Planes, Trains, and Buses - A Saab Story

For both of you who are interested in rescuing/saving the post Y2K Saabs, here we go:

NLevine posted this up a few weeks ago:  https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/cars-sale/500-2001-saab-9-5-aero/162839/page1/

Since it was located about 10 minutes from my ancestral home, I foolishly forwarded the ad to my dad and said 'If you're bored in the next week or so, go scope this out". 

The next day, he said there was a Saab shop the next town over (The Doctor, in Acton, MA) who could do the clutch job quickly.  The clutch was definitely not going far before complete failure. 

A couple days later, the car appeared at my parents' house, around the corner from my C900 parts car (another story for another thread later this spring) sporting a new clutch, MC, subframe bushings, and cat-back exhaust.

So, other stuff happened, documents were shipped around, and the car ended up with an OH temp tag and insurance.  My dad did some tinkering around on it, some rust remediation and drove it around for a week or so to see what else would break or fall off.

Step Two - moving myself into position to get the car back to Ohio...

Things worked out for me to get a long weekend this weekend.  Coincidentally, my daughter had a long weekend for Presidents' Day weekend, so I figured we could do a fun father/daughter trip for the weekend.  We procured a couple of one way JetBlue seats.

Thursday morning at CLE:

The row of dots between the row of planes in the deice pits, and the jetway, are plows.  All the plows... Visibility has by now improved to where you can almost see the NASA hangar across the field.

I somehow lost the screen-print, but due to free wifi on JB, I was able to follow most of our very short flight.  CLE>BOS in 1+08, with groundspeeds over 600kt for most of the flight.  An approach to what looked like 200ft ceilings, and we were in Beantown.

A quick run through the airport, and shuttle bus ride later, we arrived at the T station:

Two stops later, we arrived at the New England Aquarium.  We spent a couple hours here:

African Penguins:

Myrtle the Turtle (who is 70-90 years old, and has been at the aquarium since 1970!)

Moray Eel:

Feeding time!!  The feed the penguins individually so they can assess them. 

After a couple hours at the aquarium (which was almost empty), we got on the Blue Line back to the airport, and boarded a Logan Express bus out of the city. 

The original plan was to take the MBTA ferry boat across the harbor, but we missed the shuttle to the dock by a few minutes, and reverted to the train.  Failure .  Otherwise, we would have hit all possible transportation modes in one day.,

This summarizes most of the highly self-important travellers we had to endure throughout the day, regardless of gender:

Apparently, yelling into your bluetooth headset about stupid minutia that shouldn't require more than a single text or comment is now 'efficient use of time' or some other similar newspeak definition.

My daughter commented that the only well-behaved people were on the Blue Line.  Interesting...

By the time we arrived back at the homestead, it was dark, and we had eaten at a brew pub, so work started the next morning, promptly at 1030 ish. 

Car defrosting in the garage:

The plan for the day was to change all the filters and basic fluids and do a quick assessment of stuff that could fall of and/or kill us on the way home.  Fresh stuff ready to go into the car:

Sometime soon after this, my phone died, so just use your imagination from now on...

This should be good. Following. 

Following

In for anything Saab. I miss my '07 9-5 dearly.

So, the filters went in.... Fuel filter looked like it hadn't been touched in a decade or so.  The serpentine belt and idlers look almost new.  I did a couple small/important things like swapped in a seat heater switch for the passenger side. 

We also discovered that the back seat is heated !!

The actual 'drive' part of 'Fly and Drive' went pretty much like this:

Painfully boring, like the hundreds of other times I've done this drive.  This is good!

As the day went on, we finally spied this overhead sign in the distance:

I'm not clear what we're supposed to find here...

Later on, we passed Summit Racing:

An invader had parked in Pat's reserved spot...

My son just started working there part time in the warehouse, so we came up with this glorious plan to go put a 'Sorry about the dent!' note on his car, which would cause him to run around the car with flashlight for an hour and have a dramatic meltdown in the parking lot at midnight.

We then discovered we had neither pen nor paper, and there was much sadness  So we just kept driving...

And arrived at home:

Conclusion of a somewhat boring day in the Swedish Camry. 

