saablog

I’ve now been enjoying the BSOS 900 for 27 months, and have put about 11,000 miles on it during that time. At this point it is a fairly nice car, with pretty-good condition interior, 15-foot shiny paint (i.e it looks great from 15 feet), and it is comfortable and fun to drive.

Because this summer’s autocross season has been cancelled, I’ve got no competetions to run. I’ve been using the 900 to commute to customer’s sites to save gas instead of driving the R. It’s an enjoyable drive, and a distinctive vehicle no matter where it is parked or driven.

As my writing has picked up on autosavant.net, I’ve been approved for many manufacturers’ test vehicle fleets. In the next month I’ll be driving a Jaguar XJ Super V8, Mazda MX-5 (Miata) Power Retractable Hard Top, Suzuki SX4 Crossover Touring, and Land Rover LR3.  I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to drive each of these vehicles for a week. As my friend Dr. Casey Shillam said, we’re growing up and our dreams are coming true. But it leaves me with a bit of a problem regarding where I should park all of these cars… Ani’s 9-5, my V70R, my 900, and my press vehicle.

At  the same time, my dad has been shopping for a third car for their household, one that gets better fuel economy than his V8 Nissan Titan 4×4. He sent me a link last week to a clapped-out 1989 Honda CRX with some ridiculously high mileage on the odometer, with faded paint and a ruined interior, for $2700. Unacceptable.

That said, I’ve proposed to my dad that he drive the 900 for the next few months, and he is “really excited”. It will save him gas, and it will free up parking at my house.  All of my hard work on the 900 will not go unappreciated; and I don’t have to sell my “toy” car which has been my favorite hobby since I bought it.

I’ll try to keep you all posted on the 900’s sojourn in Kennydale, and maybe I can convince my dad to write some blog posts to keep you all up to date.

My 900 is cool! Freezin’ cold actually.

It’s April 18. It shouldn’t be snowing like this. Boo!

Last month the WWSCC’s Autocross schedule dates were all tentative, and this month the calendar shows no WWSCC autocross events.

I checked with Zane (who helped me get started in Autocross) and he said that Boeing isn’t offering their lot for events this year, so without a venue the season is off. Two other organizations are offering events, but those events are run in Bremerton and Packwood, both of which are a long way from here.

In any case, this means I’ve got no season to run. Suddenly I find myself at a crossroads. The whole reason I bought the 900 was for autocross. Now that I’ve got it, and have been driving it regularly, I can’t imagine selling it. But at the same time, I don’t need a third car, even though it’s a great commuter that gets better fuel economy on regular gas than my Volvo does on Premium.

For now, I’m making no decisions.

I did have a fun drive through downtown Seattle the other day… going down Columbia, I bottomed out the front lower frame member when coming across a cross-street going at least the speed limit. It was hilarious.

The 900 and I have returned from a successful journey to Portland. It was pretty much a fly in, fly out type of trip. The blender I was testing overflowed on its first three minute cycle, flooding the motor and wetting live parts. So I didn’t have to stay long in Portland.

I left the office just before 4:00 PM yesterday, expecting to hit traffic getting out of Portland. I didn’t. After the metered onramp to Hwy 26 at Murray Road, I didn’t stop again until reaching Shoreline. From Intertek’s door to mine took exactly 3 hours, with 2:58 of those in motion and 2 minutes at stop lights and the metered ramp.

When I first got the 900, it was my friend Dave Newell who suggested I start a blog to keep people informed about every small detail of news about my race car. Dave explicitly told me to make a post about the first time I got the car to 100 MPH. I told him not to worry, that it isn’t a 100 MPH type of car. My apoligies to Dave for misleading him.

That’s a pretty damn good picture from my partiacular camera phone, and it gives a lot of good information. You can see that it is about 5 minutes past 5:00 PM, that I’ve gone 82 miles since resetting my trip odometer at the last fill-up, and that I’m in 4th gear nearing red line (I used 4th gear to gain the speed as I was climbing a hill). My only regret is that I was not coordinated enough to have kept my foot in it for the nearly one-second delay between pressing the “capture” button on the phone and the time the shutter captured the photo.

