Doc Brown travels back in time in a 99 Saturn SW2

Whelp, winter is on its way and its time to prepare for the snow, salt and whatnot.   As many of you may recall, only a few years ago I picked up a blue Saturn sedan  for a winter beater...well I never really liked that car and the heater is somewhat problematic.  

A trip to the Craigslist website yielded only a few Saturn wagons.  Most of them were FUBAR...except this cream puff.  It's a 99SW2 loaded to the gills with options that I normally regard as unnecessary. The unnecessary option list includes automatic transmission,  ABS brakes, traction control, cruise control, power windows, locks and mirror and to top it off, keyless entry.  Meh... I suppose the cruise control will be nice.  

 The new addition to the Saturn fleet is a wagon.  112K miles and fully loaded.  

The blue Saturn.... a perfectly good car and ultra reliable.  The only real issue is the heater sucks.  The problem with the heater is still unresolved after two years of service.  At this point it is believed that the mixing door or the cowl vents are not operating properly.  The thought of digging out the HVAC unit is enough to abandon this car as a primary winter beater.     

'Uncle Buck', with 340K HARD miles on the clock with insurmountable damage, decay and neglect the car is the poster child of deferred maintenance.  This car is no longer road worthy.... even by Michigan standards.  Uncle Buck lives in the back yard and is used to pull tree stumps.  At this point I still haven't decided what to do with it, but it's still a few years away from seeing the scrap yard.  

 Moor in just a moment... 

...continued

Automagic transmission.....  after many years of driving rental cars, I feel confident in my ability to drive an automatic.  Although, at this point, I'm not ruling out a five speed swap

Doh! C engine.... hmmmm.... I have always been a SOHC person... I guess its time to try something different.

Nice!  already set up with a hitch!

Trailer light connector.... awesome!  

Moar in just a second

Although Saturn's are built tough, occasionally they need a bit of work.  Saturn's are stupid simple to work on and cheap to keep.

The only difference between a M60 tank and a Saturn is ?....   

hoboy, looks like we got an oil burner.  Meh,  Saturn's eat oil like candy.....  Not too worried.... yet.  Anyway that Bosch iridium plug is a real problem.  Saturn's don't like fancy spark plugs.  Regular copper core plugs are just fine for these plastic go-carts.  

The Bosch plugs were replaced with el'cheapo Autolite plugs.  Normally I only use NGK, however they were out of stock at the local auto emporium.  We'll revisit the plugs in a few thousand miles.....  

The ignition module on Saturn are somewhat prone to corrosion.  A quick clean up with a wire brush removes all the crud.

The ignition module mounts to the trans-axle.  The mounting pad was also cleaned.

The rear struts were NFG.  Normally this isn't an issue, however due to the optional anti-sway bar, the blown struts made the car handle like E36 M3.  The blue Saturn had issues with the front struts and the finial solution was to replace them with el'cheapo ebay struts.  While the el'cheapo struts solved the issue on the blue car, I was disappointed with the higher spring rate and made the blue car sit an inch or two higher in the front.  This time around I picked up a set of reasonably good struts and had a go with swapping them in.  

Getting the old struts off was stupid simple.    

The old rear struts came apart with ease.  I used an el'cheapo harbor freight spring compressor to squeeze the springs enough to safely remove them.

Rebuilt struts ready for another 100K miles  ....or more...  

The drivers power window was somewhat slow and needed some attention.  On Saturns, 99% of any door repairs requires the external panel to be removed.  I really like this feature.

Door panels are held on with a handful of these fasteners.  Nice!

The front wheels were making a soft clicking sound...When I pulled the wheels I discovered a common rookie mistake.  The brake hose pictured is routed incorrectly and will contact the tire.  The only damage done was a slight abrasion on the plastic cover that protects the hose.

This is the correct way to rout the brake hoses.  

Stay tuned!

Rust sucks.  I recently parted an E34 that came from Boston, never again will I buy a car from up North.  I like Saturns though, you can park them anywhere and not worry about door dings.  I had an SC2 and Ion.  The Ion loved getting air and took out a minivan.

