Transmission In, Engine Cleaning

So with the new (to me) transmission cleaned, rebuilt, and resealed it was ready to go back in the car. Assuming your car's chassis is completely unmodified you hypothetically want to put the engine and transmission in already joined. However my chassis is modified: the front two chassis bars have been cut out, the top because it came like that and honestly you need to for easy removal of the motor, the bottom one because it had been dented severely when the motor was removed by the previous owner so I'll be welding in a new bar. So with those modifications I can slip my transmission and engine together seperately, the trick is to simply set the trans-axle into where it's going to live, but DON'T bolt it in. That gives it that little bit of wiggle and adjustment so that when the engine is ready to join it adjustments can be made and the bell-housing bolts put back in.

Getting the trans in the car is a tricky job, and it's better if you have two sets of hands because you need to rock the trans-axle to either direction to slip in the axles. Gotta' be extra careful to make sure the spindle caps on the axles don't come off at this step and to re-pack the axle cups with bearing grease, don't want them wearing out.

I had to put back on the C-Clip that connects the clutch release arm and slave cylinder

Sitting pretty with everything connected

However my flywheel, clutch, and engine are not ready to go back in the car so for now just the transmission will be alone in the car. The engine is the only thing on this car I hadn't torn down and either rebuilt or at least cleaned, mostly because it hadn't given me any issue. Supposedly the engine had had the cylinders sleeved by the previous owner and I wanted to cleaned the oil pan anyway since the first time I drained the oil it had water foam and slime in it, so I figured it didn't hurt to clean the pan and look in the cylinders.

I was speechless.

The motor looked goddamn brand new

After everything else on this car I expected a horror-show. 

This engine was professionally cleaned, probably vatted and cleaned.

All I did to the interior was to clean out the oil-pickup and clean some of the dirty oil out of the valleys.

I like the Ford blue so I'm gonna try to clean it up and repaint it

I bought a new oil pump ages ago and never installed it so I figured now was as good a time as any

Oil pickup cleaned and the old gasket scrapped off

While the engine is off I figured I would clean the waterpump since when the motor is in the car it's damn near impossible to get tools down there. Also gonna go ahead and clean up the motor mounts. A motor that looks that good inside deserves to look just as good on the outside!

Water-pump cover, water-pump and motor mounts.

Interior of the pan, cleaned of old oil and anything else

Exterior of the pan, I think we can agree it was a little worse for wear.

Feet cleaned of old paint

Water-pump cover all cleaned ready to be repainted

Here's the outside of the motor before cleaning

It's been sitting on this engine stand too long, dust, grime plus everything from inside the car

Motor is almost as gross as I am

Remember kids, if you're gonna gunk your motor cover the carburetor, distributor and the PCV value so you don't get water and gunk inside the block.

I've got to clean the exterior of the motor and figure out if I want to paint it or just leave the paint as is. I think I'm leaning towards repainting it this Ford blue or a very similar color since it matches the steering rack and overflow tank. We'll see though, it may be more trouble than it's worth, but at the same time I'm never gonna get a better chance... decisions decisions...

Also need to clean my flywheel and clutch assembly so they can be bolted back up as well.

Parts Car

Since it's been ages since a post I will begin by apologizing to anyone reading this blog consistently, I've just been busy with school. Some Sonett work has been done, but not as much as previously and updating this space hasn't been high on the priority list.

Now onto some actual updates: since the old trans-axle was done I needed to source another one. I thought I was going to have to go to Nines and see if I could buy a used one off of him for an arm and a leg. Then like a gift from the automotive gods a 73' Sonett showed up on Craigslist right here in Apex, literally 15 minutes from my house... for $400. The poor car was (according to the gentleman I bought it from) driven daily for years by him and then his son until he went off to college, the car was parked out in the field and left there. For 10 years. The car was dirty, it had trees growing through it but there were good parts there; so I talked him down to $300 and pulled it out of field.

as it sat in the field, literally with the forest growing up around it

it took a tractor and a winch to remove the car from the trees and get it up onto the trailer since the tires were basically nonexistent

A good sign. These guys do good work, they're actually still in business in Durham. This sticker was a large part of the reason I felt the car was taken care of.

