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gear shifter broke!

Hi -

The gear shifter just broke in my '91 900S on my way home. I was shifting up quickly through a particular stretch of road -- but not applying any truly unusual pressure -- and then all of a sudden the gear shifter started "bending". I could still shift gears but everything was really exaggerated. Luckly I was close to home so I pulled in and in my parking spot wiggled the shifter around a bit to see what was up (thinking maybe something had become dislodged). It then just snapped

-- right at the base where the metal meets the ball part. Glad that happened while parked. It does seem that with such a long shifter there'd be a lot of torque there, but still couldn't believe the metal pipe broke.

Has anyone had anything like this happen? I'm thinking of trying to find a piece in a salvage yard, but if this piece just gets brittle and snaps with age I might be better off trying to find a new one.

I did see one old (2001) post to this board describing exactly the same thing with the same car ('91 900), so I'm wondering if it is particular to the newer gear shifters. (I understand the dimensions changed a bit at some point -- '88?)

Cheers, Hans

Reply to
Hans Lellelid
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In all my years of messing around with C900s I've never seen that. Either it's a manufacturing flaw in the metal, or you're really heavy handed :-)

Reply to
Grunff

Yes, not myself, but remember a friend braking the gear shifter of his 900c 2 years ago...... Not sure of the year, but somewhere around 1990 most probably. Had it welded back on.

Richard.

Reply to
OKOK!

OKOK! wrote: > Yes, > not myself, but remember a friend braking the gear shifter of his 900c 2 > years ago...... > Not sure of the year, but somewhere around 1990 most probably. > Had it welded back on.

Yeah, the 91-93/4 shifters seems to be a pretty crazy design; the rod is just welded to the metal ball. I've done a little more research & seen people saying that it tends to break at the welds -- which is exactly what happened to mine.

(I tried seeing if the older style shifter would work -- from one that I got at a salvage yard -- but no, no luck there.)

I thought of possibly re-welding it, but honestly it looked like it may already have been welded a second time and so I figured the safer route is to get a new replacement (ouch, expensive part). Also, the rubber lining of the slotted plastic ball at the end was all chewed up and mostly lying in pieces at the floor of the gear shifter mechanism, so that part probably needed replacing anyway. I'm hoping that installation should be pretty simple. Mine pulled right out after loosening the 3 torx screws (I left it in neutral).

Can anyone tell me if there's any special adjustment that I'd need to perform when installing the new one? The Bentley guide was talking about putting it in 3rd gear and turning some screw thing to callibrate the shifter, but I'm assuming that this wouldn't really apply to this repair & that the new shifter should just drop in -- after putting the plastic ball on, adding some grease, etc(?).

Thanks! Hans

Reply to
Hans Lellelid

In article , snipped-for-privacy@k.ro spouted forth into alt.autos.saab...

Not happened to me, but I have heard of it before, only once, and when at parking speed, in a busy street, trying to switch from 1st to reverse and back again.

Reply to
MeatballTurbo

Hi,

Well, I am a bit surprised at the new design (91-93/4) of the shifter. I ordered the replacement shifter from saabsite and it also had these couple welds that held the shifter rod to the metal ball. Thankfully I was able to just assemble and drop the replacement it in where I pulled the other one out (in neutral). It does work now, although in general the shifting is now a lot firmer / more resistance (it used to be fairly effortless to switch gears, except when it didn't want to actually go into gear). At first I thought that it wasn't sufficiently greased, so I added more grease (perhaps its the fact that I used general purpose lithium grease?). Since it seems to work fine, I'm not really worried about the resistance -- figure it's probably partly needing to wear in a bit (and I'm getting used to it) and partly the fact that rubber parts had all corroded on the old shifter & as a result there was a lot more play.

I'm just impressed at how easy it is to replace the shifter. After reading about short-throw installation in other cars, I can say that I'm glad this happened on a Saab 900.

Hans

Reply to
Hans Lellelid

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