First off, Hi everyone. I've been away for a while as I sold my old V70R a few years back but have now bought a nice '97 S70 T5 manual This is a long intro, but please bear with me ...

Its been stood a while, and neglected mechanically despite being polished to within an inch of its life, so I've been doing the usual Stage 0 stuff - replacing all the coolant hoses, vacuum hoses, plugs, HT leads (originals still fitted after 23 years!) etc etc etc culminating in changing the cambelt, tensioner, idler, waterpump etc.

I've done 3 cambelt swaps on T5s before, and all went without issue... which is a dangerous thing as I felt (over?) confident in doing it this time. This car is going to be a long term keeper (I regretted selling my 850R auto a few years back, and this is nigh on the same car being a pre-ME7, but with a more compliant ride and a manual gearbox). So I decided to check the cam seals as well - belt & braces - but something I've never done before. I removed the sprockets and only after pulling them off the camshafts did I notice the elongated slots And then they moved a touch, presumably due to valve spring pressure - I'd taken the belt off of course. Usually I use a cam locking tool when doing a belt change - but this had also been removed to allow the sprockets to come off...

So, with the cams having moved, I quickly researched getting them set by aligning the slots at the back of the cams. As I don't have the correct tool, I did it visually - they seemed fine after a minute adjustment. So with everything apparently set up correctly and the new belt etc in place, I turned the engine over by hand - no resistance felt through three complete rotations, so I thought I'd dodged the bullet...

After doing some other stuff I finally tried starting it up. It fired up on the button, but sounded like a diesel, so I killed it pretty quickly. I'm hoping that no damage has been done as I was able to turn the engine over easily ??? I've now ordered a genuine Volvo camshaft alignment tool from Skandix which is due in a few days time. Once I've timed everything up again with that, I'm going to fire it up and then do a compression test if it runs ok. I'm assuming that this would show damage such as bent valves as the cylinders wouldn't hold pressure? I'll be looking for something over 140 psi as indicating an acceptable seal - do you think this is reasonable?

Finally, if - IF - the compression test shows up some bent valves, would I get away with just pulling the head and changing them? The contact must have been minimal so I can't see the head itself being damaged? Or am I missing something? I've read elsewhere that the head is a scrapper once the valve have been bent, but I assume this is only if the cambelt has snapped at high rpm breaking the valve heads off and causing damage that way?

Thanks in advance for your patience in reading this far, and for any advice you could offer. I'm still in utter disbelief at what an utter plank I've been.