Saab Gets New Shoes Jan 23, 2006
We installed new wheels and tires on our Saab 9-2x this weekend. The stock 16-inch wheels were needed on our Subaru Rally project for some street travel to RallyCrosses. This gave us a chance to bolt on a set of very light and very strong (and very attractive!) Team Dynamics Pro Race 1.2 wheels. These 17x7 inch wheels weigh 17 pounds a piece.
These were mounted up with Nitto's NeoGen tires. These street performance oriented tires are designed to work well with large amounts of negative camber (think rear of slammed Honda Civic) without being chewed to shreds. Since many of our cars have track friendly (but not tire friendly) alignments, we thought these would be a great tire to check out.
Our Saab actually had a pretty funky alignment to begin with, with close to a degree of negative camber in the rear wheels and a little bit of positive camber in the front. Talk about a recipe for understeer! It made even fun street driving a little numb. With the wheels off, we adjusted the factory eccentric strut mounting bolts to their maximum amount of negative camber, in this case, about .8 degrees. We then dialed our toe to zero on the front wheels, leaving the back as-is.
The result is a much higher level of grip, equating to more driving fun and more safety!
Saab’s new inner strength. Jan 30, 2006
Our Saab got a new strut brace that we sourced from eBay. It wound up costing less than $50, shipped to our door. The Saab now has about 11500 miles on it and continues to be a comfortable and problem-free ride.
On Saturday, it swallowed up a bunch of 8 and 10 foot pieces of cedar for some home improvement work. Wagons are cool.
Fog Lights for the Saab Feb 28, 2006
We found a set of used fog lights from the Aero model on Saab92x.com for $60 shipped to our door. What's really neat is that all we need to do now is order a relay (about $10) and a switch (about $30), as all of the other wiring is already in the car, ready to be plugged in. While the fogs aren't as good as those on our rally car, they will help us find our way to work on those foggy Florida mornings.
The fog lights are being protected by yellow film from Lamin-X.
Saab 9-2x gets rails…roof rails. Apr 27, 2006
We traded our trim strips on the roof of our Saab 9-2x for the roof rails from its sister car, the Subaru Impreza. It was an easy swap, after we had disassembled have of the interior to drop the headliner. We're now looking for the cross bars that mount on these rails so we can haul a canoe or kayak.
Nice Rack May 18, 2006
Now that our Saab has the roof rails from an Impreza WRX, we can easily fit some of Yakima's neat crossbars and fittings. We used the LowRider mounts, a pair of 48-inch RoundBars and a 32" Fairing on our Saab. The LowRider mounts are protected with a set of four SKS locks. Next up, we'll look at their kayak saddles and straps to figure out what we need to haul a two-person kayak.
The Yakima products are very well-engineered with very easy-to-follow directions, we had everything installed in about 20 minutes!