By Kevin Miller
09.06.2008
It has been since the beginning of May that my dad has been driving the 900. During that time I've had a bunch of great cars to drive for
Autosavant, though for the past few weeks I've just been enjoying our 9-5 and the V70R. Among the cars I drove for Autosavant was a
2008 Saab Turbo X Sport Combi, the ultimate black Saab. Truly. I'd love to own that.
Yesterday I picked up the BSOS from my dad to take it to a big Saab meet-up. The proprietor of the site trollhattansaab.net, an Australian, was in Vancouver BC, and had the idea to have a big Saab meet-up in Washington. Since I am an avid reader of
TrollhattanSaab.net to get breaking Saab news (which I've used on Autosavant and credited him), I was very interested to go. When I picked up the 900 from my dad, it was amazingly clean. Nice work Dad!
Because it was in Issaquah at the XXX drive in, Ani and Luisa came too, after a visit to Ani's dad's. So both of our Saabs were in attendance. It was a GREAT meet, with a huge turnout. We had 26 cars present, including our two. Everything from a mid-70s 99 to a 2008 9-5 sedan. Fortunately the weather was beautiful. We chatted, went on a drive (when Ani and Luisa went home), then stayed and chatted some more. I lasted until the event ended around 7:00. By that time tons of huge 1950 and 1960s American cars were arriving, any one of them could have either (a) put my Saab in its trunk, or (b) reversed over my car like it was a speed bump. Fortunately neither of those things happened.
One thing I had noticed about the 900 was that the passenger-side headlight had a lot of condensation inside of it. I knew that it had some rock chips in it, but for whatever reason the water hadn't dried out. Today I pulled the headlight out, dried it out as well as I could in 2 hours, and covered the half of the lens with all of the holes with some protective film left over from a project where I covered the lenses on our 9-5 after it was broken by a rock. Hopefully this will keep more water out, and also hopefully the water that is in there will be able to evaporate over time. We'll see.
Removal of the headlight isn't too tough, but it involves removing the grille, loosening two bolts above the headlight assembly, one below it, and loosening a screw that holds the corner lamp in place next to the headlamp. When it's all removed, the front of the car looks pretty wrecked, as you can see in the photos.
After drying the housing with paper towels, a hairdryer, and sunlight, I cleaned the lens with glass cleaner and applied the film. Becuase of 1.6 decades of use, I couldn't get all of the grime from the headlight, which resulted in an uneven fit of the film in some places. It's going to be OK, it's way better than having water in the headlight. It felt good to do a little project on my car. I had fun driving it yesterday.
This week on Friday I've got a Saab 9-3 Aero Convertible coming, followed by a Mini Cooper JCW, Nissan 350Z, BMW X5, and Kia Borrego EX. Autosavant has recently re-launched as www.autosavant.com, you should check it out, maybe even subscribe. I'll be getting the 900 back to my dad. I'll try to get him to write every once in a while.