Tires may have been gone but the soccer-balls where in good shape

Why aren't all pop-ups mechanical? These still worked after years and years of negligence.

It had truck tire inner-tubes  wrapped around the bumper, I don't know why

Front body was pretty cracked, good news: I don't need it!

Dirty dirty!

Uh-oh, carb is stuck open, doesn't bode well for the engine. I don't need it but I like the idea of rebuilding this one since I haven't really messed with mine. Can you say forged internals, bored over and a super-charger blowing through a carb?

So I dropped the parts car at the shop and over the next few weeks slowly completely tore it apart. I filled 3 twenty-five gallon tubs with the parts, not to mention the engine, trans-axle, seats, rear axle, dashboard, fiberglass, all the glass, door-frames, relays, and accessories. I posted the availability of parts for sale on the SAABSonett.org forums, which if you haven't been there are a fantastic place for information. I've sold $75 worth of parts already so the hope is I can sell at least $300 worth of parts so it will have been a free transmission. So if you need parts for your Sonett III leave a comment here and I'll let you know if I've got it! I plan to eventually have a catalog, with pictures, of everything I pulled off the car.

Interior was quite rough, field mice had made the seats and vents their homes. Tons of mud-daubers, I was glad it was winter and they were all dead.

Front end stripped of everything, suspension, engine, relays, master-cylinders, engine, transmission, accesories.

*NOTE* My cellular telephone broke during the time I was disassembling the parts car, that's why there aren't that many (or any really) pictures of the dissassembly process. My new phone doesn't take that great of pictures so the quality is gonna take a nose dive. I'm trying to get a better camera, but I'm broke, I've got a SAAB sucking out all my money!

So with the car totally stripped of everything usable (and some stuff that probably isn't) I took the frame to the junkyard. I felt bad doing it, but the body was far beyond saving. The trunk pan was worse than the one on my car and actually fell out while we were trailering it, the floorboards were basically paper mache, the rocker panels were see-through and there were holes everywhere, everywhere, and everywhere. The car could have been saved but it would have been cheaper and easier to build a frame from scratch.

Now my attention turns to finishing my car again. I wrote my list of everything I needed to do before I could put the engine and transmission back in. First and foremost was making sure the new transmission was good and clean it. 

Thats what sitting in a field will do to a transaxle. Nothing a little (a lot) of heavy duty gunk, elbow grease, and a wire brush can't take care of!

This is the roll-pin that holds the clutch release arm onto the rotating pin, it took about a can of PB'lastr and two days of pounding on it with several punches of varying size.

Ashcraft suggests that while you have the trans-axle out to check for wear on the arm. If the hole/slot where the release bearing fits have become worn you should weld (MIG preferably) and the grind down the weld to exactly fit the bearing. Worn constitutes 1/16" of space of wear, mine was OK but I did slightly bend the upper arm like a retard when I was pounding the rotating pin out, I worked it back to the correct position in the vice but I would suggest care instead of trying to fix the stupidity.

Wire wheeled and I sanded the inside with some 220 grit so it would fit a little less snuggly to ease reassembly and remove some rust, the rollpin holds it in so the fit doesn't need to be that close

Remember kids, anytime you remove something from a seal plug it with shop towels, you don't want crap getting in there.

Here's the bell-housing off ready to be cleaned, before I removed the clutch shaft.

Here's the clutch shaft removed, to do this you need to remove the bell housing from the trans-axle and then remove the two retaining clips shown in the picture

To get the bell housing off you also need to remove the axle cups, these just literally are hammered out, get a crowbar or I used a jack handle and try to get as much of an angle as you can, pound them out. They'll break loose and slide out. I cleaned off the caked on grease, grime, and for some reason green paint.