The verdict: still has a good amount of power.  We ran 2 tanks of Shell 93 through it, and got an average of 30.2 mpg according to the car's SID, mainly cruising at 75-80; not much less mpg than the 115HP Civic .  It's still possible to surprise modern cars on the superslab.

Things that need to be fixed soon:

• the HVAC system has some kind of blend door issue.  My side was about 123deg, while the pax side was adjustable to normal human parameters.
• The brakes need work: they will get pads/rotors/fluid and a working parking brake next weekend.

Other stuff: it is somewhat cosmetically challenged, which isn't too surprising.  Both doglegs are rusting, which is an expected 9-5 issue.  Also, the paint just needs a lot of TLC.  The fog lights are destroyed, and the front spoiler is MIA.  I didn't see any drips on the driveway after sitting overnight, and we didn't burn any oil or lose any coolant.  Inside is also dirty, but overall in good shape. 

Lol, sorry, just assumed it would be front and center...

And, as proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a sense of humor, this has just shown up down the street from me

Another 1st gen 9-5 Aero  5 spd, this one with ventilated seats too! 

My 9-5 had the blend door problem. IIRC there was cheap fix involving some PVC pipe that could be accomplished without massive interior disassembly; it fixed mine.

Driver’s blend door is harder to get at than the passenger’s but can be accessed with difficulty by taking out the brake pedal brace.  Some breaks can be sleeved, we got a couple of years out of a pvc pipe joint + epoxy putty repair on a break that was un-sleevable. 

So far, I've installed a homelink/compass mirror from a later 9-5 that was kicking around in a box in the basement.  The brakes have improved over the last 1000 miles, so being lazy, I'll defer them for awhile.

Amusingly, both the early (99-01) and update (02-05) mirrors use the same connector, same 5 wires on the same pin numbers, regardless of whether it's a basic mirror or the fancy schmancy homelink one.  However, because Saab, the male/female connectors are reversed on the two generations.  Bizarre...

15 minutes, a bit of solder, and some shrink wrap later, I had a functioning Homelink.  Great success!!

I got a bunch of stuff to try and mitigate some of the  paint issues :

The plan that sounded good earlier in the day was to dig into the HVAC blend door issues, change the cabin air filter, and maybe start doing some clay bar action.

However, winter has decided to return, and it's ~20deg in the garage with a nice 20kt breeze blowing snow thru the gaps around the doors, so I figure I'll stay inside with a glass of bourbon and play with the puppy this evening instead.

@conesaretwoseconds, looking forward to the 'accessing with difficulty' part

In reply to XLR99 :

Glad someone reads my posts!  

Happy the car found a home here...

OK I figure it's time for an update.  I spent a large amount of time last weekend with a buffer trying to grind away as much of the scratches as possible.  Here's a before shot of the trunk lid, apparently used as a butcher block or something. 

And after several rounds of buffing:

Also note the uber downforce addition: $35 pre-painted trunk lip from Taiwan.  Paint is to my eye an almost perfect match.

After a good cleanup, the right side of the car looks like it had some poorly done bodywork done.  Left side looks better.  Now it's a 20 foot paint job, whereas earlier it was a good 75-100 footer.

I got a waterproof back seat cover; the dog loves this car compared to the Sorento; back seat is a good foot lower, so much easier for him to get into.  We took a drive to a nearby park to drop my daughter off at a party and went for a walk while we were there:

This was supposed to have been a cool shot with all the signs, the car, and the ford, but this doofus showed up just as I was getting ready to take the picture.  Oh well...

Today I decided to start looking into the HVAC stuff.  The ACC (Auto Climate Control) can give its' own diagnostics.  I got a code 6: Stepping motor, air-mixing flap, LH - open or short circuit

So I dove under the dash and after fumbling around for awhile, I figured out that apparently the stepper motor has been strategically reacquired.  Possibly by someone hoping to trade it for TP or bread.  Dunno.

The white connector on the right should be plugged into a stepper motor. Just above it you can see the broken stepper motor shaft with a black zip tie on it. 

Of course, the stepper motors on my '04 resting in the next bay over are a different part number.  Ugh.

Sand run park?

Patrick said:

Sand run park?

Yes.  I had never been there before, pretty impressive gorge (for NeOhio, anyway).

