What Is Your Saab Story?

I lost count of how many Saabs we’ve had. But two of them gave their lives to save our daughters in very serious accidents.

I was aware of Saabs because my father transmitted to me his love of weird cars. But I never really warmed up to them, did really liked the looks of them. Until I saw the “GM” 900 in the 1994 yearly new car books. I remember thinking “one day, one day…” Four short years later, fresh out of college, my trusty Jetta was rip for a career change and I was due for a change. It was then that I spotted it, resting alone under a light pole at the used car lot: a white 1994 900. Love at first sight! It may have only been a base, non-turbo Saab, but I loved it for 4 years… Until I traded her for her younger, more attractive a much more athletic sister – a 2002 9-3 Viggen.

Oh my. What a love/hate relationship that was. Loved looking at her, loved drving her, hated paying her upkeep! She finally expired on the 401, on the way back from Mosport. Foolish me, I didn’t want to pay -yet again- for her heart transplant. So I let her go. I still see her from time to time in the local classified… Hacked to bit now by a few unsympathetic owner-mechanics…

I still miss that Blue missile. Never should have sold it!

http://www.spanjaardwerf.nl

Our Saab 900 S was more of a happy accident.

The Dutch consul general of Hong Kong was relocating to Shanghai and couldn’t take his dog with him. We offered to take care of his dog. While picking up my ‘new’ dog he mentioned he also had a mint Saab 900 S convertible that he had to get rid of. Before I knew it we left the Dutch consul with a Saab [i]and[/i] a dog.

Being an ex-consul Saab, it also rocked a CC sticker (Corps Consulate). In retrospect, those CC/CD stickers sure are something. They bring along a bunch of added benefits. Whether it was a 100\% legal to drive around like that… meh, i’d say it’s a grey area. Good times. 🙂

Here in Brazil there are no Saab importer or dealer. General Motors Brasil imported and sold some 9000 CDs in 1992/93. My black 1991 900 Turbo S came to Brazil for GM market studies, together with a red convertible. So, my car is unique here. There is only other classic 900 from 1983, not in really good condition when I saw it some years ago.
My car was found by a friend, who immediatelly call me. I bought the car the next day, in December 2004, and started correcting some problems.
The bigger one was a broken gearbox, which was changed for a remanufactured one bought in Sweden by other friend with 25 years as a Saab engineer.
I changed the gearbox at home, on jackstands, from below of the car, without removing the powertrain. it was not so easy, but with another great friend helping, my wife and brother, we’ve done it ! The major problem were the costs, as I live in Brazil, [i]The Country of the Taxes[/i].
It is not a car for the posers, as it is not properly beautiful in the purest definition of this abstract concept, but a great automobile for an enthusiast.
Very low on suspension, it suffers on bad roads, but fine on smooth surfaces. The engine and brakes are good, but the handling is really ahead of its time, if you verify the 99/900 project was started in 1963.
Great to see people looking for the badges to identify the car, and the questions them make.

