That's the plan!
That's the plan!
I did not get nearly as much done this weekend as I'd hoped... I got railroaded into hosting a Mother's Day brunch and that prep and cleanup sucked up quite a bit of time. There was an upside, which is on Saturday morning I discovered the Pomona Sheraton Fairplex Hotel, site for the 2017 Saab Owner's Convention, is a Starwood property. With a little preparation I should be able to stay there for free... just need to get one of the SPG credit cards and collect the signup bonus. Done! Just gotta put purchasing on hold a few weeks... it tightens the timeline, but saves a little over $500 so I think it's worthwhile.
I did acquire a couple doodads for the motorhome to use with Power Steering Cooler v3, which I hope to Dog fixes the system once and for all. The top of the autopark valve is the return to the pump, and also where air tends to accumulate since it's the tippy-top of the system. I assembled a bleeder to go there:
I am always amazed at exactly how many different systems for fluid fittings there are. That little factory elbow is a 9/16" o-ring base (ORB) to JIC 37 degree flare. Two totally different systems right there.My replacement is an ORB to NPT adapter to an NPT tee. Up top is an NPT bushing with a bleeder screw and then an NPT to JIC flare to connect back up to the factory system. It's not pretty, but nobody will ever see it so whatever.
Way up high in the wheel well is where it goes:
Aside from making bleeding the system easier, it also allowed me cut out about 2' of power steering plumbing so I'm not mad at that! It's very direct from valve to cooler...
This did require me to slightly modify the metal shield in there, but it shouldn't be a problem:
I'm not done with that slot yet - but I stuffed some hose in there just to keep the hose safe from cuts or abrasion. I'll come up with something more permanent soon.
I'm going to stare at it all a bit longer, but I think this is functionally done and I just need to refill it.
I also redid the oil cooler on the Suburban. Although not difficult at all, it was NOT fun. I was worried about getting the Jiffy Tite connectors apart, but that was painless. The difficulty was getting the old gasket out! From underneath, looking up, this is the recess where the oil cooler mounts:
You can see remnants of an old gasket - it took maybe an hour to pick it out, tiny fragment by tiny fragment. Visibility was poor, and I had the choice of sweating into plastic eye protection or letting oil and gasket fall into my eyes. SUCKED.
The oil cooler housing itself was pretty messy - sure looks like oil has been leaking onto it for a long time. Hopefully the new gasket and o-ring keeps oil on the inside going forwards!
Unfortunately, I have some doubt about that! While searching the intertubes for tightening torque on the housing (18-20lb ft, BTW), I found a thread on GMT400 where someone comments "Don't use the GM gasket, the gasket they supply is thicker than the old one and prevents the o-ring from sealing. Use the Felpro version instead." SHIT, I used the GM gasket and I will attest it is tangibly thicker and more rigid than the old one... the old one feels like a typical paper gasket, but the replacement feels like it might have a metal core. However, the o-ring that came out was bright red, and the replacement o-ring was also thicker and black... so both parts were different. I'm hoping the "it'll leak" concern is what happens when you use the old o-ring with a new-style gasket rather than matching new-style parts.
While I was in there, I also replaced the Jiffy Tite adapters - I'm pretty sure they have rubber O-rings in them, and I'll bet those were baked too. Even though I couldn't directly attribute any leakage to the old ones, the adapters are cheap and easy to replace with the cooler out, so better safe than sorry.
I only ran the truck for a couple minutes after reassembly to refill the oil, but no leaks so far. I'll probably need another long drive to generate any real seepage. Around town doesn't seem adequate - the only time it's really been a problem is road trips. :shrug:
The close to my Saturday was a FedEx package containing parts for the SPG's T5 conversion, including a sweet, sweet modified flywheel! The front is lightened to the max:
and the back is not only lightened, but also has a 60-2 sensor pattern milled into the back. It's a super-elegant solution to getting crank position!
I didn't have time to do anything with it, but hopefully I can get to that sometime this week. I have a bit of time, as I gotta put purchasing on pause til that new AmEx shows up.
TSG, something I learned a line time ago, at least on vehicles in the last 20years, is that the engineers run bolt sizes directly proportional to the clamping force they want.
I found a PDF that contains standard and metric thread torque specs. Hasn't been wrong yet.
When it's metal to metal those guidelines are usually close enough, but when there is a soft material like a gasket or an o-ring in in the middle, max fastener torque is often too much. In this case the M10 bolts could be 33 ft lbs, but are specified to 18-20. I tend to overtighten things, so when I have to deal with gaskets I've just gotten in the practice of looking it up. Otherwise I just squish shit into uselessness.
You laugh, but it's a problem. When I put a new showerhead in my bathroom the instructions said "hand tighten" and so I did that. Years later I had a plumber out for an unrelated problem and he was trying to take it apart and scolded me for using tools to put the showerhead together. "It just needs to be hand tightened, it's plastic." I KNOW! That's what I did! Hand tighten is damned arbitrary.
Hey, speaking of over tightened: When I got this '85 SPG it was leaking from the oil drain plug. I found the old plug was covered in RTV, PO tried to stop it leaking. Problem turned out to be radial cracks around the drain plug, clearly from dramatic over-tightening. The "oil pan" on c900s also happens to be the transmission casing, so what I had was a cracked transmission case. I'm sure I posted about it. Anyway, point being, someone damaged the transmission case from over-tightening.
