Slow Fleet – SAAB 900 Sept – December Update

Latest Costs: £54
Miles since last update: 0

Seeing as bits of the 900 broke in Wales I figured it would be a good idea to get it sorted. Firstly I needed to get a replacement downpipe, I wasn’t going to mess around with some additional bodging on it for it to fall off again…

Lots of internet searching and many phone calls later got me the correct downpipe and a few fittings delivered, so I at least could make a start…

The manifold on a 900 is easy to get to, thankfully, with the two downpipe flange bolts easy to access. The trouble is you need to get underneath the car to drag the remains out, after disconnecting the Lambda probe of course…

With all of that accomplished I could drag the remains on the exhaust system out from underneath and think about draining the gearbox oil.

The trouble is, when Government Motors (then General Motors) started acquiring their stake in Saab they decided to do the sort of penny pinching that was associated with some of their lesser quality brands. So, in their wisdom to save a few pence they deleted the gearbox drain plug… Now it’s supposed to be sealed for life, but oil is cheaper than gearboxes…

So It’s off with the diff cover to get it out, and hopefully avoid too much oil spillage and to give it a bit of a clean.

One home made gasket later…

and it was time to refit it to the diff and put the oil in.

For many years the accepted wisdom on Saab gearboxes was to use 10W/40 mineral engine oil, which meets API-GL4/5. Now this is harder to get than it was 20+ years ago and not only that, since then oils have come on a little. When SAAB specced the oils for the transmissions the sorts of transmission fluids generally weren’t available. So in went some Castrol Syntrax, 80/90, gear oil.

Then all I needed to do was fit the new downpipe, easy…. except there was one problem…

To be continued…