In this episode of the RB Saga:
You may recall I couldn't work out how to remove the outer fixing for the RB's boot gas strut, which looked like this:
... I tapped out the inner side roll pin at the top easily enough, but that achieved nothing (you will see why later), but still couldn't see how the to unfasten the outer. I decided, rightly or wrongly (as it turns out unnecessarily) to drill the head off the fixing, that was easy enough and the rest of it tapped out. I turned out to be fixed swivel pin, pressed on in the factory. The gas strut is not bolted on at the outer side, but just rests under tension in a slot like this:
No harm done (but lots of time wasted), I had the gas strut out and replaced the pin with a bolt and nylock nut.
It turns out the inboard end is not positively fixed by the roll pin either, it just has a forked end that is held in place by the strut's own tension - so there had been no need to remove the roll pin either.
There didn't seem much wrong with the left side strut, I could barely compress it with my 15 stone, so I decided to just re-fit it. What a palaver: having replaced the roll pin the only way of fitting the strut was to compress it by about 30mm, then slide both ends into place and allow its own tension to fix it there. I used my chippy's Workmate to compress the strut then tied it up like the Xmas turkey with some thin SWR and a thimble:
(... don't look if you have a concern for health and safety).
The rest of the reinstallation was simple enough, just slide it into place with the boot held open with a yard broomstick and then release the SWR.
That had all been a bit more difficult than I intended, so I made a cuppa and thought about whether I took the other side off or not. The struts seemed to still have a good amount of pressure in them and more or less held the boot up in the right way. Getting the right side out would be difficult without either a special Volvo tool to compress the gas spring or quite a dangerous procedure to wire up the strut in its compressed position (with the boot nearly closed), then open the lid.
... I decided the strut system was nowhere near broken enough to warrant fixing, in fact it worked about 80% as well as it did when new - so I decided to try Dave's suggestion of helping the mechanism a bit with a bungee:
I must say, this works fairly well and is quite unobtrusive (in fact it stops the spare wheel rolling around), so I think I'll get some new bungees next time I'm in town and improve this method a bit.
As you may see here, the mechanism holds the hefty boot up quite well:
This is about the 80% open position, it is quite stable there. Maybe the extra weight of the spoiler is the only thing preventing 100%?
So, sometimes it is better to retrace one's steps back to the last good place, which is what I did this morn. The RB isn't a new motor car and I realised that I was being silly trying to make this fairly unimportant part work like new. It is fine the way it is, with a little help from a £1 bungee.
One last point: Mr Volvo made this one much harder than it needed to be.
:-)