Jamie

Most Dangerous Roads in the World Anyone for a Road Trip? (I found this via an entry in Digg)

After Ajax Fasteners second failure in 3 months, Holden (and Ford) may have to shut down their production lines if alternate suppliers can not be found. From the NewsOnLine section of the Australian Broadcast Comission web site

Yep. Light weight, excess power, serious understeer, and aerodynamics that result in a rear end that gets airborne at speed ... A great combination.

Since people seem to have run out of ideas, here are the details on the experimental SAAB engine installation. The vehicle is known as the SAAB Monster, and can be found in the SAAB Museum in Trollhättan. For the SAAB Monster, the engineers transversely mounted two SAAB 93 type three cylinder engines in the engine bay. The engines both face the same direction and are joined by a gearbox that is located in the space between the two engines. This gearbox has a right angle output shaft that connects to a beefed up version of a SAAB 93 clutch and transaxle located in the same orientation and location as the transaxle in the stock SAAB 93 models (have a look at the transaxle location in the SAAB 93 image in my previous post). The engine joining gearbox also has an auxiliary output shaft that goes forward to provide drive for the two distributors and an equivalent to a "crank pulley" that provides a "v" belt drive to the rear mounted radiator cooling fan (and I assume a pair of water pumps). This type of engine with an output located in the middle of the engine is technically known as a split inline. SAAB 93 Wiki entry SAAB 'Monster' Wiki entry A few years later, SAAB attempted another dual engine installation using a pair of Ford V4 engines mounted side by side in the engine bay.

The SAAB 93 that it's based on has a 748 cc two-stroke, three cylinder engine mounted north-south and coupled to a transaxle that drives the front wheels.

Yes. The coupling of the engine to the gearbox, and the engine gearbox relationship is the really bizarre part of the setup. It is quite possible that it has a flywheel between the banks of cylinders (though I'm not sure, and it could be an unused feature of the standard SAAB engine block casting), but it's not a chain drive. However, the engine assembly is mounted ahead of the axle line and the gearbox/transaxle is behind the engine.

Another photograph of the engine installation.

Coming soon to a theater near you, The Trollhättan Chainsaw Massacre.

I'd have given credit for "an early Daihatsu".SAAB occasionally fitted their prototypes with Daihatsu badging when they needed to do public road testing in Sweden.

The later models of the replacement SAAB 96 had a lengthened hood and the radiator was relocated to the conventional position in front of the engine. Have no fear, I'll post more images once this is settled. But in the mean time, here's what a SAAB 93 looked like:

Yep, it's a 2 stroke ... but that's still not the "unusual feature" of the engine. Here's a hint. The car uses a strengthened version of the standard SAAB 93 transaxle ... and NOS2006 was very close to having the correct answer.

Correct, it's an experimental 6 cylinder SAAB from 1959. The engine is installed in the front of a lightened 1958 SAAB 93.Now for the tricky part of the question ... "What's unusual about the engine?" (and BTW, it's not a flathead) You definitely "should've given the 'born from jets' tagline more credit". On a speed test on an airport runway, this tiny 'born from jets' car did 196 km/hr before they had to back off when it's aircraft influenced aerodynamics caused it to try to leave the ground.

Believe me, it's simultaneously one of the weirdest and most clever engine installations I've seen in a long time. Even with details of the engine setup it still took me a while to figure out what they'd done to get it all to work.

Here's a photograph of the engine bay for an experimental high performance model of a production car. Who built it, and what's unusual about the engine?

If you're just doing a front drum > front disc and leaving drums on the rear, then usually you're up for a new front uprights (some models had different mount points for the disc callipers), the discs and callipers, master cylinder, and occasionally new rear buckets (different diameter) for the rear drums. The Valiants over here had front discs/rear drums without a power booster, so if you have an unboosted drum/drum system now, you may get away with an unboosted disc/drum installation.

These days, you'll really only find manual transmissions fitted to the cheapest models (auto is somewhere in the region of an AUD$2000 extra cost option) or the performance models. Most people drive automatics.

Would-be carjacker thwarted by manual gears

option 1 option 2

Although I have to sell my house in Australia first (I'm currently back here to prepare it for sale), I've been looking at houses in the St John's area, and a 4 bedroom farm house with an ocean view on a few acres with a barn and a few other out buildings is in the low CAD$200k price range.My wife and I feel that we'll need a full size pickup to cart around stuff for the renovations we assume we'll be doing on whatever house we buy, and as we plan to get a few acres, it'll need to be a 4x4 (most likely with a snow plow attachment) to deal with a long driveway on snowy days. At the moment, the place my wife is renting has a few cows grazing and in the barn, and as part of the deal with the land owner, the cow's owner keeps the driveway clear.

Newfoundland will be a lot better than Northern Manitoba (55 degrees north) where it looked like I might be living. The locals up there routinely talk about -40 degree days. My step-daughter calls it "scary cold". ALL the cars there have block heaters, and practically every parking space has a power outlet for the block and/or interior heaters. Newfoundland will have more snow, and it'll be damper, but it won't get as cold.

I've been doing it for 29 years ... and at times, it still gives me sweaty palms. It gets easier the longer you do it, but the first couple of times I was truly terrified. I've reached the point where I can get off an aircraft in LAX or SFO, and face peak hour traffic.On this trip, except for 2 weeks in the middle when I was on my honeymoon in Ireland, I spent almost 4 months in the US or Canada, and in that time, I drove over 16,000km, topped off by a near 6,000km trip from Northern Manitoba to Newfoundland driving a loaded U-Haul van pulling a Dodge Caravan on a car trailer. It appeals to my sense of the absurd.

My condolences Bob.

With my impending move to the St John's area of Newfoundland, and planned purchase of a house on a few acres, I suspect my next vehicle purchase will be a used Chevy or GMC 4x4 ... although the replacement of my wife's ancient Dodge Caravan is also very high on the list of priorities.

Do you guys know about this: BABE2007? Cars must cost or be valued at $250 or less ... and must have all relevant state safety inspection stickers, and insurance, and be able to pass police spot checks. It sounds like a real blast.

A friend of mine has a '01 Silverado that has just started to make a loud and "oh so very not happy" RPM related tapping sound when the engine is cool/cold. Noise appeared to go away when the engine heated up, and to his backyard mechanic's ear, it sounded like a sticky lifter, loose valve lash or other valve train related problem. As he had some other work to be done on his truck that required some professional expertise, he took the truck to a GM dealer workshop. He was totally not expecting the cause of the "valve train" noise to be driveline related, namely a cracked flex plate. GM used to be notorious for blowing flex plates. I'd like to think they've changed, but maybe not. Certainly the newer flex plates are stronger than the older ones ... but the dealership found the problem mighty fast, so it may be a lot more common than people are aware of. Another friend had a similar problem years ago on a '79 Monte Carlo. The car would shudder like HELL at speed, and at idle, you'd hear what sounded like valve chatter. Lo and behold, the flex plate was cracked and out of line, and that sent the torque converter wobbling like hell ... which killed the front main seal on the transmission.