Volvo 700 Series In-Tank Fuel Sender Assemblies - Whats the deal?

FOREWARD

Over the 15+ years that the Volvo 700 and 900 series were in production, many changes were made to the ignition systems, fuel delivery, wiring, clusters, and various other components. These year-by-year changes are often not well documented, and make finding discontinued parts even harder now that many of these cars are reaching the 40 year old mark. In this write-up I will mostly be discussing the fuel system upgrades, and things I have learned along the way with restoring the fuel system in my Bosch LH2.2 powered redblock 740.

This write up, like almost all my others, comes from a personal struggle and a desire for a clear, concise information resource that I could reference for a repair. My 1987 Volvo 740 GLE spent much of its life in Pennsylvania before ending up in my hands in North Carolina. In that time it sat in a covered car port, not moving for the better part of 15 years! As you can imagine, the work to get a car this old and tired back on the road has been no easy task.

In my quest to diagnose a rough running condition, a full teardown and rebuild of the fuel system has quickly turned into a whole ordeal in and of itself. The pump under the car, filter, along with the lift pump in the tank are all original. New injectors will also be going into a cleaned fuel rail.

BASIC INFORMATION

The LH2.2 Fuel System

The fuel system in the LH2.2 (and maybe 2.4 cars as well?) use a basic fuel injection system where a lift pump in the tank sends low pressure fuel to a filter and then to a high pressure pump under the car. The high pressure pump then feeds the fuel rail and the injectors. This 2 pump system works fine when parts are new, but a failure of the in tank lift pump can cause the high pressure pump to burn out or struggle to supply enough fuel to the motor. Additionally, the fuel pump relay in the car can be a sore spot for many redblock owners as a failed one will leave you stranded on the road.

Replacements for the in tank pump, under car pump, filter, hoses and bracket are all readily available. The part that you can NOT buy new anymore is the in-tank assembly that the lift pump bolts into.

The in tank assembly has a few ports on it for the fuel filler port, pressurized fuel, fuel return and breather hoses. It also has the 2 wires for the in tank float as well as power and ground for the lift pump.

The issue now is that these in tank assemblies are no long being produced new or aftermarket. To make matters worse, there are multiple designs of assembly that are only sort of plug and play. This means when you end up in a rusty predicament like me, you better start scrounging the local junkyards.

The under car fuel filter and pump, still attached to the mounting bracket.

Corrosion had rusted out the top of the system leading to leaks and the hoses breaking off the fittings.

Pump Differences Between Years

(Excludes B27, B280, D24T, etc. Only for redblock motors)

Float Style

For the in tank assembly there are 2 different styles of float design. There is the ball style and the tube style.

The older “ball” style float, where the ball floats and swings the arm to actuate resistance to the fuel gauge.

The newer “tube” style float where the inside of the tube houses the float to determine the resistance to send to the fuel gauge.

Fuel Level Sensor Differences:

• Lever “Ball” Type Sensor (1982 - 1986)

  • Empty (0 L) - Resistance: 296(+/- 15)Ω

  • Full (60L) - Resistance: 36(+/- 2)Ω

• Lever “Ball” Type Sensor (1987+) / Tubular “Tube” Type Sensor (1986+)

  • Empty (0 L) - Resistance: 0Ω

  • Full (60L) - Resistance: 280Ω

• Tubular “Tube” Type Sensor (1988+ (for 760/780 ONLY))

  • Empty (0 L) - Resistance: 0Ω

  • Full (80L) - Resistance: 363-370Ω

Upgrade & OEM OPTIONS

Much like a lot of other parts for these cars, replacements are no longer available. This means that you are working with an ever shrinking supply of good, useable ones. I am very lucky to have multiple parts cars I can take from, but even with that they condition of the assemblies can vary greatly. Swapping between these units can be very easy with a few different options:

Easy Wiring Harness Adapter

Thankfully if you have a 1987+ car, the replacements will be easier to find and the gauge should read the same. In all of my searching, not a single ball type unit was available for sale online. The tube style is almost a direct drop in replacement with one small difference. They ball style on my car has a 3 pin bullet connector, where the new tube style assembly used a 3 pin flat blade connector similar to more modern Volvo connectors.

