88 240 DL, has been running fine for the 8 months I've owned it. The only exception has been a loss of power at around 2K rpm in the past month or two that I'd been dragging my feet on troubleshooting.

Two weeks ago, while driving at highway speeds, the car backfired and the engine quit. Would not restart. I was literally on my way out of town for a week so I had it towed to a shop - "We work on these old Volvos all the time" they said. That turned out to be a lie but I won't bore you with the details.

Shop decided that the timing belt was bad - "It's not broken but it's skipped a tooth and it is junk". Shop replaced timing belt. Car still would not start. Shop called me and said that they didn't know what was wrong with it, I would have to take it someplace else. Shop clamined they had checked and car was getting fuel and spark.

Went up there tonight and replaced the plugs, coil, cap, and rotor mainly because I had all those items sitting on my shelf.

I noticed that the air intake hose downstream of the AMM was totally shot. Cracked in two places and nearly busted completly in half in another. It looks like it had been failing for awile and I missed it. Could not procure a replacement at the late hour so wrapped it up with tape as best I could.

Car is very hard to start, but will eventually start going only to die a few seconds later. With the AMM unplugged, car is still hard to start but once it gets going will idle smoothly for as long as I'll let it. If I try to give it any gas at all it just dies.

Obviously it is a no brainer that I need to replace the hose. I'm going to try and get one chased down, but I'm worried that I'm up against more here. Even with a taped up hose, shouldn't I be able to "limp home" with the AMM unplugged? I couldn't limp more than 10 feet! While in neutral if I verrry carefully feather the gas pedal, I can get it up to about 2500 RPMS. Under load, I can barely get the car moving at all. And even with the busted hose, should I have such a hard start condition?

Thanks for any help. The car is 20 miles from my house so when I go back with parts / tools I need to be prepared as best I can.