallation, I forced fluid backwards through the brake lines to the point that the master cylinder overflowed.
I've flushed the fluid on this car several times over the past few years in an effort to cure that mushy brake pedal that you complained about. I've used pressure bleeders, vacuum bleeders, and the old two-man method. Nothing cured it, and it's not as though I haven't done this dozens of times on various street and race cars, always with the expected excellent results. Not on this car, though.
I'm wondering if the "reverse pressure bleed" that I did when I expanded the front calipers made the difference here. Maybe there's something about the Volvo fluid reservoir, master cylinder and ABS that traps some air in there until a reverse pressure bleed is done. Either that, or it was just replacing the rear pads.
In any case, one of those two tasks solved the problem for me. You said you were willing to do anything to fix this. You could do a tremendous service to this online community by trying each of these two tasks and identifying the one that fixes the problem. Let us know.
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Jim Rothe, '99 S70 T5M,
http://www.jimrothe.com/volvo/index.html
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