Another Saab Story- Barn Find 1962 Saab Model 96!
Written by Charles Gould
Photos by Gabriele Isenbrand
Chapter One
I have a love/hate thing with EBay and Craigslist. On the one hand, they alert me to interesting cars all over the world. On the other, they do the same for all of the other vultures looking to acquire the same things that I am looking for. As a result of EBay and Craigslist, and also just a factor of time, the majority of interesting barn find cars have been ferreted out by now. However, there are still a few fascinating barn find discoveries to be revealed. Those discoveries are infinitely more interesting when you are the one that discovers them!
I received the email referring me to a Craigslist ad for an old “Bullnose” Saab (1962) that had been in a garage since 1978, which was to be auctioned at 4:00 PM on Saturday, March 6, 2010. Although I wanted to go to see the car in person, I was not prepared to get there in time for the Saturday 4:00 PM deadline. So, I made arrangements to place a bid over the telephone, sight unseen.
I had lost three other “bullnose” “stroker” Saabs, and I did not want to lose another. One was from the estate in Texas, and the seller had promised to sell it to me for $4,500, and then decided to increase it to $5,500, and then decided to get it running first, and then demanded $6,500, which I was still prepared to pay as it had a factory rebuilt engine, and a GT hood, even though it was not a true GT. He then decided to place it on EBay, where it drew 12K or so. Oh well!
So, I was very excited about this New Jersey car, as I really love original cars with years of patina, and I also truly love barn find stories. I was “willing” this to be a nice original car, and although the posts on the Saab enthusiasts’ list were getting pretty discouraging, I did not give up hope.
At 11:00 am on Saturday, I decided that I really needed to see this Saab in person, and that I had to be there to bid live, to be sure that telephone bids did not fall through for a bad reception problem or some other glitch. So, I called several friends and nobody was available to take the 200-mile road trip. So I was getting ready to go alone, when my friends Carter & Gabrielle called to say that they were in town and wanted to visit. I asked if they were up for a road trip, and they set out to my house while I went to the bank to get some cash!
I debated whether to drag the trailer along, because it always seems that when I bring the trailer, the car is always a disappointment, and when I leave the trailer home, the car turns out to be great, and I have to frantically hunt down a U-Haul in the vicinity of the purchase
I did decide to grab the trailer from my shop on the way out, and we bolted down to New Jersey. We arrived at 3:20, and were greeted by four other very knowledgeable Saab enthusiasts, the three estate sale ladies, and some assorted customers buying other estate trinkets from inside of the home.
We were sent out to the garage behind the house, at the end of a long and very narrow driveway, that had long since been overgrown with trees and shrubs which had made the narrow access even narrower, and which would preclude getting the trailer anywhere near to the little Saab which had been tucked away thirty-two years prior.
When we finally got a chance to check it out, I was so excited to climb through the sad and lonely looking little teardrop. As someone else had posted, all four tires were flat, and all four wheels were stuck, so we were wondering how we were going to get it out of there if we were successful. Anyway, our investigation in that dark garage made it obvious that this was a remarkable example, even though it was covered in 32 years of dust and crud, and looked like hell on the surface. This was clearly a remarkably well preserved, time capsule, owned by a woman who was the original purchaser, and who parked it here in this garage in 1978 when she fell ill, and there it sat until being unveiled again in the last thirty days!
There was almost no rust whatsoever, and what little was there, was limited to surface deterioration on the bulkhead, where the mice had nested and urinated on the metal, which contrary to an earlier post, did not penetrate through the metal, but did remove the paint and caused some pretty deep surface rust in the corner near the driver’s side bulkhead.
Also contrary to that earlier post, although a previous owner had bent the steel up above the battery tray to accept a larger battery, they did not cut the metal, and I should be able to bend it back close to original. The plywood panels in the trunk were near perfect, and under the rear seat looked like brand new.