So this is the kit Mark Ashcraft will sell you for a single easy payment of $78. Don't buy this, it is a waste of money! Some of his kits are a good deal, this one isn't! It is literally a piece of 1" ID pipe X long (If you need the measurement post a comment and I'll measure it), cut carefully with a pipe-cutter and a crudely cut out cover for the spot the old free-wheel switch was.

When I went to install the sleeve it was supposed to still be able fit the retaining clip over the back, or very close thereto, however I was off by about the entire size of the pipe...

At this point I noticed that this sleeve that was on it... This transmission had already been neutered. This car was seriously well taken care of, thanks Swedish Imports!

Well OK, guess I put it back together now

Repainted the release arm and the tension spring with some black glossy engine enamel.

Here's the transaxle, while I had everything apart I examined the gears and cleaned all the nooks and crannies I could reach to remove any metal or grime that had built up. The teeth of a few gears had some rust so I very carefully scrapped the bigger bits off.

Everything cleaned, polished and reassembled. 

At this point I hadn't put on the rubber grease cap on the linkage ball joint and I hadn't put on the slave cylinder.

Transmission is Terrible

So I'll start this post with a disclaimer: SAAB V4 transmissions and transaxles are NOT weak. This is a conception I come across just about everywhere I've done any research in forums and anywhere else. They claim that these units just fall apart. They are strange, they have components that don't really benefit them (cough freewheeling hub) and some of the design is highly questionable (bushings that have no way of keeping their lubrication), but they are plenty strong. I base that they're plenty strong on first hand remarks from both Mark Ashcraft and Tim Nines, both of whom have used Sonetts in Motorsport, with greatly boosted engines (125+ hp) and never had problems with the transmissions keeping up, Nines said he broke axles before the trans-axle gave up the ghost.

Make no mistake, they are finicky. The freewheeling hub remains a problem child until it is neutered, and the the shift bushing on the outside transmission itself has no grease fitting and tends to give up sooner than similar units in other cars. They need fresh gear oil, more often than you change the motor-oil. Ashcraft recommends changing your gear oil every month and using synthetic Amsoil 80-90. Synthetic oil is going to do what it's designed to do: fill every nook and cranny it can get into (read: it will find any holes/cracks in gaskets or other seals.).


You may remember, or I may have not posted anything about it (oops), the latest with the transmission had been that it wouldn't get into gear. To refresh: when I was working on prepping the door sills for paint I backed the car down my hill (which is stupidly steep) to turn it around and work on the other door sill, at the bottom rolled to a stop, went to shift into first to turn the car around and heard the awful sound of gears grinding. From that point on the car has not gone into gear. At first every signal indicated that it was a problem with the clutch control system, the slave was leaking and the pedal wouldn't hold pressure. That was all rebuilt bled and tested, not the issue. The next thought was linkage, the collar on the shift linkage was hitting the shift tower and it never felt like a gear was even being selected. We jacked the front end off the ground and tried to see if we could feel through the wheels any kind of moment in the transmission when the shifter was moving, nope. We could look down and see the linkage on the outside of the transmission case moving so it wasn't bound up. After fiddling with the linkage for several hours I placed a befuddled call to Ashcraft.

He walked through all my symptoms and was equally perplexed unless the problem was with a selection fork inside the trans being worn down or broken, in which case I would have to pull the motor and trans (which I very much wanted to avoid) and have the transmission rebuilt. Then he had a eureka moment and asked about the freewheeling switch, which had totally slipped my mind. I sprung for his 50$ book on transmission diagnoses and fixes, which so far has been quite helpful.