Last night I went to finish installing the clutch, and found one of the slave cylinder bolt holes was stripped out. This is an oddly placed bolt that you simply can't use big tools on, so someone wrenched the crap out of it with a tiny little allen wrench.
Here is something kinda crazy, though: There is this hole randomly placed on the engine's side cover on the Saab motor:
It does nothing, never did anything. Right behind it, on the block, are two threaded holes. It's an oddly perfect location for a crank sensor using a bracket like this:
The sensor is positioned perfectly to read a pattern on the back of the flywheel. Seems really unlikely to have this built into an engine designed in '82, yet there it is. I'm not complaining - it's a very elegant solution for crank timing!
Put some miles on the Suburban over the weekend. Oil filter adapter is now dry as a bone, so that feels good. With no oil coming from the back of the motor it was easy to identify the oil coming from the front of the motor, so, you know, silver linings and whatnot. There is definitely a small leak up front, but I'm pretty sure it's from the pan and not the crank seal. I need to do a little research on that job - if getting the pan out is easy, I'll deal with it... if it involves lifting a motor or dropping an axle fuhgetaboudit! Either way, I won't do anything until it gets really bad, or at next year's oil change. It's not worth the expense or time to deal with it right now. I'm crossing the Suburban off my list.
I did some research on thread repair for the SPG's clutch slave - I've never had a problem with Helicoils, but mechanically I've always liked Timeserts better. I guess maybe I should, as they're typically many times more expensive.
It was TIGHT.
But, it worked, and the Timesert was adequately flush with the face on the transmission:
Ideally I would have liked to sink the head lower, but that was it for the counterbore. It works fine - the ears on the slave aren't seated against the transmission anyway. Glad that's done!
I got the new flywheel & clutch installed:
It looks so nice in there! The big mark on the flywheel is what I think is TDC - they milled all that info off the flywheel because Trionic doesn't need it, but if I ever need to do a head gasket or something down the road it'll be nice to know. In retrospect I should have scribed something on the metal, so once I verify those marks I may hit the flywheel with a punch or something.
The crank sensor fits beautifully - this is really an elegant solution versus a trigger wheel bolted onto the pulleys, and keeps the sensor in a safe location.
It does limit options for a severely heavy-duty clutch (max is 228mm), but this clutch will hold everything the transmission should be given and I am way past pushing c900s hard. There aren't enough transmissions left to risk grenading one. So, yeah, I have a motor capable of 300hp that I will self-moderate to 240-250hp. Whatever.
I went ahead and ordered the last few components I think I need - an IAT, a good base tune, and the proper spark plugs for the coil pack. I need to get some minor welding done - a bung for that IAT sensor - and I may pursue a crossover pipe that eliminates the MAF, but meh, not important right now and easy to go back to later.
I also went ahead and pulled the trigger on some transmission parts for the motorhome - new solenoid harness (new-style internal and external, natch) and a selector shaft seal. I shouldn't need a selector shaft seal. That is the thing I paid to have replaced back in 2014 when I bought the thing. That is the thing that resulted in a warped pan and a stripped pan bolt, and caused me to buy a $200 aluminum pan. But, it's DEFINITELY leaking out of there, so either the shop bungled that work or didn't do it at all. Either way, WTF? Speaking of, when I ordered that repair part of the work was draining the transmission to replace the seal, but during my research for DIYing it I learned a) on the <'93 4L80s that seal is replaced externally and there is no need to drop the pan, and b) on '94+ transmissions there is a $30 tool that installs & removes the seal externally. There is never a need to drop the pan. SO IRRITATED. Not only did I get hosed on bad repair, but I got sold on extra work. Admittedly, I would have asked for a drain/filter/refill anyway, but I was still either misled or the victim of professional ignorance. Ridiculous.
I am hoping that selector shaft seal was just cheap or improperly installed, but I understand the shaft or its bore can wear resulting in a perma-leak. They sell a repair sleeve for those applications, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that. Seems unlikely a motorhome with 80k on it would have an excessively worn selector shaft, but who knows?
Oh yeah....
Something that proved unexpectedly hard to find is a weld-in bung or weld nut in M10x1.25, which is the thread size for Trionic's IAT sensor. The only place that purported to have such a thing was aptly-named "Bung King," and honestly I had to draw a line before ending up with BUNG KING on my credit card statement. Plus, $10 or $15ea (after shipping) seemed exorbitant. Rather than doing that, I got a pair of 1/8" NPT bungs -
1/8" NPT is 10.2mm, close enough to 10mm that I don't care. An M10 tap goes through
and voila, M10 weld-in bung. Most people would just weld a regular nut on, and that's cool, but that looks corny to me and it was worth $3 or whatever to make it look good.Gotta get my intake pipe over to my welding guy before the sensor shows up!
Bung king.
I would have bought from them for the sole purpose.
You know what would really protect that transmission? A fresh set of Fuzions.Originally Posted by thesameguy
It does limit options for a severely heavy-duty clutch (max is 228mm), but this clutch will hold everything the transmission should be given and I am way past pushing c900s hard. There aren't enough transmissions left to risk grenading one. So, yeah, I have a motor capable of 300hp that I will self-moderate to 240-250hp. Whatever.
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