Hi there! I have a 2000 Volvo V70 XC wagon. I just purchased this car in January and it needed a lot of love and care. Here’s my car question: I have a rattling noise that started about a week ago. Just this morning (on my way to the mechanic ironically/luckily) the rattling became very loud and apparent. The noise sounds something like a piece of metal rattling around in an empty coffee can. The noise seemed to go away when I was accelerating, get louder when coasting, and then slowed down in frequency (not volume) as the speed of my car slowed down. My mechanic also isn’t sure what’s wrong. He has had himself and 2 other mechanics look at, in addition to hooking it up to machines and making phone calls to Volvo. He says the noise is unmistakably coming from my drive-shaft and that it sounds like it is traveling from one end of the drive shaft to the other. He also said it’s odd because the place that the noise is coming from is just a shaft and shouldn’t be making any noise? His only solution (which he’s not sure of) is to replace the drive shaft altogether, at a minimum of $1000. Help?
Your Volvo may have what is called a Torque Tube drive shaft. This basically means a drive shaft within a drive shaft. If it does, the inner drive shaft may have broken and what is now causing the noise. But you can’t see it on the outside of the drive shaft.
And if it costs $1000 to replace, it’s a Torque Tube drive shaft.
Tester
I replaced the front to back drive shaft on a '98 V70XC wagon. If was getting a rumbling vibration at low speeds and it was worse when turning. It is a very expensive part, I bought mine from a Volvo dealer on line for a discount and it was about $800.00. The shaft is complicated, it has a joint at each end and there is a third joint in the middle of the whole thing
The drive line of these Volvo’s is complicated, joints and shafts all over the place in the front and back. Hopefully you’ll have some confidence that the shaft is the problem. Tough to spend this kind of money and not get fix you want.
After several very expensive repairs I gave up on my Volvo and sold it. Good luck.
I’m not 100% certain but I think the driveshafts on this model uses joints similar to CV joints instead of U-joints.
Sometimes inspecting something like this may involve removing the shaft from the car, placing it on the workbench, and going over it physically by hand to detect any anomaly.
This is also true of halfshafts with CV joints, U-joints, and even suspension components such as ball joints and tie rod ends.
If you live in or near a major metro area you might check the Yellow Pages under the “drivelines” category for a shop that specializes in things like this. There is a good chance they could repair the existing one for far less than a grand.
Failing that, I’d check eBay or something like that for a good used or reman unit if the price is right. Hope that helps.
Thank you all for your advice! I just found this forum that seems to have diagnosed my problem exactly: a bad cv joint in/on the drive shaft. http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26548
I can apparently take the drive shaft out altogether and drive the car as FWD to see if the noise is gone to be certain the drive shaft is my problem. I’m fairly certain it is from this post and my mechanic saying that that is exactly where the noise is coming from. Does anyone know if you can just replace the cv joint (whichever one it is) on the drive shaft instead of replacing the entire thing? Thanks again!
I took a quick look at eBay and there is a replaceable joint shown for a V70 shaft with a price of around 120 dollars. Some net searching on the websites for some major parts houses such as NAPA, Advance, etc may also show these joints; maybe even cheaper. Hope that helps.
On a 2000? Just remove the drive shaft and drive the car as FWD, there are far too many other expensive parts in the AWD system that can go wrong to make it worth paying a mechanic to repair after 10yrs of use.