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Great!! An entire BB dedicted to my other Saab!! I have been a regular visitor to the NG900 board, but after being away from TSN for a short while, I see that there's a 99 board!! Excellent!!
I have a 1978 99T (Lady Emmy) who is under restoration. The mechanicals are just about done, thanks to the talents of Mike Connelly of ConnTech Automotive and his very competent 99 mechanic, Luis. Emmy needs some body work, but that should be done over the winter. This (in brief) is her story...
She was abandoned by the side of the road in RI with a blown water pump.Towed to a storage lot, she was sold at an abandoned property auction to a friend of my good friend, John Naylor of the Auto Barn. John was planning to restore Emmy to her former valour, but when he looked under her hood, he realized that it would take more time, money and patience that he had to bring her back to life. He sold her to me for $600--sight unseen.
Her backlight had been shattered somwhere along the line. The interior was in bad shape and somebody had installed a Mopar radio (the horror!) where the Saab radio had once been. When she was in the storage lot, she had sunk in mud up to her axles, and when they towed her out, her exhaust system (from the manifold back) stayed in the mud. Worse, someone took they key out of her ignition without having the gearbox in reverse and the shifter elbow was destroyed. Her battery was dead, two of her four tires were flat (and the other two were in doubtful shape) and we were not exactly thrilled to find four empty bottles of Prestone in the boot.
John repaired the exhaust, the shifter linkage and replaced the backlight. We towed her to Mike's, where he spent 9 months locating parts to get her to run and drive.
And now, almost three years later, we're almost done. Two days before Carlisle this past May, her engine and gearbox were spread out all over the shop. We installed a new head, resealed the engine (it was easier to describe where oil was NOT leaking!) and cleaned 25 years of gunk out of the gearbox. The day before we left for Pennsylvania, we were in the shop til nearly 11PM installing a new (if incorrect) interior (sitting in her front seats was like sitting on concrete) out of an '80 900. (The front seats are in the cellar, waiting for a trip home to be recovered and reinstalled).
So, she runs, drives and looks good from 20 feet away.
She does have some rust issues (which we will deal with this winter)and she needs a new headliner (alson on tap for this winter) but she's come a long way from that rainy afternoon in April of 2001 when I first laid eyes on her.
I love my NG, but there's just something about the 99........
See you at SOC!!!
posted by 152.163.25...
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