The photo doesn’t show that I’m driving up the hill on I-5 NB, approaching the second Northbound rest-area after the Oregon/Washington boarder. The road there is three lanes wide, and offers nowhere for the WSP to hide, provided you can remember to slow down before cresting the hill. There are few places on I-5 where I’m comfortable exceeding the speed limit by that margin; I’ve just seen them too many places. In fact, in the Chehalis 60 MPH zone the Acura TL behind me did get stopped for speeding, though I was afraid it might have been me the trooper was after, as I’d crept up to about 65 MPH. Fortunately (both for me and for the TL) the trooper was about a mile north of the END CONSTRUCTION sign. 

The one caveat to the photo is that the speedo in the 900 is a bit optimistic at higher speeds. After seeing the needle approach 105 just an instant before snapping the above photo, I was convinced I’d topped the century mark. However, a later check on the Garmin showed my maximum speed for the trip as 92.9 MPH. Hmm. That’s a pretty big margin of error. Like about 10 percent.

In any case, I’ll be sending Dave an email to be sure he checks out the Saablog. The photo above is specifically for him.

The “Ten Thousand” in the post title is in reference to the fact that I’ve now driven the car 10,000 miles since buying it in January, 2006. The 900 had just 110,991 miles on it when I purchased it, and on the way to Portland on Monday evening I rolled past 120,991 and on past 121,000.

With the improvements I’ve made, the 900 just keeps getting better and better. I had a comfortable, pleasant, and FAST trip to Portland and home. When I got home, Ani remarked that the 900 seems to make the trip more quickly than the R. Part of that has to do with the fact that I usually hit traffic between Shoreline and Beaverton, which didn’t happen this week. Another part is that I use the cruise control in the R to make sure I don’t speed, but the 900’s cruise control is inoperative, so my right Puma is the only speed control. In any case, it was a quick trip!

On Saturday I finally got the oxygen sensor loose by using a big wrench of my Papa’s. The large 7/8 and 13/16 combo is inscribed with “C. Agren” and is really long. I threaded the wires of the oxygen sensor through the 7/8 hole and lowered the wrench onto the sensor, by working from beneath the car. Then I turned my body around so my legs were under the car, and I pushed on the wrench with my legs. The sensor loosened.

After removing the sensor, I set to work installing the new one. I had to splice on the original Saab connnector (since I had purchased a generic sensor), then I put on anti-seize compound and installed the sensor. The next step (which happened on Sunday) was to take the car for a test drive. The repair manual stated that it might take up to 10 minutes of driving with the vehicle warmed up to clear the Check Engine fault. It did take a full 10 minutes, but the light did go out and hasn’t re-appeared.

I ended up needing to come to Portland this afternoon to do some testing in our lab. I would have taken the Volvo, but I had to take in to the shop this morning for a failed power steering reservoir (it was leaking fluid from a seam in the reservoir) which caused loud power steering noise when turning and also caused a half-dollar size circle of fluid to appear on my garage floor. I dropped it off today and also asked my SM to look into why I’m having a difficult time engaging reverse… he said there is a Tech Note about that problem, which requires removing the transmission to re-lubricate some internal parts (which should be permanently lubricated). Hmm. I wonder how long the R will be out?

In any case, in lieu of renting a car Ani suggested that I take the 900. Having just spent a bunch of money on the car, it needs to earn some money back, and since it has just recently been repaired and gotten a new sensor, it shoudl be good to go. So I packed the 900 FULL this afternoon with my sample, test equipment, and some miscellaneous stuff needing to be returned to the office. I left home around 3:15, and made it (on a non-stop drive) in 2 hrs 55 mins to the Joy Wok restaurant near Jim and Brenda’s house. Pretty good timing from the North End. The 900 performed flawlessly, though the cruise control is again AWOL and there were some pretty brisk winds which attempted to push me off course. Hopefully I’ll be returning (swiftly) home tomorrow.

So you all know I’m a little bit fanatic about Saabs. I’m also pretty fanatic about Luisa. So when she learned to spell SAAB last weekend when she was helping me wash the car I was really excited… Watch this!

The Check Engine lamp is on pretty much full-time now.  It makes me crazy.