Quick lesson: the SAAB V4 trans-axle has a freewheeling hub, a remnant from the 2-stroke Sonett days. Honestly SAAB couldn't be bothered to redesign a new transmission, for god's sake these cars were already being built with the bits they had just lying around, so they reused the two-stroke transmission. The free-wheeling hub is a gear in the transmission that actually turns the axles. For the car to actually accelerate the car the flywheel has to exceed the rotational speed of the freewheeling hub for the centripetal force to propel the car forward. This is an excellent design for a two-stroke motor, it makes it so applying the gas (to keep the engine from seizing) while braking when going downhill is no longer the most terrifying, seat-browning experience because unless you really jam on the gas the car won't accelerate faster than gravity is pulling it down the hill. However this feature introduces more points of failure into an already fairly complex mechanism and is completely unnecessary in anything other than a two-stroke motor. It does allow you to hypothetically drive the car without using the clutch to do anything other than coming to and setting off from a full stop.

The free-wheeling hub position can be locked out or engaged using a switch mounted on the top of the transmission case. The switch is pulled into the lock-out position (pointing toward the firewall) or pushing into the engaged position (pointing toward the engine block) using a small lever located above the gas pedal. Well it would be if mine wasn't totally missing.

This is what it should look like, rod through a grommet in the firewall

I didn't have one, so I made one. Simple enough, just a piece of rod bent in a vice that I tapped on both ends. Engine side to attach a nut/washer to hold it in the grommet and handle on the other end.

Before tapping I tested fitment and movement, seems to work well.

 Well that didn't fix the problem so I decided before I continued any further I could at the very least change the gear oil. So I put the car up on jack stands, crawled underneath and loosened the drain plug. I used a jack with a block of wood to apply pressure on the back of the ratchet while I yanked on it with the jack handle, made breaking the plug loose a bit of a faff but fairly easy.

While I was under there I did notice this, the flywheel is totally exposed to the road. I really question this being the stock configuration, I would expect some kind of something to protect it from the elements.

Plug is loose now

Gear oil draining, that doesn't look so bad but boy did it sound bad...

Clunk! That's the first batch of metal bits that came out with the gear oil. They look fairly important, and at the very least shouldn't be bouncing around in a transmission. Not good.

So now I know the trans is dead in the water. Something internal has either broken, come lose, or simply fallen apart. That isn't terribly important beyond the fact I'm going to have to pull the drive train and have it professionally rebuilt. So at that point that was the next step. close back up the plug hole, put gear oil back in the tranny so the internals aren't exposed to the air any more. Then I began the arduous process of pulling the motor and trans.

*UPDATE!* The little springs and rollers that fell out here are indeed from the free-wheeling hub inside the trans-axle. Further lending proof to the fact that the hub needs to be neutered so it doesn't break other stuff.

Taillight Wiring

So I was actually smart about this. The stock harness for the taillights hadn't been butchered, so I save it and just cleaned it. I cut off the stock 5 (or 6?) pin connector and soldered on a new 6 pin connector I'd bought so I could connect the old harness to that section of my newly created harness. I waited to do this when the back body was back on so I could be sure all the wires were the correct lengths. This lead to some interesting soldering conditions....

Installing the taillights themselves is a very easy process, the frames actually have "R" or "L" on them to help you figure out which hole they go in, but even without them it's fairly easy to figure out what goes where. The extra beauty of them is that the lenses screw on after the frames are already bolted onto the car, so you can install the bulbs and test everything before you finish them off, not that taking back out those two screws would be  a huge deal.

After they were installed, with new bulbs, and the lenses were cleaned and installed I turned on the ignition and tried all the lights. Brakes lights: check, reverse lights: check, license plate & outer running lights: check. The left brake bulb didn't come on at first but it was simply due to a slightly bent contact on the socket, you can see the contacts on the back of the frame if you look from inside the trunk. Simply remove the bulb and gently push the contact forward, then when you install the bulb it'll push the contact but remain in contact, problem solved.

I repainted the trim pieces that go around the the lenses black because the silver on them was fading and frankly looked kind of silly with the white.