Only 24 Hours to go!
Only 24 hours to go before Flan will be sold on the Great EBay Auction of 2006. Currently on £220 (at time of writing..) lets see how much he sells for. His ego has already been boosted by the fact he is going for more than £100…. lets see if we can make him feel even better about himself by getting it up to £300!
We have had some serious adventures with the car recently. What now feels like a year ago, Pete took the car into Icthus garages for them to give it the once over. They said we had blown the head gasket and wanted £1000 to fix it, amongst other things.
£1000!?! HA! I fell off my chair!
Pete and I decided to grab the bull by the horns and do the job ourselves. I mean, how hard can it be to change a head gasket?
As any one will know who has dealt with car exhausts, rust, heat, dirt and a long time are a bad recipe for removing nuts and bolts with our breaking them. I was fearing the worst and expected carnage but with lots of WD40 and plenty of aggression, things were going well, only for us to be rudely interrupted by someone having a car crash outside the garage we were working in!
HOW RUDE!
Flying glass and ambulances stopped play for the evening as we tried to nurse a nurse(!) who was reasonably traumatised from getting the front of her car caved in. Hope things are going better this week Lucy.
A busy weekend continued as bits in the engine bay became less and the pile on the garage floor grew!
Eventually we managed to get the Cylinder head off only to find a crack! Thats not good news people!
After a few calls to saab dealers we were saved by a man named Nutcase from SaabCentral Forums… the source of all Saab knowledge! He happened to have a spare in his garage, great! The fitting process is the reverse of removal and all was well until we discovered the water pump had died!
The cause of the overheating has been found! So, we have fitted an electric one. EASY! Thanks to the guys at Think Automotive for doing us a deal! You really saved our bacon.
So the car lives one more….. new cylinder head, new cylinder head gasket, new water pump…… what’s next on the list! I am just thankful we are doing it now not stuck in some random African back street!
