Head cleaned and reassembled.
Head cleaned and reassembled.
It's finally back together. Over the course of approximately 12 hours yesterday and today I managed to get everything bolted in. Getting the head on without an assistant was not the most fun thing I've ever done, but it's on. I did finally manage to get the timing chain master link in, but it was stubborn - I can only hope that my efforts to peen the ends were sufficient (I hit it as hard as I could while holding it steady and not wanting to break anything).
Aside from just methodically piecing it back into an engine, I ran into a few hurdles, but nothing insurmountable. The oddest one was that the intake manifold bolts needed to be really cranked down to seal the water passages, much harder than I expected. The holes and mating surfaces were clean, and I even used a smear of Curil-T on the gasket, so this was just strange. When I finally got the engine started and idling the alternator was squealing terribly - turns out one of the belts was off the crank pulley and being squeezed behind it. Once I fixed that the squealing stopped. The lifters took a bit to pump up, but now they're pretty quiet. The engine overall is much smoother than it was before.
Still need to flush the cooling system (it was just murky from previous neglect) and try in vain to seal up the exhaust (which is mostly made up of rust, rusty bad welds, and hope), but otherwise it's up and running. Hopefully I can now move on to other car projects for a bit.
Cool. Any chance of a walk around/drive video? I really miss my old 900.
In reply to Stampie (FS) :
I'll see what I can do, though this car may make you rethink your nostalgia unless you have a rust fetish.
The Saab seems determined not to be fully fixed. Drove it this morning and not one, not two, but three new issues appeared.
One, it immediately idled up to 2500RPM and stayed there. Made sure the throttle plate was closed, which only left a big vacuum leak or the ICV. Unplugged the latter and the idle dropped. Pulled it and hosed it out with carb cleaner. Hopefully that solved it.
Two, belt squealing on acceleration. Not a big deal, but I thought I got everything adjusted when I put it back together. Took a little slack out of all three belts (actually four, but the dual alternator belts share an adjuster), since I couldn't tell which one was complaining. We'll see.
Three, and most worryingly, the oil pressure light started flickering at idle, then stayed on steady at idle. Fortunately, I have a gauge and was able to confirm good pressure through the range, so I started looking for anything obvious. First stop the oil pressure switch. Leaking. Great. I just installed a new switch not six months ago, and now it's leaking. Fixing this is more annoying than it should be, as Saab used two different threads for their oil pressure switches - mine is 1/8 NPT. I used a cheap generic the since the old one was questionable, and we see where that got me. All the OE parts I can find are for the other larger thread. So either I find a decent one in the right thread size from another application, or I find an adapter for the OE one. Or I just plug the damn thing and rely on the gauge (not really an option, but I sort of feel like it should be). Any suggestions for a decent part that interchanges and won't fail in less than a year?
EDIT: Found this which I think should be 1/8 NPT. It interchanges into a lot of cars, Jaguars and Volvos mostly. Can anyone confirm the thread size off the top of their head?
So I got the oil pressure sensor leak fixed up with a new RockAuto unit. Let's see how long this one holds up. If and when it fails, I also bought a cheap Ebay combined gauge sender and light switch, so I may try that next.
In the meantime, the cobbled-together exhaust (I think I've dealt with leaks at every pipe and clamp at this point) was the recipient of perhaps the most half-assed "repair" I've every performed on a car. The one remaining muffler (I cut the rear resonator out and replaced it with straight pipe when it blew apart) was leaking through rust holes on the bottom. At some point I will have to bite the bullet and replace the whole thing, but for now I decided to try one last bodge. I grabbed some aluminum sheet, some exhaust putty, a drill, and some pop rivets. You can surmise what happened next. 40 minutes and 20 or so rivets later and I have a quieter exhaust. How long will it last? Your guess is as good as mine.
Today was the first time the Saab broke on me out on the road. Coming home from a bike ride and I started hearing a squeal from the engine. Within a mile it was getting pretty loud. Car was running normally, but the voltage gauge showed 12v instead of the normal 14v when running, so by the time I pulled over I already figured something was up with the alternator. Sure enough, nut holding the adjuster bolt was gone, and the adjuster was halfway out of its hole and riding on the pulley. Great....