In this situation I made a adapter pig tail using the male end off my old pump soldered to the female end snipped from my parts car. This means there is no cutting or non-reversable damage done to the original wiring harness on my vehicle.

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The full harness

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“Newer” style blade connector from the pump

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Bullet style connector on the chassis of the car.

I also drilled out the pass through hole for the connector, which means I did not have to de-pin the bullet connector end every time the assembly needs to come out. The OEM grommet on the harness of the updated assembly is more than wide enough to still create a water proof seal.

Single Pump Upgrade

One of the most common upgrades for people re-doing their fuel system in the redblock cars is to upgrade to a single pump system. Modern upgrade-style fuel pumps from DeatschWerks and Wahlboro offer a near drop in replacement, and have more than enough GPMs to fully supply the fuel system from inside the tank without the need for the second pump under the car. In my personal experience, the width of these pumps is too large to properly fit inside the plastic carrier on the assembly like the OEM pump did, but modifying the mount to work was very easy.

For my 740 I went with the DeatschWerks 255, which was the recommended pump for the 700 series. It has a basic power and ground wire, and the pickup sock and outlet are nearly identical to the stock pump.

I used a dremel to cut the hard line on the outlet. (This is where the small section of fuel hose mid-way up the hardline is) Doing this cut allowed me to easily mount the angled section of hard line up to the outlet of the pump. Instead of using the plastic “basket” that holds the stock fuel pump, I used 2 hose clamps to attach it to the metal bracket that originally held the basket. This allowed me to finely adjust where the intake sock was sitting, and I tried to line it up as best I could to the bottom of the float.

A soldering iron was used to remove the 2 thin wires from the stock fuel pump. The new hardness from DW was then soldered directly to the top of the assembly where the power and ground are.

The back photo shows how simple the mounting system is. The zip-tie was added to correct some pump angle cause by the alignment of the hose and hardline.

With this single pump setup, the fuel line can go directly to the filter and then the fuel rail.

BjarnTech Digital Dash

The BjarnTech digital speedometer & fuel gauge is an amazing product I recently found thanks to the Volvo 240/740/940 group on Facebook. They are a super easy, drop in replacement for the center speedometer which gives a kmh readout along with fuel level. It is pre-programmed with all the stock ohm ranges for the fuel tank meaning you can upgrade your in tank float to a newer style or one from a 760/780 and still have a working fuel gauge without messing around with decoder boxes.

Currently they do not ship outside of Sweden so you will have to get your buddy to order it and send it over, but I plan on reaching out to see if a special run of US market ones can be made as a NordCarolina exclusive product. Stay tuned for a product review and install guide as soon as I receive mine!

Store Update: Shipping Rates and Carriers

With the new year comes some unfortunate price hikes for many of the usual shipping rates. Since I started the business my standard has been $99 for all headlights going across the Atlantic. USPS has raised it rates for the year, and with UPS being unreliable with import duty payment, I will be raising the USPS International rate for headlights to $125.

Shipments should not be affected by any current tariff situations as on April 2025.

Cash for Clunkers and Todays Car Marketplace - A Mathematical Analysis on Why Cash For Clunkers Doesn't Matter Anymore.

Foreword

Its often brought up in various forums, facebook groups, Twitter threads, etc that Cash for Clunkers is the epoch of our current used car market pricing. To many, this program symbolizes everything wrong with “evil guvernment” and how it was a dirty trick to hurt the lower classes and working man. So lets answer the question with numbers and data, does the fallout from 2009s Cash for Clunkers still really linger to this day?

History

Cash for Clunkers was a program put into place in 2009, with the basic premise of offering incentives to get consumers to trade in an old used car and get credit towards buying a new car. The program had some basic caveats that a car had to meet to be eligible:

• Younger than 25 years old (which in 2009 would have made the age limit at 1984)

• Combined MPG of 18 or less.

• “Driveable” condition.

Now I’m sure certain locations were more or less strict on what “driveable” meant. I wouldn’t have known since I was the ripe age of 12 in 2009, so my concerns with government programs to help the post-recession economy were greatly drowned out by computer games, Xbox live, and generally being a dumb middle schooler.

