[Al]

Bu**er - just had the 2.3 stg.1 serviced - My Turbo is on the way out - occasional white smoke and an oil leak. But the good news the nice man at Hallam and Sutherns has found a 75K mile turbo at a reasonable price and will be fitting it a week Tuesday.

Kev wondered out loud if my stg.1 tuning has contributed to the string of woes on this car
DI
Clutch
Turbo
Big ends
(He commented that it goes like an Aero)

Surely the only real difference to the hardware is the turbo itself?

Views, comments?

Alyn

 

[cdcarlsson]

The only thing that sticks out is the big ends, I've not heard of them needing doing on a 9000 before. (Waits for the yells from the audience...)

I wonder if the car suffered from low oil level or pressure before you bought it?

Nick.

 

[1989agoodvintage]

The Big ends are rarely mentioned so I reckon it's fair to say your problem is a bit of a freak occurance, very unfortunate of course! DI's can often go after a change of ECU software, I can't explain why but it does seem to happen to a lot of people who post here. The clutch could just be due to age, I wasn't aware that LPT's use a less substantial clutch than say an Aero, perhaps someone could state a case? The turbo would be a T25 and they're usually pretty robust, mine's 185K old and still working well, producing large amounts of boots which is nice.

But they can fail prematurely if they're not nursed, i.e. the cars been driven hard from a cold start and not allowed a minute or two of warm-down driving before shutting off the engine.

Just a few thoughts ...

 

[California Saab Tuner]

Some possible thoughts on DI racks:

Higher boost typically increases the heat load that the cyllinder head and spark plugs must dissipate. The two electrodes of the spark plug dissipate heat into different surfaces. The negaitve into the head where it is grounded, the positive dissipates it through the wire into the DI rack since it obviously cannot come into direct contact with the head itself. The center electrode is heat isolated in the cyllinder to keep it from getting too hot, but a fair amount of heat must be getting conducted up to those DI coils. Since heat is one of the major causes for coils to fail, increasing the heat with higher boost could contribute quite a bit. Even if the center electrode isn't getting any hotter (IE turning white etc) it is probably just dumping the extra heat into those coils.

Maybe one of the Saab-Tuners should develop some kind of coil cooling system. It might make the plugs run cooler as well. Should really try it out and see if it helps keep from burning up those things. Would only be a matter of reliability though, can't see any immediate performance advantages.

 

[smcf]

Al,

another thumbs up for Hallam & Sutherns then?

 

[injectie]

In the three Years I've been working at Saab now. I've done one or two 9000 which needed new big ends.
YEEEEHH for cdcarlsson.
It's indeed a strange failure. Which reminds me my own 9k is number three on the list. but hey 250k miles is a lot.

 

[Al]

Hi,
Yep, H&S are doing the turbo swap.
I must admit that I always wait for the engine to reach operating temp before

ing it.
and always allow it to idle for a minute or so after taking the last couple of miles gently before switching off.
The service history was complete - but I guess that the previous keeper could have been less mechanically sympathetic than I am

Cheers

Alyn

 

[1989agoodvintage]

The service history was complete - but I guess that the previous keeper could have been less mechanically sympathetic than I am[/b]

I wouldn't be surprised, a lot of people don't seem to bother ready their drivers handbooks imho. :/

 

[Al]

True Jason, very true.

A thought........ how much turbo "Blow By" oil does it take to skin a cat?......or at least put it outside emissions?

Alyn