bestow wisdom upon me 98 volvo wagon

I just got an offer to trade an isuzu pick up for a 98 volvo cross county v70xc wagon. The isuzu is worth about $1700. I've been toying with the idea of a wagon lately, but these weren't on my radar.

That $1700 will be a good start on the money needed to maintain the V70XC for the first couple months.

Don't be afraid. They're just like any other Volvo of that era, just on tall springs and with a (somewhat fragile) AWD system. My college-age nephew drives my in-laws old one with well over 150k miles on it, the only major problem it's had was the trans computer crapped out when he tried to jump start it and reversed polarity. He now knows not to run the radio all night and red to red and black to black keeps the smoke in the wires All the usual Volvo issues of that era apply - AC evap will eventually fail and require that the dash come out to replace it and it will eat headlights at an astonishing rate, etc. It should have the low pressure turbo motor, reliable and powerful enough to be entertaining but not so much power that the transmission is overstressed.

nothing to add other then these...

When I owned a fwd Volvo 850 I remember reading of the weak fragile awd system that can be expensive to fix. I also remember the wisdom of not running various brands of tires on the cars. Not just different sizes but different brands in the same size. Seems that even the slight size differences from different manufactures and different tread size/styles can cause issues.

Here is some follow up reading:
http://www.volvoxc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15498

I seem to recall reading that if the AWD system goes bad it is pretty simple and cheap to convert it to FWD only.

EvanB wrote: I seem to recall reading that if the AWD system goes bad it is pretty simple and cheap to convert it to FWD only.

A write up on that conversion:
http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20836