Did some stuff this weekend on the Saab.

Power Steering Hose

Last weekend the power steering fluid decided to leave the car. I *think* I traced the leak to the return hose, the thin one between the rack and the reservoir. Nobody has the correct molded hose (again) so I used a 3/8" Gates transmission cooler line.

Now we remove the old hose:

• Unclip the reservoir mount
• Remove BOTH hoses from the bottom (you'll see why in a minute)
• Remove the 10mm plastic nut holding the fuse box on and lift fuse box out of the way
• With the fuse box out of the way you can access the return hose at the rack for removal
• Snake the old hose out.

Now, if you don't have the proper hose, you probably won't want to route the line the same way. There would be two kinks that could impede the flow. Instead, I ran the line under and around the ABS unit in such a way as to minimize the bends. This ended up using 36" of hose. 

Follow the above directions in reverse until you get to the reservoir. You may find some looong needle nose pliers will help get that plastic nut back on to hold the fuse box. It's too tight for my hands to seat the nut. If you have spring clamps on the hoses, this is a good time to replace them. If you can source new spring clamps, go for it! If not, some quality worm clamps can be used as replacements. Don't reuse spring clamps.

Make sure you have given yourself some extra play with the line when attaching it to the bottom of the reservoir. The nipple is bigger than the hose, and it will take some work to get it on there. This is why we detached BOTH hoses and have the reservoir in hand. You can rotate or wiggle the reservoir as needed. It took me 20 minutes of work to get it on there. (Would have gone faster if I had a heat gun I think... But that's in Colorado. :( )

I put everything back and filled it with fluid and fired it up. Looks good! We'll see if the level drops again...

High Boost Misfire

This also started last week. At WOT (Wide Open Throttle) and high RPMs such as just before a shift, the car would buck and spit out a black cloud of smoke.

I started a thread over at Saab Central asking about those symptoms. I had assumed the black smoke was oil. Two folks came back saying it was ignition and I should check out the spark plugs.

Nobody local had NGK's, so I settled for Autolites. (I found Bosch, but after seeing the munged up threads on the ones for my old Bus, there's no way I'm buying Bosch plugs again.) I gapped the new plugs to .040 and slobbed up the threads with anti-seize.

When I pulled out the old ones I found this:

That one wasn't the worst of the four either. The side electrode was worn to a point while the central electrode was heavily rounded. The orange ash looks good, and all four were the same color.

Replacing the plugs resulted in no more misfire. I took my daughter for a test drive, gunning it everywhere. She loves it when I do that.

Heater Hose Replacement Update

When I installed the new hose, I had reused the factory spring clamps.

BAD IDEA

The new hose has a smaller wall thickness, so the clamps are able to apply less pressure on the hose/nipple than they did on the old hose. Combined with age and loss of spring tension, this allowed one of the hoses to pop loose this morning. Oddly enough, it was the stretched wide end at the driver's side of the engine.

Lucky for me, this happened right around the corner from my house so I was able to get it back home. I had a proper hose clamp in the garage, so I installed that and got to work. This weekend I'll be replacing all the clamps with worm clamps. Sigh.

Driving through Hollywood last Saturday, I smelled coolant. When we came out of The Grove, I saw a bunch of coolant on the ground under the Saab. I popped the hood, didn't see a hole or leak immediately, so dumped all the bottled water I had in the car and made it home.

The above pic is what I found. The heater hose had a slit. Of course, no local shops had one of these things, so I ordered one from RockAuto. It's a pair of molded hoses, bound together in the middle. Old one on the left, channellocks for size perspective.

The hoses use those stupid spring clamps instead of worm clamps, which was lots of fun to both release and attach. And the heater core ends had to be reached from under the car. But all in all, not a horrible job. Took about half an hour.