Tommi’s Saab Site

I have put the T8 Special for sale. I really love it, but I have too many cars and not enough time and space for all of them.

Sad to see it go, but I really want to focus on  the two stroke – V4 department. I really hope it finds a very good home

Some photos:

The spring is here! (I think… Yesterday it snowed a bit again…).

I woke up the T8 Special from it’s winter hibernation last thursday to make it ready for the Saabclub Spring Meeting on the next saturday. I had some issues last fall with the car – the fuel cut kicked in at full boost (not a pleasant surprise passing a long truck…) and also the idling was a bit iffy. Also it seemed to be drinking a lot of gas…

So, time to sort those out:

All in all a quick fix, I also changed the motor oil for this year (I change the motor oil every year even though the car doesn’t get a lot of miles).

The turbo needed to have it’s clutch changed.

The first order of business was to make some room:

In the turbo there’s a bit of intake tubes and hoses to remove…

The clutch assembly and the slave cylinder were pretty much shot. No wonder the clutch felt crap:

To remove the housing the splines need to be compressed and a circular tool inserted between them and the housing. This will release the tension between the slave and the clutch. They will then slide out together.

There are some special tools for the job but ofcourse we don’t have any of those

At first I tried to put in a piece of brake tube (dad pushing on the clutch pedal):

But it wasn’t quite thick enough to relieve the tension and I couldn’t get the clutch out. I could have tried a thicker tube/wire but the slave and pressure bearing were so bad they didn’t push the splines far enough.

It was far easier to use another tool – an angle grinder

That got the job done in no time (besides there’s no reason to use the old assembly so it’s scrap anyway).

The next step is to remove the flywheel bearing. You can use an extractor tool for it, we had this simple tool that dad made:

It can also be used for extracting the clutch shaft.

Time to put in a new bearing:

A couple of big sockets and an iron bar does the job just fine.

So – why not remove the flywheel for this job? Because to get the flywheel out you need to remove the starter, and to get to the starter rear mount you need to remove the throttle body and stuff…

Remember to lube the relevant places:

Time to put the new clutch housing, slave cylinder and pressure bearing in.

The procedure is similar to the extraction, but ofcourse in reverse order. Apply pressure to the splines and insert the round tool or a piece of tubing or wire between them and the housing. A piece of fuel line (8 mm thick) works fine.

The assembly then slides into place “with ease” (Well, never easily, you still need some juggling to get it in there).

Done.

Remove the wire, connect the hydraulic hose, and bleed the system thoroughly untill you see clear liquid coming through.

There’s a pretty good walkthrough for the job at http://www.thesaabsite.com/900old/c900clutchrepair.htm

I have done some maintenance stuff on the T8 Special.

Since the car needs to be MOT’d next week I had the emissions tested. It’s a catalysator model so it’s considered a “low emission vehicle” and the maximum emission values are pretty strict.

T8 Kats can be difficult when it comes to emissions so I was a bit worried what the situation is with this car. But, as it turned out, all the emission values were spot on! No problems what so ever.

And ofcourse the storage dust was washed away.

The next order of business was to fix the hatch lock which had given me some trouble. The mechanism had gathered some rust and grime and wasn’t functioning properly.

I decided to change the whole mechanism since I had a very good one from one of the spare parts cars. The only problem was that the attachment screws and nuts were pretty much solid rust.

No other way to remove them but grind them all off.

Well, it certainly took a while but I finally got them loose. But to actually remove the handle it turned out that I also need to remove the reflector plate that’s between the rear lights. And to remove the reflector plate I also needed to remove the license plate…

Fortunately putting it all back together was easier since I used new nuts and bolts and a lot of graphite grease…

So – quite a bit more work than I initially thought but it got done.  Now the central locking mechanism functions without problems also on the hatch.

Time to get the Saab 900 T8 Special out of the garage (it hasn’t been driven in 6 months…). There’s a Saab Club spring event a week from now so I need to fix a few things and get it on the road:

I had to change the brake master cylinder. I got a good replacement from the spare parts car – so I decided to use it rather than buy a new one (even though they are pretty cheap).

The old master cylinder

The used but good replacement (with new seals)

Changing the master cylinder on the 900 is easy, just a few bolts – but bleeding the brakes afterwards turned out to be a bit tricky.

Bleeding the brakes

Only two of the four calipers could be bled with the vacuum pump – somebody had broken off the other bleedscrews on the two other calipers!

Actually it took quite a lot of persuation to get the two intact screws open but I finally succeeded. The other two calipers had to be bled from the brakeline nuts.

New calipers only cost around 60 euros each so I think those are now on the purchase list.

Not much happening currently – the winter is here!

They promised a snow storm for this evening, so I had to go and make some room in the garage for the B105. I don’t want to leave it outside for the winter. So, a short clip about that:

And as I was there anyways I figured I better have the Turbo running a bit too, since the battery seemed to be all but dead already (after two months without driving – seems to me that the alarm takes a lot of juice). A clip about that also: