I picked up a 2000 Saab 9-3 Turbo the other day for $200. It spun a bearing, but other than that it's in great shape, so I decided to take on the project. Thought I would share the progress with you fine folks.
A little info on the car: 88k miles, automatic, heated leather seats (front and rear), power everything, moonroof, fog lights, factory front mount intercooler and oil cooler, and best of all...headlight wipers.
We'll start off with a post I made on a Saab forum (edited to make sense here)...
So once the pan was down, the first things I noticed were these thin chunks of metal, as thin as aluminum foil just chillin in the pan. And I thought, where the hell did these come from?
The bottom of the pan looked like this:
So I pulled the pick-up out to see if it being clogged caused the issue. Just a bunch of tiny metal chunks, but no goop (common failure on these is sludge buildup on the pickup causing oil starvation):
(From the looks of the underside of the car, the oil ran low due to a leak somewhere. Because there's oil on the passenger side of the gas tank.)
From there I decided to see exactly what the issue was and started shaking the rods. No play on cylinders 1-3, but number 4...I believe holy crap were the words that came from my mouth.
At first it seemed as if the bearing had disintegrated because I couldn't find it. Problem was, it was as thin as aluminum foil, hence the chunks I had found earlier, and stuck on the crank. Took a screwdriver and worked the bearing halves off the crank as one piece. Quite a sight to see:
Never seen that before.
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