Slow Fleet – SAAB 900 Sept – November Update

Latest Costs: £35
Miles since last update: 378

I left the last post with the 900 needing a top up of coolant, which I did in the car park before driving off to the fantastic little place of Llandanwg where I used the sandy car park to paste a little more Gun Gum onto the exhaust and to replace a tail light bulb that had blown.

Now things seemed quieter again we set off towards Derbyshire with a planned stop for lunch in Dolgellau. With the stunning scenery and pleasant, dry and bright weather made the coast road even better. That was until reaching Barmouth. Coming into the town I could hear the exhaust making a lot of cracking noises and somewhat louder than I’d like. SAAB owners are not normally antisocial types. Making my way through the town slowly kept the noise at bay, but on the climb out the other side the noise changed… I accelerated up the hill and prodded the throttle a little too much as there was a huge crack followed by a bang and then a scraping noise… I pulled into the convenient layby on the right and stopped to have a look and found this.

I never assumed that the leak would have been a complete failure of the joint to the flange, but I guess it was. There weren’t too many options at this point other than trying to get some sort of recovery as I didn’t have enough with me to lash it back together. There is one problem, being in the middle of nowhere you tend to lose mobile signal and I didn’t have any. A few minutes of wandering round and being passed by a recovery vehicle, whose driver was to engrossed in his phone call to notice me waving at him I admitted defeat and went back to the car. I had the great idea of driving it back to Barmouth to find somewhere that would do what I would have done if I was at home. Weld a sleeve around the outside to hold it together, you see the flange was still attached to the Cat so it should be alright…

Much slow driving and more scraping noises later we arrived in the town. A quick check at a bicycle place in an old garage where there might be a place to help and I was directed to Coastline Tyres. A couple of attempts to get in resulted in the exhaust getting stuck and the young chap there unbolted it for me and I put it on the ramp. I explained what I’d do to it and he said his father does the welding and wouldn’t be back for an hour. I then decided lunch would be in Barmouth, which was fine as the food at The Last Inn is excellent.

We returned to the 900 to find a sleeve welded on, the noise a lot less and strong enough to drive with. Not bad for £35 either, it’s worth knowing about them if you need help in the area. So a quick stop on the sea front and back on the way to Derbyshire, a little later than planned…

 
Simon