Brief update to prove I occasionally do car stuff:

I'm now on 'call from home' status unless we have actual cases to do, so I filled up my small Purell bottle and ventured out to Pull a Part today.  The big score was a matching dark blue drivers' side mirror that doesn;t have tape and safety wire holding it together.  I did battle with stepper motors for the HVAC system and was able to successfully get one out. By the time I moved over to the right side, my back was already screaming. 

I put the mirror on, but will be delaying further HAVC work for a day or two.  Im too old and fat to spend much time under a dash anymore.  I manually adjusted the blend door to provide cool air, which makes it much nicer to drive.

There was also a C900 there, an auto, 4 door non-turbo.  I scored a cruise control/turn signal stalk; in the far distant future I'd like to adapt in a modern electronic cruise control unit.  It also has a nice tan leather passenger seat I'm hoping to go back and grab to make an office chair with.  Didn't think to bring big torx with me, and I may need to wage additional jihad against stepper motors in the future.

Yesterday this happened somehow:

And these arrived at the front door:

So I combined them:

The Centric rotors are pretty nice - some kind of plating on the non-friction surfaces.  I changed the brake fluid using the handy-dandy Motive bleeder.  One of the slider pins on the front was completely mangled (5mm hex), but fortunately I was able to sacrifice another hex bit and remove it.  Also, yay to the engineers who kept the same slider pins across multiple models from 1990 to 2010, as I had some spares lying around from a 9000.

Surprisingly 3 of the 4 bleed screws opened easily; the fourth... well, ended up breaking quarantine for an O'Reilly run 5 minutes before they closed.  I did my usual bedding in process and parked it.

I still need to fix the parking brake - the shoes look ok, but the right side cable boot is messed up and binding.  Im now 'patiently' waiting for ebay to provide me with cables.

The HVAC thing is wierd; I'll take a few more pics and explain once I figure out what the actual problems are.  So far we have a completely absent stepper motor causing fault codes, but the blend door shaft the motor should be hooked to isn't broken.  So someone just crawled under the dash to remove a possibly working motor from a non-broken shaft?

One time, when i was about 19, i was in my truck and one of my favorite things to do was blast that river ford.  I was coming up fast and someone in a convertible popped up approaching from other side.  Road being wet and a gmt400, brakes did nothing and we hit the ford at the same time.  Them going 5 me going 35.  I never stopped but i looked back in my mirror and it wasn't pretty.  We hit it at the same time and i could see the spray off my front tires hitting them full blast.

Just before ending up on a week-long 'vacation', at my soon to be ex employer, I ordered a bunch of stuff for the 9-5.  Upon my return home tonight, it had all arrived:

Ebrake cable & return springs, ball joints & sway bar links, and some HVAC blend arms.

It's prb going to be a week or so before I can get back into it at this point.

Sooo, that week turned into four...without getting into the world of TMI, I'm kinda sorta feeling ok.

So, bearing in mind that I'm going to be a bit mobility-challenged this spring, I happened upon one of these last weekend:

Well, not that exact one.  It's not so shiny, but it also didn't cost more than two of my vehicles...

The transportation process was mostly uneventful, until we got home.  I had figured we would lift it up with the engine hoist, but then someone said 'I got this!'

No clue what it weighs, 800 lb? 

Getting the lift set up this morning, I discovered that it's really not all that 'portable' if you don't have access to either a strong-man or a come-along.  Fortunately, strong-man was available to get it situated for me.  I was able to slide the lighter end, but I can't even move the end with the cylinders.  The garage is too small and tetris-like to actually use the lift when it's under a normal parking spot, so it needs to go in the middle to allow access to both sides. 

So, off to mounting some of the shiny parts onto the less-than-shiny car:

At some point in the past, I was following some guy's epic build of his Vanagon Syncro (HodakaGuy on ADV), and he happened to pull the boot off a new ball joint or something, revealing almost no grease.  I've started doing this as well on zerk-less joints.  New $40 Moog ball joint:

Added Mobil1 grease so that more than 10% of the bearing surface has access to lubricant:

I did the same with the tie rod ends. Strangely, the Moog sway bar end links have zerks, but the ball joints don't.  Wierd

And one side worth of new steerage stuff installed:

No, the car has not been washed since it snowed a few weeks ago .

Sweet

My favorite style lift. Super jellous.