I figured I had two choices: call for a hook, or see if I could find a nut to fit the adjuster. I had to give fixing it a shot, as I was ~50 miles from home and really didn't feel like going through the hassle of getting a tow. Fortunately, I was able to find a suitable nut quickly - the A/C compressor is held on the bracket by four bolts, and they are the same size as the alternator adjuster bolt. Getting one off was not as easy as it should be, as access if tight and I didn't have the big Torx I needed to hold the bolt in place. Eventually, I jammed the bolt with some pliers and got the nut loose...and promptly dropped it into a tiny cavity right below the alternator. Fishing that out took 20 miserable, wrist-abrading minutes, but eventually I got it out. After that it was just a matter of tightening everything up enough to get home.
Lessons learned: 1) check everything else I had off when I had the head off; 2) buy Torx keys for the car toolkit; 3) throw some wire (for fishing out hardware I drop) and zip ties (just because) in there as well.
I feel you on the stuff not checked when you pull apart an engine and hope you remembered everything when it goes back together. I made it 8 hrs of highway driving after pulling the valve covers on my Accord a while back, and suddenly the car went into limp mode 30 miles out. I flashered all the way home, popped the hood and oh wow none of the coil packs are bolted down. Whoops.
love this project. One of the first cars to ever get me interested in cars, in general, was a buddy with a 900 turbo. That car was awesome. Glad to see they are still living on.
How are the alternator mount bushings? I've lost alternator hardware when they were failing. If you do replace them, I'd recommend rubber. The poly bushings didn't last very long for me and I'm not alone in that experience.
In reply to Powar (Forum Supporter) :
I did the alternator bushings last year when I had the front of the engine apart to take care of the front crank seal. Used the OE rubber. It still shakes some, but that seems to be their normal operating condition. In this case I'm pretty sure I just missed getting the nut tightened fully.
Small fixes continue, but in this case the payoff was rather satisfying. Two things needed to be addressed - one had been lurking for a while, and the other was entirely new.
First off, chasing exhaust leaks on this car has become something of an obsession. I dealt with most of the obvious stuff, but I was still hearing it blowing under acceleration. Turns out it was the gaskets between the manifold and the downpipe. I had serious fears about trying to get the bolts off - this is a 30-year old New England car, after all - but I couldn't leave this alone, so I slathered them in PBlaster and hoped for the best. Two were quite stubborn, but in the end they all spun off fairly smoothly, and most importantly, nothing broke. I wrestled the downpipe off and found this mess:
I didn't have replacements, but I did have a sheet of fairly thick exhaust gasket material, so I traced out the shapes and cut new gaskets; I did the holes with careful use of a drill and a hole saw. They actually came out pretty well, but what was even better was the result. Not only is the engine considerably quieter, it also sounds and feels smoother, and seems to have gotten a little bump in power as well. There a long, fairly steep uphill stretch on the highway that has always required a drop to 4th gear (at least below 3000RPM), but today I was able to climb it at a steady 2700RPM in 5th. Not bad for an hour's work.
The second problem was that one of my two keys decided it didn't like being all boring and straight and intact anymore, and tried to twist itself into two pieces when I went to start the car last week. Found new blanks online and had them cut locally. The remaining good key was a little tweaked, and had always been a little finicky, but the new ones open every lock first time with no fuss. Plus they have a cool rubber grip that the old ones lacked.
All in all, some low-effort progress that made things a little nicer to use.
I'm really bad at taking photos while I'm working on something unless I specifically set out to document it. Sorry. If you want a very good look at the guts of this thing TwinSaabs has an excellent write-up with many photos here.
Driving home the other night I was not pleased to discover that my instrument cluster lights had decided to quit - not the indicator and warning lamps, but the two overhead bulbs that shine down on the instruments. Since I figured both bulbs blowing simultaneously was not likely, I resolved that I would have to pull the cluster (again) to investigate the wiring and the likely culprit, the dimmer rheostat.
