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Your best bet may be to look for a good used engine, from a wrecked low mileage car that was properly cared for. For example, I recently totalled my 88 745 with 140K on it. The engine was in great shape---it used about 1/2 quart of oil between changes (at the factory interval of 5K miles) and most of that was leakage. I'm not really offering this engine for sale, merely using it as an example of what is likely to be out there. Though I might listen to offers, I was planning to keep it as a spare for my next Volvo. If one really wanted to do it right, replacing the rod and main bearing shells (and of course all the oil seals etc.) while it was out of the car would give you an engine that was essentially as good as new.
Usually, you will find the engine in an automatic car to be in better shape, as they are rarely revved much over 3000 RPM. My car was originally an automatic, but I had converted it to a stick, which I MUCH prefer---more fun, and I regularly got nearly 30 MPG out of it. If you are going to the trouble of an engine swap, I highly recommend the manual transmission conversion at the same time. (if you can find the parts---something like 95% of 7 series cars were automatics)
You should be able to pick up a complete car with body damage that renders it uneconomic to fix for a few hundred bucks, assuming you can find one. That's a lot less than the price of a reman engine, and you get A LOT of other useful spare parts as a bonus if you have the time and a work space to strip a car completely. When you're done, it's easier than you might think to cut up the body shell into manageable size pieces with a Sawzall.
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