Yeech. For the past month I've been completely swamped either
with work or with family or with relationship stuff. Sorry to
all those I've annoyed by not replying to email and related stuff.

An interesting thing happened to me two weeks ago. My girlfriend
and I drove to san luis obispo from south of los angeles (about 350
miles). We took blue -- my 164.

Well, I had noticed that it was having a slow brake fluid leak,
and being the lazy, extremely busy slob that I am my solution was
to locate a replacement master cylinder and I also thought real hard
about buying new brake hoses. But mostly I just carried around a
large container of dot 4 brake fluid. It was also having some weird
problems with losing power at any RPM above 4000, which I suspected
was related to my adjusting the point gap to be too large.

I had also noticed that my car's clutch slipped sometimes when
shifting, especially if I stayed hard on the gas through the shift.

Well, in slo, my girlfriend said "Chris -- the brakes aren't working"
Not what I wanted to hear. (they still did work but not as well because
one circuit was completely empty and the other was low and it was
clearly time to address the problem). Also, after adjusting the points so
that the distributor worked correctly I noticed that the clutch
slipped in 4th, long after I had shifted.

Oops. Now I needed the brakes fixed, a new clutch, and a way to
keep my girlfriend from killing me, and my tools were 350 miles
away.

I took my 30 year old 164, a car that was always the red-haired
stepchild of volvo, to a dealership. I was a bit worried when
the guy who was going to be working on the car said "Hey -- a 164!
My dad use to work on those!"

They found that I had a loose connection on the porportioning
valve and recommeneded against replacing any hoses or the master
cylinder but I had them replace all those anyhow (I wasn't sure if
the cylinder rubber had been scuffed up by pushing the piston far
beyond where it is suppose to go when it was low on fluid, and the
hoses had been rubbing against the tire at full lock and the outer
rubber was worn through on several of them). They also put the
wrong pressure plate in and had to pull the transmission and put
the old pressure plate back in, which wound up taking an extra day,
but they also gave me a rental car for use for the extra day that
the car was in the shop. If I had done only what they suggested it
would have cost me quite a bit less.

All told the bill was less than $1000, they did the work correctly
and were courteous and competent. They kept my girlfriend from
killing me, I didn't get dirty, my car's back on the road and it
only cost me a little bit more than my car cost to buy in the first
place. All told, I'm pretty happy. Thanks to smith volvo in san
luis obispo and thanks volvo for making such a simple, sturdy, fun
car.
chris