It starts!

good to hear she's back on the road

Going out for a test drive. Wish me luck.

Well deserved win in that battle

Gearshift linkage is all fucked up. New parts in there, but it's hard finding gears. Last night I couldn't get it into reverse for a while, and this morning 1st/2nd were impossible to find after driving for 5 minutes. It's no fun going through the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru in 3rd gear.

Now it's just fiddling with the crappy ScanTech shift linkage. My old linkage is tighter than this new one. wtf? It's causing me to have to shift into Reverse before I can find 1st; 2nd is missing... goes into 4th.

I'm gonna pull it off and see if I can shim both sides of the linkage to tighten it up. Maybe put the old one on....

Car runs like a top though. Too bad there are no hills on the NC coast to do a proper adaptation run.

thats a pretty neat idea

Made it to NH last night. Car ran well, except I lost the c-clip holding the wastegate rod on the wastegate at some shitty Burger King in a shithole in CT. Drove the rest of the way with zero boost.

You're hardcore man! 900mi. after that repair is bold. I usually try to stay within the limits of my AAA coverage. Glad to see it all worked out for you

DanF. said:

Cool.

I pulled off the new ScanTech shift linkage, and it was loose as shit. No wonder I couldn't find any gears. So using my sober McGruber skills I made this:

It works great! I'm impressed with how much tighter the shifter feels (relatively speaking... it is a Saab)

Click to expand...

when you say the shifter feels tighter are you referring to your old linkage or the new unmodified scanwest one??

Ghetto fabulous. Got any pictures from the side of your car? I was thinking of powdercoating my rims black. may do some PS work.

132417SAAB said:

when you say the shifter feels tighter are you referring to your old linkage or the new unmodified scanwest one??

Click to expand...

IIRC, it was noticeably better than the original, 150,xxx mile old, linkage. Metric shit-tons better than the new Scanwest unit. The rubber in the Scanwest was extremely loose. I'd love to cram some poly bushings in there if they made 'em.

sona said:

Ghetto fabulous. Got any pictures from the side of your car? I was thinking of powdercoating my rims black. may do some PS work.

Click to expand...

I don't think I have any broadside pics of my car. It's really dirty right now, but I'll get some pics this weekend and post them.

DanF. said:

IIRC, it was noticeably better than the original, 150,xxx mile old, linkage. Metric shit-tons better than the new Scanwest unit. The rubber in the Scanwest was extremely loose. I'd love to cram some poly bushings in there if they made 'em.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I've gotta replace the trans in my car and the 256k linkage too. I'm gonna buy the scantest one to save cash and do this to it. I'm also toying with the idea of stuffing some window weld urethane to help stiffen it more.

The reason why I even bought a new shift-linkage was that I couldn't get the stupid taper pin out of the old transmission.

So, fuck it. I left it on the input shaft and bought a new one.

That's what I'm guessing is going to happen on my car with about 100k more miles

I'm guessing you already know this, but the trick that works sometimes is to loosen the nut on the linkage taper-pin until it just barely clears the threads, and then whack it with a hammer.

I was successful doing that once before, but not the last time.

Im not even going to bother with it; just unbolt the shifter side of it and leave the old jank linkage with the old broken jank trans