Quote:
Originally Posted by Laird Scooby
Yours looks very like one a friend of mine owned a few years back Alan, even down to the registration - can't remember his reg exactly but it was Rxxx UBL and was a black rag-top. The roof wouldn't go up and down thanks to a fault in the hydraulic control system where they had used Cherry V10 microswitches - Saab wanted an absolute fortune for each one and although i informed him i could replace them for peanuts, he sold it on for scrap because there were other problems with it. Transpired that the ECU had become fried due to water ingress so even if the roof had gone up and down, the engine wouldn't run long enough to take you anywhere!
It's often said about Volvo that they take a simple idea, over-engineer it and then complicate the bejesus out of it. With Saab they seem to square or even cube the last stage!  |
I can't have been the same model or year Dave, my Saab 900 had an electrical mechanism for the convertible top, the hydraulic one came in with the 9/3 about two years later.
Both systems were rubbish (design and execution), but the electrical one was worse. It drove through a right angle gear box which incorporated the emergency release latch for the roof. The mechanism was too flimsy, play would build up in the movable release latch and then the bevel gears would start slipping - soon reducing themselves to dust. Saab charged a fortune to fix it - mine came with a FSH and had been repaired (by replacing the whole mechanism) twice and costing thousands by previous owners. The only reasonable way to make it work in the long term was to dispense with the emergency release mechanism and bolt the bevel gears firmly in position. That worked very well indeed, except should the electric motor fail there was no way of putting the roof up or down.
No more Saabs for me :-)