Swede dreams
New carb completes a long and difficult restoration
Ever had that feeling that your project car simply doesn’t want to live? Every step of the restoration, every leap of progress made results in an almighty stumble backwards, where you end up flat on your bum, dazed and bewildered and wishing you’d just splashed out on a decent example in the first place. I don’t mind admitting that I have wished I hadn’t bought my Saab many times. However, previous owners Mark and Trudi Hodges – both passionate Saab enthusiasts – had real faith in it. Their belief was that somewhere in this heap was a great car and my job was to find it. The quest has taken almost two years.
Replacing the tired old V4 for a gruff-sounding but ‘upgraded’ reconditioned unit, there was sporadic coughing and there was something terribly wrong with the column shift. Working up through the gears to fourth meant stirring the stick in assorted directions: to engage third meant popping it back down from second to fourth, then into third. Top gear meant a yank forwards, in and out of second, with a robust downward yank to fourth. Pulling and tugging at the gearshift in bewilderment, it was like trying to knit a pullover whilst riding a donkey.
The big fix
As you’ll have read a few months ago, I took the car to Saab enthusiast John Green, whose lifelong passion for Swedish vehicles led to a number of problems being nailed within days. Following days of rewiring and crawling into every crevice, the gearchange column was then stripped and repaired, a leaking brake master cylinder reservoir replaced and… well you can see where this is going. ‘So much of the car was either faulty, worn or missing. It could
so easily have been just a parts car.’ Were it not for the thorough welding and corrosion resistance work previously carried out on the body, that might well have been the sensible thing to do.
With a house move and renovation on the cards and the commitment of a new puppy, John had to put his efforts on hold. You could therefore say he was swapping one dog for another…
Extra expertise
I turned to fellow Saab nut Tony Parkhurst, who has run a Saab specialist in Yeovil for decades. ‘I spent the first three hours trying to work out why the ruddy thing wouldn’t start’. He checked everything, mirroring John’s methodical process right down to valve clearances. ‘Then, it started making rough, dry noises when you turned it over. It was horrible!’ Tony removed the plugs, squirted oil into each cylinder and the noise vanished. Evidently, the carb was chucking in so much fuel on one side, it was washing the bores clean of oil.
After that, it started up instantly on the key – but appeared on tickover to run only on three cylinders. Tony swapped the distributor, cap and leads for that of his own V4. ‘By pure chance though, unbeknownst to me, one of the leads on my car wasn’t very clever and so your car still sounded like a bag of spanners. I’ve never known a Saab like this. I was beginning to think John was right and it was possessed.’
The list of oddities continued. The handbrake was all wrong, apparently. ‘It’d hold a horse box on the back of it now!’ Tony had also noticed that after a few minutes, the coil was too hot to touch so he found an old genuine Saab one in the shed and fitted that. The iffy carb was next. A call to Webcon led to the arrival of a brand spanking new unit – a 32/36DGV. According to Webcon’s man Martin Eva, it would be easier to tune as it has fixed venturis. It was the final piece of the jigsaw. ‘After fitting the new carb, it ran brilliantly’ beamed Tony. The final task was to drive it home – a journey you can read about soon. But needless to say, I left Tony with the realisation that a car is not a priceless vase. It is merely a thing – and all things, as it turns out, can be fixed. Eventually. james.walshe@practicalclassics.co.uk