It has been almost a whole year since I bought the 900 for the purpose of having a dedicated autocross vehicle. The handling has always been pretty poor, so after race tires, the biggest priority was shocks, or so I said. The summer autocross season came and went, and I just kept talking about the fact that I needed shocks, but never actually got them.
Maybe some of that was due to budget. I bought the car for $800 knowing it needed work. The tires were around $300, plus the extra rims for $100 so I could run the race tires only for autocrosses. Other necessities such as power window motors, belts and hoses, etc, were a few hundred more. The shocks that will help me the most are the KONI red adjustable shocks. I was able to find them at www.shox.com for $408 for a set, plus $20 shipping. That's half of the price of the car, just in shocks. But with the promise of help from my brother to put them on the car, I bit the bullet and ordered the KONIs last month.
Remember- you can click on any of the photos to make them larger.
The shocks arrived the day after Christmas, and on Thursday of that week my brother Erik showed up around 11:00 to help me, while Ani and Katie went out to have lunch and get pedicures. We decided to start with the rear shocks, because we thought they'd be slightly easier. HAH! The instructions in the Bentley book are simple... support car on jack stands, remove rear wheels, slightly jack rear suspension arm, remove lower bolt, remove upper nuts, remove shock from car. Installation is reverse of removal.
Blue shock = the enemy.
So up goes the car onto jack stands and off come the wheels. Then we get out my tools to work on the car. Erik didn't think my meager supply of "imperial" wrenches would help us out, he was pretty disappointed by my tool supply. So off we went in the R to the Shoreline Sears for a set of metric wrenches. I probably needed those anyway.
My meager wrench supply.
Cruisin' in the R... to Sears.
My cool new wrenches...
So with the new wrenches, we started on the driver side lower mounting bolt. Using my nice torque wrench as a breaker, Erik put some weight into the bolt. The nut was so rusted on that the bolt sheared at the nut. We used a crowbar to get the rest of the bolt out. So now we're down a bolt, but at least that bolt is removed.
Uh-oh.
Next we go to work on the upper mount. The two nuts holding it in place are rusted together, and rusted to the shock shaft. In attempting to loosen them, he broke my brand new 7mm wrench... good thing Craftsman are guaranteed for life. I finally convinced Erik that we neeed to hacksaw the part below the bolts, but that meant hacksawing where the compressed rubber bushing was located. So using the hacksaw, two different pocket knives plus a mystery tool (perhaps a brake tool of some type), we managed to get the bushing out, so that we could have about 2 inches of freeplay for moving the hacksaw back and forth. I finally sawed most of the way through and my brother used a hammer to complete the job. The shock was now loose.
The mystery tool...
Using just the end of the hacksaw
The Bentley book merely described the next step as "remove shock from body". umm, OK. We thought it might be removed through the bottom of the suspension arm, but it seemed like a tight squeeze. So my brother used a crowbar and hammer to try to pound the shock and its big bushing down through the suspension arm. But it wasn't going, and eventually jammed down in there. We were kind of stuck, but decided to move on to the passenger side.
The bottom nut came off of the bolt pretty easily on the passenger side, but we couldnt' get the bolt to budge. Undeterred, Erik went to work on the nuts holding the top of the shock in place, and we were shocked (hmm..) that they weren't rusted in place, they came off pretty easily. Maybe it was the Simple Green we decided to use when we ran out of WD-40.
Not enough room for two heads in the wheelarch...
Looking back at the bottom bolt, we determined that the bolt was rusted to the inside of the lower shock mounting bushing. No amount of hammering, wrenching, and prying was able to get it out. We were frustrated. The women were back from their pedicure and were amused to see how far from "done" we were. We ate lunch and returned to the garage, working with the jack, large hammers, and pry bars to try to loosen the shock. Eventually with a lot of banging and jacking it was freed from the suspension arm, and we finally figured out how to manouver the shock out of the body. Success!
This one's worth 1000 words...
Photo with the shock removed. Hans wrote here that "You can drive the car without a rear shock. I put many 100s of miles on a '78 99 this way (top mount punched through). Car was fully loaded with skiing/climbing gear, too." I don't think I'm willing to try that...
Returning to the passenger side, we used a C-clamp against the suspension arm to exert outward presure on the bolt. The pressure eventually prevailed, and the bolt slowly backed itself out. We got the passenger side shock out as darkness was falling. We had dinner plans, so we washed up.
When the driver-side bolt had broken, I called Scanwest Autosport and Carter Saab to ask whether they stocked replacements. Neither did. On the way to dinner we stopped at an autoparts store, but they didn't have such a bolt. They recommended Tacoma Screw in Ballard. I was able to convince Erik to come over on Friday to help me install the shocks, assuming I could get the bolt. Since the 900 has also been Erik's "rental car" while he was in Seattle, and since it was now disabled in my garage, I loaned him the R to drive. He considered it quite an upgrade.
On Friday morning Ani, Luisa and I drove down to Ballard to Tacoma Screw. It was a cool place, and within 3 minutes the clerk came back with the bolts and nuts I needed for both the driver and passenger sides of the car. The only difference was the taper on the end of the bolt, which the original bolt had. It turns out that allows the bolt to be driven into place which helps align the shock in the mounting holes. We ended up using the original removed bolt for that purpose, then replacing it on each side with the new bolt.
In any case, after the screw store, we took Luisa to the locks to see the boats because it was a nice sunny morning. Then we returned home, and Erik arrived, and we set to work. We first adjusted the shocks to their firmest setting (they're adjustable only when removed from the car), then used the jack to compress them to get them over the suspension arm and brake line. Then we had to jiggle them around to get everything lined up. Finally we could loosely fasten a top nut to hold the shock in place, then drive in the bottom bolt, tighten, and secure the top.
See that little bit of red above the hub? The new shock is in place!
Our original goal had been to replace all four shocks that day. It turns out that it took a day and a half just to replace the two in the rear. The fronts are still in their box in the garage; I recently read a bit of a horror story on Saab Central about a guy replacing his classic 900's front shocks... so I imagine that will be no picnic.
With the wheels on and back on the road, the 900's ride was greatly improved. It feels so much more settled on the road now, I had no idea what an impact new shocks have on a car's ride. I'm excited to see how the car does now at autocross, and I'm excited to get the front shocks installed. I'll write all about it when I complete the installation...