Yes, the engine was stuck, but we are always saying that mechanical stuff is easy to fix, but rust is such a headache. The upholstery and headliner were simply amazing, and even the dash pad was not cracked. The oil change stickers confirmed the mileage and dates, and contrary to an earlier post, the paint on the door seals was transfer from the door, after being closed for thirty years. There is not overspray on the door seals, although I was surprised to see both door striker mechanisms on the jamb were painted. Does anyone know if these were painted at the factory?
There appeared to be some minor body work on one rear fender, but it was done quite well. Otherwise it was remarkably unmolested, and well preserved, and even had the Blaupunkt radio, speaker, antenna and even the grounding straps for the radio installation kit. I decided that I really wanted this car, and when I learned that it would be a sealed bid auction, I got very concerned as there were about three or four other knowledgeable Saab enthusiasts at the site, and three more bidding by telephone. There was also another guy who arrived carrying a 6 amp battery charger, and who had intended to plug that into the garage outlet in the hopes that he could get the stuck engine to spin on the 6 amps of available power!
It was nerve wracking to try to decide what to bid, as I really had no idea what the others would bid. Well, we all must have had a good idea as to value, as four of the six bids were within $200.00 of each other, and my
bid was $99.00 higher than the next lower bid! But we were the high bidder except for one telephone bid that had a contingency that the seller provide a title at that price, which the seller could not do.
So, now we had to decide how we were going to drag it out of that narrow driveway, and figured that we would have to call a local wrecker with a long, long winch cable, until I decided to unhook the trailer and back my MDX down the narrow driveway. Unfortunately, I had cleaned out my MDX last week to go in for a new transmission, and I had forgotten to put my tools, air compressor or tow cable back into the truck before we left, so we had no way to pump up the tires before trying to see if any of the wheels would roll before we called the wrecker.
Now, I have pulled literally hundreds of old cars out of barns, and I am a consummate optimist, so I was “willing” the wheels to free up, as we tied up two ratchet straps to the rear control arms, and hooked them to my trailer hitch, half expecting them to break. As we tugged gently, two wheels rolled, and two dragged for about one foot before the third freed up, and another two feet before the fourth wheel freed up and started to roll. The brakes were still dragging a little, but the wheels were rolling!
We were able to slowly drag the little Saab all the way out to the street without any real problems except that occasionally the wheels would dig in as though the little car was holding on and afraid to be dragged away. I suspect that when he went to sleep in this garage over thirty years ago, nobody collected old Saabs, and he probably feared being dragged to a junk-yard after hiding successfully here in this garage for thirty-two years.
The trailer battery, which runs the winch died before we could drag the little car all the way onto the trailer, but we kept letting it rest and pulling six more inches, until we got the whole car safely up on the trailer. So, within thirty minutes of having won the bid, we had the little 96 loaded on the trailer and we were ready to head off for home in Massachusetts!
One of the ladies handed us the baggie, which had the original owners manual, service coupon booklet, and brochures for the Blaupunkt radio, as well as several period road maps of New Jersey and New York. The three ladies who were running the Estate sale were really sweet, and I had a lot of respect for how honest and fair they were in handling the sealed bid situation. It was really a pleasure to deal with them.
So, on the road again, and headed back to Massachusetts, with almost 100 miles under our belt, with most of those miles spent with me sneaking peeks at the cheeky front of this barn find through the rear view mirror, when we hit a huge pothole on the road that was so big that I waited to feel a tire collapse! Well, nothing seemed to be wrong, so we proceeded up to Rein’s Deli in Vernon, CT, about 85 miles from home for dinner. Reins is a traditional stop for us whenever we return from a car retrieval in New York, New Jersey, PA and anywhere else southwest of us here in Mass!
Dinner was great as usual, but apparently we had developed a slow leak in one of the trailer tires from the pothole, and although we didn’t realize it until we left Rein’s, the tire completely blew apart three miles later on Route 84! We pulled into a small 24-hour gas and convenience store to have some light to work under, as it was now almost
9 pm.
As I had forgotten to put my tools back in my truck before we left, we were stuck with no tools and no spare tire. Well to make a long story short, we could not get the tire off, and with the self leveling equalizer link on the leaf springs between the two right side trailer tires, there did not appear to be any way to get the dead tire off of the roadway, so it looked like our newest acquisition would have to sit out at a rest stop overnight until we could come back with a replacement tire and tools.
Then we decided to jack up the trailer suspension to bias the rear trailer tire down and the front one up, using the MDX jack. Once we had achieved the desired position, we went into the store, and carefully selected a pack of firewood, with one log just the right size to jamb in the shackle mount to hold the proper orientation for the trailer suspension to lift the front destroyed tire off of the roadway, and limped home the final 80 miles at slow speed, and made it home before 11:00 safe and sound!
Now with my back out, and exhausted from the tension of waiting for the second tire to blow, we went right to bed leaving the little Saab on the trailer in the driveway overnight, planning on having a closer look and cleaning it up in the morning. I will provide the next chapter of this saga soon, but please enjoy the photos in the meantime.
http://s191.photobucket.com/albums/z190/ricobirdo/1962\%20Saab/?start=0
All I will say at this point is that I am delighted to have acquired this little time capsule and I can’t wait to start on this project. Thanks to Carter for being such an amazing reference source on this car, and to Gabriel for documenting this barn find retrieval on her digital camera for me! Finally, thanks to both Carter and Gabrielle for all of their hard work, help, moral support and encouragement in chasing down this barn find dream! Please let me know your thoughts and comments after viewing the photos and whether you want me to write the next chapter of this story, and thanks for all of the support on saving this little 96!
http://s191.photobucket.com/user/ricobirdo/media/1962\%20Saab/IMG_7756.jpg.html?sort=6&o=10
Copyright 2010 Charles Gould
chasgould@mac.com
(617) 965-4848

I have owned 4 till now…. 1 injection 3 turbo’s…. they’re fantastic!