I've been busier than ever and the engine still sits where it landed in the last post. I did get the pilot bushing out.
I also elected to take apart the transaxle to check the seals because a tiny pool of gear oil was appearing underneath it sitting on the floor...
This is where the really bad news comes in. I suppose in some respects it's good news because I caught it now, not when everything was back in the car. As you know if you've been reading this blog these cars came with a freewheeling hub, a remnant of the two-stroke power-plants that came in the earlier Sonett II's. The generally accepted way to best modify the transaxle is to neuter this freewheeling hub, effectively locking it in the "engaged" position. Remove moving parts -> reliability/strength.
Well this transaxle that was in the parts car had been previously neutered, the process is adding a spacer to the input shaft to lock the the hub in the engaged position.
The critical part there is locking the hub. Well whoever neutered this transaxle REMOVED the hub.
The fact this is wrong should be pretty obvious to anyone confident enough to take a transaxle apart. Without the hub the input shaft becomes the proverbial hotdog down the hallway bouncing around in the cup with nothing centering or stabilizing it, plus there's no way for that shaft to drive anything. Plus they removed the small needle bearing at the end of the input shaft... for some reason. This is all bad. Really bad. Because the problem with my previous transaxle was... the freewheeling hub exploded.
So now I have 2 transaxles and no freewheeling hubs.
Far right two holes is what it SHOULD look like... catastrophic failure.
So now I have 2 transaxles and no freewheeling hubs.
The hub was never a "replacement" part, so there are no true spares they're one-to-one with transmissions. So nobody ever re-manufactured them. Speaking to Mark Ashcraft (http://markashcraft.com/) on the phone he had some thoughts on where to maybe get one; but even if we can it's not a simple fix.
The hub is a bunch of roller bearings with springs behind them arranged in a circle, so without compression they go shooting out. So installation requires a special tool of which probably only one still exists (Subrew has it) but he's in Oregon and I'm in North Carolina, and he's not gonna loan me a tool that is essential to his restoration business (don't even remotely blame him for that).
I spoke to Mark on Monday (3/12) at lunch time. Amazingly he has already come up with and mailed out a new hub for me, along with the dimensions and specifications to make the SAAB designed tool to assemble and install it. It's fantastic to have someone with the connections with such a weird rare car.
He also seems to be the only one who still has pilot bushings for the V4 engine...
Removing the pilot bushing with the proper tools is weirdly satisfying.
This new discovery seems to be the actual reason that my car drove about 100ft then wouldn't move, not the flywheel not actually being attached to the motor. The issue wasn't gear selection or clutch engagement but the input and output shafts weren't actually connected. I'm still gonna fix that stuff but it's not the main issue.
So upon closer inspection this little engagement fork (I don't have a better name for this thing) was the entirety of what was connecting the input shaft to the drive shaft of the transaxle.
That's 5 tiny little teeth on each side of the T making 10 total, the V4 doesn't make a ton of power, but more than enough to destroy those tiny teeth on both the fork and the cup that it mates to. Which you can actually see in the picture, the teeth are bent over from where they should be straight out.
So that transaxle is done for, not even mentioning the rust on the ring gear. The good news is all that stuff is OK on the first transaxle, it's just missing it's freewheeling hub.
So when the freewheeling hub arrives I'm going to have that assembly tool made and get my first transaxle back together and try to get the drivetrain back in the car. I do need to double and triple check that there is no damage to the gears in that transaxle from the exploded freewheeling hub, also verify there are no more little roller bearings bouncing around inside the case.
There is still some stuff I need to do to prepare for that. Clean up the engine bay, reroute the battery cable, maybe the fuel line; but the project should hopefully continue again.
The hub is a bunch of roller bearings with springs behind them arranged in a circle, so without compression they go shooting out. So installation requires a special tool of which probably only one still exists (Subrew has it) but he's in Oregon and I'm in North Carolina, and he's not gonna loan me a tool that is essential to his restoration business (don't even remotely blame him for that).
I spoke to Mark on Monday (3/12) at lunch time. Amazingly he has already come up with and mailed out a new hub for me, along with the dimensions and specifications to make the SAAB designed tool to assemble and install it. It's fantastic to have someone with the connections with such a weird rare car.
He also seems to be the only one who still has pilot bushings for the V4 engine...
Removing the pilot bushing with the proper tools is weirdly satisfying.
So upon closer inspection this little engagement fork (I don't have a better name for this thing) was the entirety of what was connecting the input shaft to the drive shaft of the transaxle.
That's 5 tiny little teeth on each side of the T making 10 total, the V4 doesn't make a ton of power, but more than enough to destroy those tiny teeth on both the fork and the cup that it mates to. Which you can actually see in the picture, the teeth are bent over from where they should be straight out.
So that transaxle is done for, not even mentioning the rust on the ring gear. The good news is all that stuff is OK on the first transaxle, it's just missing it's freewheeling hub.
So when the freewheeling hub arrives I'm going to have that assembly tool made and get my first transaxle back together and try to get the drivetrain back in the car. I do need to double and triple check that there is no damage to the gears in that transaxle from the exploded freewheeling hub, also verify there are no more little roller bearings bouncing around inside the case.
There is still some stuff I need to do to prepare for that. Clean up the engine bay, reroute the battery cable, maybe the fuel line; but the project should hopefully continue again.
