9-5 fuel line fittings question

I just repliedto this in another thread, but saw your pictures and have to comment. Man! That is one dirty engine compartment. Didn't the P.O. know the oil is supposed to go on the inside?

I'd have steam cleaned that thing before you got strated for sure...

MaltHound

It's mine, and the PCV system exploded. Which explains why the oil is all on the outside of the engine, not inside where I preferred to keep it.

It's not all that mobile at the moment, y'see.

No-one here appears to know the answer, but after driving my 9-5 a couple of km extra just to find out how this type of connectors works, this has changed. Here is enough information to get you going again.

The metal sleeve is permanently fixed to the rubber hose. Inside the metal sleeve is an o-ring preventing leakage and a ring of steel fingers preventing the hose from leaving the fuel rail. The 3-winged thing is just there to prevent dirt from entering the metal sleeve.

The rubber hose is mounted to the fuel rail just by sliding the metal sleeved end of the hose over the metal tube on the fuel rail. This just takes seconds to do.

The rubber hose is disconnected from the fuel rail by sliding the

3-winged thing away from the metal sleeve and applying a special tool over the metal tube on the fuel rail and then sliding it into the area the 3-winged thing was protecting. When the tool is pressed into the metal sleeve it will push the steel fingers away and the hose can then be pulled away. With the proper tool this just takes seconds to do. [View using fixed width font, e.g. Courier]

######[]>======= CONNECTED

######[]=====>== Slide 3-winged thing this way ---->

######[]c====>== Mount tool over metal tube |

######[]c====>== | == | == Remove tool |

######[] ======>== DISCONNECTED

######[] ======>== Push hose this way ---->

######[]=====>== Slide 3-winged thing this way ======= CONNECTED

The special tool is a very simple and cheap piece of plastic. It is basically a C-shaped "ring" with a certain size. Anything that can be pushed into the metal sleeve and push away the steel fingers should do the job.

If some home-made tool is used and the tool damages the sealing inside the metal sleeve, then quite abit of expensive fuel hose has to be replaced. If you are unsure that you can release the metal fingers without damage it is better to leave the connections alone and just remove the complete fuel rail from the engine.

The same type of fuel line connectors are used on other GM cars, e.g. for the fuel filter on recent Opel/Vauxhall/Saab vehicles. This means that tools may be readily available at do-it-yourself places.

Good luck.

That sounds like you found out the hard way. Story?

Yes.

OK, that makes sense.

That's also logical from an easy manufacturing standpoint.

And without, ...

So it's like a Molex pin-pusher kind of idea if that means anything to you.

Gotcha.

I'm thinking the fuel rail is the way to go. 4 injector clips that have to come off anyway, one vacuum line at the end, and two bolts holding it to the head (I think). I'll leave it with the car & drop the old engine out from under it, and put it onto the 'new' (or rebult?) engine.

Ah, well that changes things. I'll check my local place tonight.

There'll be pictures, oh yes, there will. May I use your description on the page I'm building (with name credit if you want)?

Dave

I made a trip to pick up some things for the kitchen renovation and made a detour to my local Saab dealer so I could ask my service technican about how to handle the connector. That wasn't so hard.

Yes, a Molex pin-pusher on steroids. The difference is that the handle on this tool extends to the side, not axial as it does on the Molex pin-pushers I have seen.

The tool I was shown was a tiny red piece of plastic, perhaps 40mm long. The handle had a strange shape, perhaps the tool has other uses as well. Estimated cost about 10p.

Yes and yes.

That's about the best way to find out. The Saab dealer here has been bought twice and isn't nearly as receptive to unreasonable requests like "can I talk to the service guy". Which is why I don't go to them, I suppose.

Makes perfect sense.

Great, this is good. I'll print out the photo and see if the guy has any ideas, otherwise the fuel rail stays in the car when I drop the engine, which isn't so bad anyway. It's supposed to be _very_ cold this weekend (below zero farenheit) so I don't know if I'll get it out this weekend, but I'm close.

Thank you.

Dave

Ah. I see. That 'splain's it.

MaltHound

I could have phoned him using his direct phone number. Some dealers here in Sweden have a system with personal service technicans. I have selected the technican that is trained by Saab and then trains the other technicans at the dealer. I book appointments directly with him, leave the key to him, pick up key and invoice from him. A very nice system, personal like a small shop but with the tools and spare parts of a big shop.

We have had temperature and wind speed records here in the southern parts of Sweden, up to +11°C (+52°F), and absolutely no snow. Not the kind of weather we are supposed to have in January.

Nice warm January day in Sweden as seen by my private weather station:

< > < > < >

Windy day in Sweden. Three years worth of tree harvesting fell in just a couple of hours. Wind gusts at hurricane levels. Strongest winds since the 1920:ies I think.

< > < > < >

Who stole the winter?

I used to have that kind of relationship with the local Saab master tech. He'd let me use his car for the day when he was fixing mine, and I always filled his tank & put a case of his preferred beer on the passenger seat for when he got it back. Worked out well for both of us. He's no longer in the area, though.

That is strange. I was in your part of the world back in November of 1993, and it was warm but snowy, and people kept apologizing for the weather (which I found odd).

Is that MRTG you're using for your graphs? That is very nice.

That's unfortunate, but if you heat your house with wood now is a good time to drive around with a chainsaw and a trailer, helping little old ladies with trees fallen in their yards. We had an ice storm that I did that after, and burned that firewood for 3 or 4 years.

Dave

No. It is about 10000 lines of home grown shell script (zsh) (!!!) doing data collection, selection, calculations of secondary data, max/min finding, generation of plot data and generation of HTML code. The actual diagrams are then drawn from the plot data by a program called ploticus <

>.

Thanks. I wasn't satisfied with anything found on the net, so I had to make my own. Doing it as a shell script was a failed attempt to get out of the common problem in the software industry -- the prototype ends up as the final version. By doing it as a slow shell script the idea was that I would be forced to rewrite it a second time, but that failed as the shell script turned up to be fast enough. :-( The prototype state of the software makes it hard to make it available for others, it is too hard to configure and it depends on how the machine it runs on is set up.

No wood burning capability. The heat is delivered in the form of hot water from a large hot water "factory". The "factory" burns garbage (no landfill here) and wood waste in an environmentally friendly way (lots of filters) and delivers hot water to almost the entire city. Quite a common way to heat buildings in urban areas in Sweden.

I'm starting to really like zsh.

Well, that's a good failure mode considering some of the others.

Ah well.

Is that why the sidewalks all seemed to be heated when I was there, or did I just have a limited sample (Gothenberg and Trollhatten, sorry for lack of proper characters).

Dave

Heated sidewalks are not very common. You probably saw the result of a generous portion of road salt [0].

[0] The car-eating [1] kind. [1] To bring this thread on-topic again.

I think this was on Kongsgate in Gothenberg, maybe?

Yes, we've got that in Wisconsin. Mountains of it.

There's a topic?