In reply to atl530i :

Up here in the rust belt winter beaters are a necessary fact of life.  I typically buy 'good' cars from the south.  Uncle Buck originally came from southern California and was nearly pristine when I had it hauled to Michigan.  Although Uncle Buck has had the living E36 M3 beat out of it...  the rust is not obvious upon first glance.   Saturn's tend to look fine even when they are riddled with rust.  The trick is to find one with little or no rocker panel rust.

Aside from 21 years of constant abuse, Uncle Buck still sort of looks ok ... sort of.

The horror of the rust doesn't start until the rear door is opened.  eeek a mouse!...  Anyway, part of the reason I hang on to Uncle Buck is to watch it decay.  This rust hole has been advancing at an alarming rate for the past few years.

Nice get on the fantastic plastic. 

Can we pinpoint the year that Saturn owners all forgot to wave at each other?

In reply to GCrites80s :

That's a great question, I wasn't even aware that was ever a thing.

Every time I see another Saturn my immediate thought is how much oil is in the crankcase?..

Good lord, your 'cream puff' car has more rust than any Saturn I've ever had.  I should really just ship my cars to you when I'm done with them 

The exterior door panel removal is nice... until one of the plastic tabs that supports the female fastener breaks off .  I broke 2 of these on my driver's door panel and occasionally I get a pretty good rattle out of it.  I really should snag another one, but I'm too lazy to call any junkyards and searching ebay is tedious.

What kind of clips hold the exterior door panel on? Is it just moulded into the panel?

The door panel has tabs with clipnuts on them.  Sometimes the locktite on the threads is so tight that you'll rotate the clip-nut around and shear off the plastic tab before backing the screw out of the nut.

Googling for a pic, it looks like the design was improved with the L series and Ion where the tabs have much more support from a perimeter flange making it more difficult to shear off that area.  Hopefully they changed (removed?) the locktite as well.

For this weeks episode of stupid simple Saturn stuff, We'll go ahead and service the automatic transaxle.  While I no big fan of automatic transmissions, the Saturn unit has got to be the simplist I have ever worked on.  Let's take a look at some pictures......

The transmission shifted fine and fluid smelled ok but with 112K on the odometer with no evidence of a past service... it was time to change the fluid.  Checking the fluid level on a Saturn is probably the most comlicated thing in the whole procedure.  The dipstick is right up front and easy to access, however its very hard to read corectly.  The proper way to check the fluid is to pull the dip stick, wipe it, then reinsert for a split second then pull it again.  If the dip stick is left in for the transmission for more than a second, you will get a false reading....    I had to learn this the hard way.   In the photo above the fluid level appeard fine, but in reality that was not the case.

The low effort and somewht lazy way to service the trans it to remove the air filter box.  Once the air filter assembly is removed the trans filter can be easily acessed.   Keep in mind the whole service needs to be done with the car completely level.  No ramps, jackstands or other crazy E36 M3 is required.

Air filter box removed and this awsome spin on filter is right there.  All cars should be built like this.

Saturns are equipped with a magnet type thingy that fits between the filter and transmission case.  This one seems to have a bit of crud stuck to it.  A quick wipe with a rag makes it like new again.  

The Saturn automatic transaxle dosn't have a "pan" on the bottom.  To drain the fluid this bolt needs to be removed.  Removing the bolt and catching the used fluid can be done with the car on the ground.

According to various internet posts, the expected amount of fluid to be recovered is a little over 4 Qts.  As you can see in the above picture the transmission seems to have been a little low on fluid.....    

A gallon of fluid and new filter were hand delivered to me by an agent of the United States government (USPS).   I really try to support the local local brick and motar stores, but lately this has becoming a more of nuisance.   

Fluid and filter ready to be installed....   The crazy part of this whole ordeal was the transmission was about three qts low.... and still worked fine.    The total amount of fluid needed to top off the gearbox was 5.2 Qts.  

Once the proper procedure on checking the fluid level was learned  and the extra fluid was added...  um,  I noticed a slight difference in performance.  The most noticable difference was in the way the torque converter would lock up.  Before the transmission service, the converter lockup was somewhat noticable.  After the service the lockup is a lot less pronounced. 

Stay tuned!

Nice find!

I still really like Saturn wagons.  Yes, I said that out loud