Texas Tea

Went to South Coast Plaza to take my daughter to the Roxy store (GAH they're overpriced! But she had a gift card...) As we were walking up we passed a later white 9-3 Aero vert. Beautiful! Daughter is in love with it. (She's 9.)

Walking back out my wife notices a trail of oil drips that leads right to where we were parked. "Is that our car?"

"No way," I respond. Confident that it's fine. But looking under the car I see a puddle. I pop the hood and break out the mega LED flashlight. The entire passenger side of the car is covered in oil. I do a quick dipstick check and the oil is barely touching the tip. Ruh roh. I toss in the spare quart I keep in the car and we come straight home. Oil light came on about half way so I stopped and picked up a couple more quarts. Light stayed dark the rest of the way. Whew!

The next morning I started the process of trying to locate the oil leak. Wipe, start engine, look. Wipe, start engine, look. Eventually I believed I had located it at the timing chain cover to cylinder head joint. I ordered a gasket set (including a front main seal) and got a rental car.

The rental was a Mazda 2. Cute little thing. Pretty comfortable too. Gutless as anything though.

When the parts came, I started the process of taking everything apart. When I got to pulling the serpentine belt I realized that the leak might be coming from the main! Well. That's easier than the head gasket.

Wipe, start engine, look.

Yup. Main. The slinging of oil by the pulley was hitting that lip over the timing chain cover just right. So I pulled the pulley off using an impact wrench. The seal was a bit of a bear to remove, but I got it done. Found a socket the right size and tapped the new seal in.

I already had the valve cover off, so considering I needed 129 ftlbs of torque to tighten the main pulley bolt, I stuck a screwdriver in the cam sprocket to hold the engine.

You know where this is going, don't you?

 Just at the point where my torque wrench was starting to click, there was a huge BAM noise. The wrench popped off the bolt, and I flopped into the pan of oil that was underneath to catch the drips while I was hunting for the leak.

Oil splattered all over me, the car, and the driveway. Might as well have not bothered with the pan.

I found someone on Saab Central who had a sprocket to sell, and ordered it from him. Another week of rental car too. It wasn't too expensive though. $150 per week.

The next weekend, with a replacement sprocket in hand, I marked several places on the chain, sprockets, and the crank pulley. I went to remove the tensioner, and discovered that I needed a 27mm deep socket.

Really?

Run up to Autozone, buy a socket, and run back. Replacing the sprocket was easy after that.

I start putting things back together, including a new valve cover gasket. No matter how sneaky I was about getting my fingers everywhere, I couldn't hold the gasket in the valve cover while turning it over to install. I used several small dabs of silicone to hold it in place.

I forget which number, but it's the black flexible style. And it worked perfectly. New NGK spark plugs and I'm ready to fire it up!

The car started right up, but there was oil flying everywhere again!

I quickly shut it off and discover the oil is still coming from the front main. GAH! A look through the WIS shows me there's another seal at that location. There's a massive circlip holding the plate that carries the front main seal. If that circlip is removed (thanks to a jumbo pair of long nose pliers) the plate comes out. It has an o-ring around its edge, and mine was broken.

Again, no local parts stores carry this o-ring. But I found a Saab specialist in Irvine, Swedish Mechanic. While the price was quite a bit higher than the online price, he had it on Monday and I didn't have to pay shipping. That actually made it cheaper.

I took a look at the oil pump gears that were behind the cover. I'd noticed a pretty loud noise in this area when I was looking for the leak. The noise has been there since I got the car, but only now had I localized it to this area. The gears "looked" ok. No obvious scoring, broken teeth, anything like that. But I didn't start measuring with feelers, so they still could be bad.

After putting everything together AGAIN, I started the car. My heart was beating in my chest like it was trying to escape.

And....

NO LEAK!!!!

Wow. Nearly 3 weeks of stress over a stupid o-ring.

This is why good mechanics make the money that they do. The Swedish guy would not have made all the mistakes I did. But I learned a lot about my Saab, and the satisfaction of doing the work myself is always far better than just writing a check.

Last Saturday I took the family on a celebratory drive to San Diego. Perfect convertible weather!