Thursday, May 6, 2021

Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or SAAB for short.


 

9 comments:

  1. Can I still get the jet for $800G? Asking for a friend!

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  2. Righto juvat! Both the car and the Draken would sell like hotcakes at those prices. I am thinking the car was a 2-stroke, maybe 3-cylinder, putting out a bit of blue smoke as it went along. Not PC any more......

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  3. SAAB is Kaput. National Electric Vehicle Sweden is a company started by Chinese-born, Swedish businessman Kai Johan Jiang in Trollhattan, Sweden purchased car maker rights from bankrupt Swedish automaker Saab Automobile in 2012. They're gonna make EVs in China.

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  4. A coworker of mine had a Saab 96 and, yes, it had a 2-stroke motor. Every time he dispensed gas into its fuel tank he had to add a portion of 2-stroke oil. That car had at least as many other idiosyncrasies as French cars have, and every one of them was pragmatic and some of them were downright ingenious.

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  5. My first car was a Saab 93 station wagon. I paid $200 for it in 1976. Front wheel drive, 3 cylinder 850cc 2-stroke engine. I had to put oil in the tank when filling up, later models had oil injection. It was a great car for a young guy to drive around and work on. You could still get new parts for them at that time.

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  6. My first car was a 1967 SAAB that had a two cycle, three cylinder, 47 BHP Shrike engine with oil injection of bearings. Easily got 40 miles per gal of regular gasoline and out West (Montana, Idaho, Washington) with freewheeling, OKA overdrive, and open roads got easily 50 miles per gal. Ran the car for over 125, 000 miles with only one problem. The engine failed at about 25,000 miles during extreme cold weather in Montana with temp well below 0° F driving the H-iLine (on US Highway 2). SAAB put in a new engine and then during cold weather I would block the air coming in through the grill with a kit sold by SAAB for cold weather use. The cost for the engine was zero to me because the shrike engine came with a lifetime guarantee. I got the car for $1,300.00 through the European delivery plan, drove it over 1,000 kilometers there, and brought it into the USA as a used car so I payed no duty on it. SAAB delivered it to New Haven, Conn. for free about six weeks after I returned to America and a friend from Grad School who was then at Yale picked it up for me. I soon after took a train to New Haven and picked it up. The SAAB was a European model with thicker steel and better paint for the body but a Gawd Awful electrical system that often failed to work properly during rainy winter weather encountered on the East Coast. Another oddity of the European model was that the underside was enclosed by a steel "pan" unlike the exposed underside of American cars. The only exposed parts were the wheels and a resonator, the last part of the exhaust system that came after the muffler. The resonator was mounted such that it could swing freely for some reason. That car travelled from coast to coast and from Canada to the outer banks without otherwise a hitch asking only for dry weather--on a dismal, dreary, rainy East coast winter morning I never knew whether it would start or not. Ether sprayed into the air intake was a Godsend that usually got the SAAB to run. If not, I would quickly change the spark plugs and get it started. Plugs then were cheap enough to just discard. Out West I could find service stations with sand blasters to clean spark plugs but never ever found a sand blaster equipped service station back East.

    Dan Kurt

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  7. I bought a brand spanking new SAAB 900 in 1979 when I was stationed in Germany. It was a great car but had no air conditioning. It was a non-California (no catalytic converter) U.S. model. When I got back to the U.S. in 1980 I bought the air conditioner system for it. It had its unique design innovations like the clutch and flywheel being at the front of the engine to drive the front wheel drive. Unfortunately, I had an accident that totaled the car but I walked away from it.

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  8. Dan K,
    I worked in a shop in the early 70's that had one of those blasters. Southern NJ, a father & son. No gas, just car/truck service and new motorcycle sales. That blaster had a coil setup so you could test the plug under simulated compression. Learned that Champion plugs were junk. It had a variable spark gap setup to stress the plug, and those would quit sparking very quickly. Terrible in bikes, which typically had pretty marginal ignition systems.

    Now I wonder if they had that due to the father driving one of those 2-stroke SAABs. I was a bit shocked when I saw him adding oil to the fuel tank. Had no idea there were 2-stroke cars. The father was pretty much retired at that point.
    Got the story from the son about his father's Indianapolis racer that he built. Custom built engine. Details are a bit vague now. An eight cylinder crankshaft in a 4 cylinder block, with a double overhead cam head. Said the camchain was about 12 feet long. When it came into the pits, the intake was coated with ice, and the exhaust was glowing red. The driver broke his arm somehow a couple days before the race, and they grabbed another driver that had his car break, and he hit the track without any practice, IIRC. Running in the top three when it broke an axle shaft, launching the wheel (might have been a dually setup?) into the stands, killing several spectators. Probably 40's-50's. Builder's name was Righter.

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