A post long enough to make up for the fact that it’s been over a week since I posted!
Work has been stressing me out this week. I’m working on a project that is pretty involved, with a Japanese client, who just fired their interpreter/agent in the
US. The client in Japan was under the assumption that we were well into testing their product, but in reality we haven’t started. I was to have spent most of June on the project, but my scheduler had other jobs which could be completed quickly that she decided to squeeze into my schedule. So now we’re behind on my project, and my customer’s expectations of quick testing and certification haven’t been met.
What does this have to do with the 900 and the Saablog, you ask? Well, quite a bit. Last week I didn’t drive the 900 all week, I was too busy so it sat waiting for me beside the driveway with a broken sunroof motor, getting pooped on by birds.
This week I got the sunroof motor on Monday, and installed it the same day. The sunroof works GREAT! But I felt like I had too much work to do to put in time on a good blog posting. Work, work, work. Well today, I burned out. At about 1:45 I couldn’t sit here in my basement office another minute.
I got up from my chair, went to the garage, and got the car wash stuff. I washed the 900, then put wax on the hood and roof. It really got a lot shinier, and a lot of the scratches in the paint became much less visible . Next I removed the driver-side headlamp wipe/wash assembly (the passenger side one was removed the first weekend I owned the car, because it is broken). Ani told me the car looked lopsided with only one wiper, and it turns out it really did.
To remove the wiper assembly, the headlight must first be removed. Since the hood of the 900 hinges at the front, it’s tough to get the headlight assembly out. You’ve got to pop the hood so the front edge rises, where two bolts on top of the assembly are accessed. Then open the hood and unfasten the screw securing the headlamp to the corner lamp housing. Next remove the air filter cover so the fourth headlamp screw can be reached; then the headlamp can be removed.
I closed the hood and removed the headlamp, then also pulled off the grill so I would have more space to work while removing the two bolts holding the thing into the car. Removing the washer fluid hose (and pinching it off with a binder clip from my desk) was easy; but the electrical connector was very difficult to loosen; I doused it with WD-40 and used two pairs of pliers to get it apart. Someday I might want to reinstall those wipers and the fog lamps… I’d have to get a new fog lamp lens and a new passenger-side wiper arm. I’d probably only do that if I was selling the car. I do really like the somewhat pretentious look of the wiper arms on cars (the 900 is the 4th car in a row I’ve bought with them), but they’re a little over the top for my “racecar”.
In the process of doing all of this, I realized that the air filter cover is a bit warped, so in re-assembly I tried to fit it back a little better. The filter element is a cylindrical-shaped device that fits into an oval filter housing; it doesn’t seem to fit very well. The whole thing is pretty ugly.
“Re-assembly is the reverse of removal”, with the exception of the fact that I dropped the 8mm socket into the fenderwell when trying to reinstall the headlight. And the fact that the screw securing the headlamp to the corner lamp housing didn’t line up properly. I did manage to fish the socket out of the bowels of the car and get it all reassembled.
I also need to show off the shift knob I got this week along with the sunroof motor. It makes the tactile experience of driving this car with it’s failed 2nd gear synchro just a little bit sweeter.
I’ve got a race this weekend, stay posted!
