Blue seats from a wrecked 900
Dashboard view with EMS steering wheel... and a missing panel
More Saab Related Links
- Official Saab Site
- Saab Central - Useful for Parts and Unofficial Help
- Saab Wiki - Encyclopedia for the Web
So, hole in exhaust manifold... what to do? Well, buy a 1972 Saab 99 from a junk yard of course. Oh wait, that came later. We actually just bought the exhaust manifold first, and only came back later after discovering a minor dent was going to require thousands of dollars to fix because while Saab's are uber safe due to their uni-body construction, they are impossible to fix without laser beams, hydraulic pulling equipment, and a home equity loan.
So, I got the manifold replaced, and began the quirky experience of owning and driving a Saab. I felt like a million bucks driving into the high school parking lot with clearly the most different car in the school! I got some "cool" hub caps from a JC Whitney catalog, and began trying to put my own teenage mark on the car.
Like I said, we later bought the whole 1972 99 we found in a small junk yard down the street from where we lived for another couple of hundred I think. We had a Ford mechanic that lived in our neighborhood who we knew from church. My dad arranged to have him help transfer the engine from my dented '73 into the '72 body. For the next little bit I had a purple 1972-1973 Saab 99 (LE I think)
After awhile, we got it painted white and sand blasted the chrome and painted it a rose-quartz. I found a 900 from another junk yard and bought the seats and wheels (which were much wider than the stock 99 wheels.) We sand blasted the wheels and painted them white as well... they were the sweetest mag wheels. The biggest quirk of the wheels was that they could only accept a metric Michelin tire which looked awesome, held the road like nothing I'd experienced before, and cost way too much to ever be able to replace again. When I put the new wheels on, after the first hard turn I realized that I needed to add some spacers between the brake discs and the rims in order to prevent the tires from rubbing the inside of the wheel wells in a tight turn. Doing so stressed the wheel bolts by giving the lug nuts less bite to hold the wheels on... probably not such a wise move, but the slightly wider stance looked really cool and the wheels didn't rub again.