I checked eeuroparts.com, and the OEM sensor is $140. Then I checked saabpartspeople.com, and they wanted $240. Then I checked my local auto parts store, who had a sensor for $66. I bought that one.

So today I went out to remove the sensor. I can’t get it out. I even jacked up the car and took off the wheel so I could get under the car to get better grip on the wrench. No dice. The nice folks on saabcentral say the exhaust should be hot which will release some of the tension on the fitting. But I’m afraid I’d burn myself that way.  I’m sure I’ll figure it out somehow but it is pretty frustrating nonetheless

On Monday I stopped by Europa, because as I was driving by I saw the 900 in the open work bay. The head was on, and Tien expected to have the car finished later in the day. I told him that I was leaving for LA and that I would pick the car up on Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday he phoned and said that the CHECK ENGINE light is on at idle, he diagnosed it as failed Oxygen sensor. Those usually get fouled by the coolant when a head gasket fails. Since I’m accustomed to the intermittent CE light (and since I’ve just passed emission test anyhow) I told him to leave it as is.

I walked over yesterday morning about 8:45 and picked up the car. Total including tax was $1329. Ouch. Time to start putting the miles on the car to earn some of that money back at 50.5 cents per mile. So I drive home, loaded up my test equipment, and headed down to Tumwater for a project… the second-farthest trip I’ve ever taken the 900 on.

It was great to be back in the 900. It sounded better than before (I’d had a lot of valve noise which was fixed when the head was machined and valve stem seals were replaced). The belts were properly tensioned so didn’t make any noise. About halfway there I decided to try the cruise control which has always been inoperative, and IT WORKED. That will make it a bit nicer to use the 900 on longer freeway drives where I tend to creep up in speed.

After my project I got lunch in Olympia near the capital, where I stopped for this nice photo. While I was taking it, the Pontiac Vibe that is parked behind me pulled into that spot and went back-and-forth about 15 times to get crookedly parked in the spot. The heavy-set middle-aged female driver fit my imagined demographic perfectly.

I also put the car seat in the 900 when I got back, to go pick up Luisa. She told me repeatedly that my black car with orange stripe is “cool”. She’s quite an arbiter of good taste, so I take that as quite a compliment.

I finally have an appointment for the 900 to be fixed, it’ll go under the knife next week on Tuesday. I chose Europa, which is on 175th very close to my house. I stopped in and chatted with them today, and got an estimate of $850-900 which is fair. I’ve walked by there and seen classic 900s in for repair so I know they are familar with Saabs. The mechanic was quite knowledgeable about the 2.1 engine in my car.

I’ll be glad to get the 900 on the road again. I renewed the license last week, but haven’t driven it for a long time.

The auto shop teacher at the local high school replied to my email, saying that for liability reasons their classes are not allowed to work on “outside projects.” Stupid liability lawsuits. I still would like to check out the two local community colleges. I do know that Shoreline Community College has an auto shop vocational program, so perhaps they actually work on cars there. I’ll let you know.

Today I had to run in to Ballard to get wipers for Ani’s car (the non-Saab ones sucked, and I had a coupon for Carter Saab) and on my way home I stopped by Moe’s Automotive SAAB Specialist on NW 85th & 17th, because I saw a bunch of jacked-up classic 900s sitting around the lot. Walking in to the lobby of his shop was like stepping back in time 30 years: cigarette smoke rose up in the air from an overfilled ashtray, and the lobby smelled like that ashtray had been overfilled since long before the new millennium was rung in. The yellowed lighted sign and the worn key-hook board played off worn linoleum and chipped Formica. When Moe walked in from the shop, his greasy coveralls with his embroidered nametag had the patina of time, oil, gas, and smoke. When I asked him for an estimate, he wrote down the year and motor of my car on a paper, turned it over in his hand, and told me (seemingly without referencing anything in particular) that it would be about $850. That’s about HALF the price that Scanwest told me. It’s still more than I actually paid for the car, but half price nonetheless. After a brief discussion of the car’s symptoms, and confirmation that it hadn’t overheated, I told him I’d save up some money and be in touch.

Depending on what I hear from the community colleges, I’m thinking Moe is my man. I’ve got almost that much money saved up from the car’s earnings, and can work on reclaiming the rest of the money by putting more miles on the car throughout the year.