By the time the program ended, the rough total of vehicles scrapped under this program was just under 700,000. (The real number being a reported 677,081). For this report I am going to ignore the car enthusiast trap of getting upset over “rare” cars being crushed. I have personally been in many junkyards due to the nature of my business, and around rare obscure cars long enough to know that just becuase something is rare, doesn’t mean the person who owns it cares. I could go on about this, but I think that’s a topic for the end of this story.

The Data

For reference and transparency, the official spreadsheet of this data can be found here:

Additionally all of this data comes directly from the NHTSA page for CFC as archived by the Wayback Machine.

So lets start by breaking down this data into some top level overviews so we can get an understanding of what we are working with:

So the first thing we see is that the number of vehicles classed as Trucks and SUVs make up a significant portion of the data. This tracks given the <18 MPG requirement of the program. However, its worth noting that the way they classified vehicles into the 3 “Truck” categories and the “Passenger Vehicle” category seem to have almost no bearing on the shape of the vehicle. There is everything from Audi wagons to Mercedes coupes in the Truck class, and then F-150 trucks in the Pass. Vehicle class. A better overview is breaking it all down by make/model:

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Junkyards

Now, let us do some math to get a very very rough number on how many vehicles are being scrapped per year. Now I want to preface this by saying these are rough estimates, however the results will be quite shocking as they are grossly LOWER than the actual number. The data collected here was calculated with the following:

Data from 8 LKQ “Pull Your Part” Junkyards, all in the South Eastern Coastal area of the US. The data was collected from October 1st to December 30th. Additionally, all this data is available for download. I used a data mining software to collect the Year, Make, Model, VIN, and entry date of every vehicle in each yard.

What we are looking at here is the amount of vehicles that were processed and put out into the yard for customers to pull parts from at each location. All of these are trimmed down to Oct. 1 to Dec. 30th, with some already having removed their early October inventory. I tried to get a coverage of a few months since the number of intake vehicles most likely varies during the year, and I do not have a complete enough data set to cover a years worth of inventory yet.

It is worth noting that LKQ has 70 locations across the United States, with most of their yards being in the south and western parts of the country. I highly doubt that LKQ would release a full dossier of information containing historical intake data, however I am sure the insights of such data would be fascinating to see.

Getting back to the data, we can have Excel calculate that in the roughly 3 month period an LKQ yard sees about 1055 cars. Now lets times that by 4 to cover all 4 quarters of the year and we get 4218 cars per year on average. Now that data is for one yard, and LKQ as a corporation operates 70 “Pull Your Part” locations. So lets multiply that by 70 and our rough yearly average for the LKQ Corp. is 295,260 vehicles.

Folks, that is nearly 300,000 vehicles a year just based on rough mathematics using a sample area that I am sure is dwarfed by higher trafficked yards in the western part of the country. This also doesn’t include the thousands of other junkyards across the country whether they be big corporate entities like Pull-a-Part and Pick-N-Pull (creative names I know), or mom and pop operations that are littered all throughout rural America. If you ever doubted the sheer scale of vehicle scrapping and recycling in the United States, I highly recommend you (virtually) travel down Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd in Phoenix, Arizona.

This street feels like miles upon miles of just auto glass, tires bumpers, engines you name it. I recently traveled down this road when I was in PHX for work, and plan on going back just to get drone footage of it all.

The sheer scale of these places can only be felt at ground level since many of these scrap yards have their vehicles stacked multiple cars high.

You may also note that I am going out of my way to specify this is data for the customer facing locations, this is becuase LKQ is not just a junkyard for older vehicles. They are a full time dismantling business, which is why you wont see many brand new vehicles at these locations. They are kept in separate facilities where they can be professionally broken down and their parts sold to body shops and repair shops to keep cars on the road. This leads me to another interesting data point I wanted to compare between the CFC vehicles and the scraped data list, average vehicle age.

The data here shows something I already knew, but was still shocked at the pure uniformity of it. The average age of a vehicle being scrapped in the US is almost exactly 20 years old.

