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Some advice for you leaky Saabers Posted by Todd [Email] ![]() ![]() |
It seems this board is full of leaks! Many of you have already heard of my project but it seems some new leakers are on this board. My 91 900S was leaking oil from the head gasket (as well as many other places), so I pulled the whole eng. out and re-sealed everything. When I put it all back together I had a mysterious" valve like noise" only once the eng. was warm and at high rev's. In the Bentley these symptoms had me thinking that I had somehow screwed up when I put on the new oil pick-up tube o-ring. This would be very bad as it would mean pulling the whole thing out again and sep. the eng. from tranny to inspect it. After I retraced my steps I discovered that I had been sold the wrong head gasket. My car has the 2.1l eng. and I was given the 2.0l gasket set. The diff. are VERY subtle, however very significant as I will explain. All the oil and water gallery openings are virtually identical, where the diff. is (which seems obvious in retrospect) is the barrel size. Obviously the 2.1l is going to have a slightly larger barrel, but I didn't think this would cause the noise. When I took thought about it I didn't think it would be possible for the piston to come in contact with the gasket because of the carbon build-up un the lip of the block. What I hadn't thought about until I had the head off again is that the rings don't go right to the edge of the block but the piston does. It was striking the edge of the gaske ever so gently at idle and when the eng. was cold, but when everything got hot and the rev's went up the piston actually came up a minute bit further and produced the tapping noise.
Why am I telling you this? SO YOU DON'T MAKE THE SAME TIME CONSUMING ERROR! As I previously posted "DO AS YOU WHERE TAUGHT AND COMPARE ALL OLD GASKETS TO THE NEW ONES SIDE BY SIDE ON YOUR WORK BENCH".
I'm guilty of this as I was in too much of a hurry and an oversight like this is not hard to make under these conditions.
By the way, the car is sealed up nicely and extremely quiet with new timing chain and guides. It is like driving a new car.
Now if I can just find the annoying rattle in the drivers door area ...
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