While I was yanking the dash face off I realized that there were a few other things that I could address while I was in there, most notably that my center vents had recently stopped playing nice. The ventilation system in these cars is vacuum-controlled, so I knew there was probably a leak somewhere in the tangle of hoses and dashpots that make it work. And since I had the whole cluster apart, I could take another crack at getting the odometer to play along - it's been intermittent since my last attempt, before which it was quite dead.
All things considered things went fairly well. I tackled the ventilation system first, since it was the easiest. Vacuum pump test for each line from the switch turned up a leak in the side vent circuit, which splits off into two lines - sure enough, the right side line had slithered off its dashpot. Reattached and everything was good.
On to the instrument lights. I confirmed voltage and ground where it should be, and that the bulbs did not simultaneously die, which left me with the dimmer. It's a Rube Goldberg contraption that relies on the springiness of a copper plate to keep contact between the various important bits. It seemed reasonable to think that this was responsible, so I cleaned everything, sanded the contact areas, and bent the copper plate to add some tension. Multimeter confirmed it was working, so I popped that back together and hoped it would still be cooperative once it was reinstalled.
Finally, I pulled out the odometer guts. The problem here is familiar to anyone who has a plastic VDO odometer made in the 1970 or 80s - the plastic gears ride on a metal shaft, and eventually they lose their grip, so the shaft spins but the gears don't. Having already been in here I knew what to expect. I pushed things back into line and used a little cyanoacrylate to (hopefully) bind it to the shaft. I also had to glue a couple other things, like one of the (plastic) clips that holds the wiring connectors and the (plastic) collar that locks the speedo cable into the housing. Old plastic parts suck.
Anyway, it's back together and so far everything seems to be working. The biggest unknown is the odometer - just because I reattached the one gear that was slipping doesn't mean another one won't start doing it tomorrow. Whatever.
Another boring, less than timely update. In the past few months the 900 has gotten a few new bits and a little fettling. One of these days I'll remember to take pictures of some of this stuff....
First off, it has a new cat-back exhaust. I had patched the old one more times than I care to admit, and it was held together by baling wire and good thoughts. The two new pieces were like $120 to my door, so I really had no excuse for waiting as long as I did. With them in place it's just a nicer place to be - not necessarily a lot quieter, but better. Plus I'm not worried about it falling off.
Next up, a new right handbrake cable. The old one was totally seized. Rockauto had them for cheap, so I grabbed it and threw it in. Nothing really difficult about it, and now I have a working handbrake. Now I can go practice my FWD rally skills on the dirt roads around here.
I also did a few things to improve the shifting, one directly and one indirectly. For those unfamiliar, the Saab 900 shifter is long and ungainly, and it lacks precision (to be polite about it). After 30 years mine was really quite unpleasant to use. I finally got fed up and looked at the shifter mechanism. There wasn't much I could do absent new parts and significant disassembly, but I did find play in the cup that holds the ball on the shift lever. Installing thin aluminum shims around the outside of the cup took the play out and made shifting more precise.
The indirect improvement came from addressing the soft and weeping slave cylinder. The slave sits up high and requires removing the shaft that transmits motion from the clutch to the chain drive (and thus to the transmission). It's a very tight fit - I ended up having to pull the pressure plate in order to get it back in, and even then it was a fight. Rebuilding was straightforward, and gave me a much firmer pedal. This in turn means more travel, which seems to be allowing the clutch to fully disengage (I now suspect it was not doing this before) and making shifting easier.
Other than that it's just been being driven and loaded with furniture and other home improvement stuff, and carrying my bike to the trails.
I can’t decide if this thread makes me want a Saab more, or less!
Either way, thanks for posting your journey!
In reply to CyberEric :
Fair point. If it means anything, for all the ups and downs I've had with this car, I don't recall feeling buyer's remorse at any point. I bought this car as a rolling project, and it was cheap because of what it needed, so I knew what I was getting into. I like driving it more than I expected to - I had never driven one before, so I was really going strictly on reputation.
If you can find a decent one, or a less than decent one if you're willing to do the work, I say go for it. Mine is cheap, rough, dirty fun.
Sounds good.
Ive always wanted one, so maybe someday I’ll make that happen.
I fit a 15 cu ft refrigerator-freezer in the back of my '83 900 Turbo. Wish I still had that car.
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