As for the CFC Data here are the top 10 makes that were the newest when scrapped:

Roush Performance (2): 2006

Saturn (1): 2005

Suzuki (1307): 2001

Kia (3181): 2001

Hyundai (566): 1999

Honda (3284): 1998

Aston Martin (1): 1997

Land Rover (2158): 1996

Infiniti (2974): 1996

Chrysler (11226): 1995

And here are the oldest average vehicles scrapped in CFC:

Merkur (42): 1987

Porsche	(11): 1987

ASC Incorporated (4): 1987

CCC Engineering (1): 1987

Excalibur Auto (3): 1987

Maserati (6): 1986

Lambda Control (3): 1986

American Motor (68): 1985

TVR Engineering	(1): 1985

AM General (12): 1984

The average age of a CFC car was built in 1994, which when the program was occurring was a roughly 15 year old vehicle. (In 2009). That means those same vehicles today would be swiftly approaching the 30 year mark. Old enough in most states to qualify for a Historic Tag.

Export Markets

While most of my writing thus far has been regarding junkyards where vehicles are scrapped / dismantled, there is also a massive market for US exported vehicles. Lots of these cars are cheaper commuter cars that end up at IAA auctions when traded in at dealers, or cars sent to Copart lots when insurance totals them out. Parts of South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe have low enough labor rates, while having access to body shop tools that make these repairs more economically viable and give a lot of these cars a second life. A quick look at Copart auctions or even the Copart subreddit, shows that most of the newer vehicles bought from Copart are being bid on from outside of the US.

Reports put the amount of used vehicles exported out of the US yearly well over 1,000,000. This is again more cars per year than C4C killed during its entire program.

A US-spec Dodge Challenger with Ukrainian plates.

The Actual Purpose of C4C

As I was wrtting this article, another C4C ragebait thread got posted on reddit. Thankfully the discourse was pretty level-headed with many commenters agreeing with the fact that this program, while killing a handful of enthusiast vehicles, was overall a culling of some truly miserable 80s-90s cars. A lot of enthusiasts also forgot why the program existed in the first place, to get some sort of life-line back into the automotive economy which was getting absolutely massacred for obvious reasons in the 08-09 downturn.

There was a very poignant comment in the thread too which I wanted to highlight which touches strongly on the whole reason it existed in the first place:

It's a rehashed dig for car enthusiasts who like to blame the admin at the time, but people seem to conveniently forget that the auto industry was devastated the second people suddenly couldn't get HELOCs to buy that shiny new Suburban anymore and the 10 houses they owned 0 money down were all going into foreclosure. I worked in consumer finance tech back then and it was not a good place to be.

Several thousand new car dealerships closed from 2008 - 2009

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/united-states-loses-record-number-of-dealerships-in-2009-says-urban-science-83444032.html

C4C only accounted for ~40 cars per dealer back then and car sales were down an overall 40%. Dealers averaged ~1k sales each which meant C4C would have only gotten ~10% of what they lost in that 2009.

Keeping people employed and getting any amount of money moving in the economy was the immediate goal of the program, not some grand conspiracy to immobilize the masses 20 years later by preventing them from buying a 1990 Buick Century.

Conclusion

While we can bemoan the loss of a Supra or a Foxbody Mustang, lets not pretend that many of the cars in the C4C program would have been long off the road today. When was the last time you saw a Plymouth Voyager or first gen Taurus actually being used as a daily? Even if the car had escaped destruction, I doubt your favorite local rage baiter who posted a C4C article would actually want to drive one.

In 2025, C4C has very little affect on the used car market. With the prices of steel ever climbing, the demand for scrap will continue to go up, and as long as labor rates stay high, many fixable “junker” cars will continue to find their way outside of the US’s borders to places where they can be fixed on the cheap and back on the road. The rise of automotive flippers and the ease of finding cheap cars through online forums like Marketplace has made finding cheap cars a challenge but not impossible. My yard full of sub $500 Volvos, and my daily for years was an $700 Volvo 960 wagon. So next time you see someone say that C4C killed the used car market, ask yourself if they are being genuine or just there to drive engagement.