Econmancer

Replacing the brake pads on the SAAB 9-5 is easy. I’d suggest 2.5 hours for this job if you aren’t in a rush. Most of the time seemed to be spent jacking up the car and removing the wheels.

The first step is to raise a wheel like you are changing a tire. Be safe and set the parking brake, block the wheels you aren’t raising, use jack stands, all that good stuff. You’ll then need to remove the wheel. On the front brake pads, it helps if you turn the wheel so you can get better access to the back of the caliper before you raise the car. Open the brake fluid reservoir and put a rag around the fill hole to pick up any fluid that may spill as you work on the calipers.

Once the wheel is off, you should see something like this-

The metal spring clip on the front can be removed with a screwdriver. There are two bolts holding the caliper. You can access these bolts by removing the plastic dust caps with the screwdriver.

The bolts are E-20 torx size. It might take some pressure, but they should loosen without too much fuss.

You can see in the above image where the top bolt is unscrewed and ready to be removed. Once both bolts are removed you can work the caliper loose. You’ll want to push the piston inside the caliper a bit to give you room to wiggle the caliper free. You can do this with the screwdriver. Once freed, the caliper can be rested on a box or step stool to keep pressure off the brake line. The old pads are wiggled off and the new ones are installed. Push the piston inside the caliper all the way down to make room for the new pads. I used an oil filter wrench to do this and it worked perfectly, but they make a tool designed just for pushing the caliper piston (if you want to get fancy). Installation is done in reverse and the metal spring clip is installed as seen in the top image.

The rear brake pads are replaced in the same way. I found the clearance tight because of the rear suspension, but an extension on your socket wrench should give you room to remove the two bolts from the caliper. My rear pads still have plenty of material when my front pads were nearly bare, but I still replaced all four at the same time.

The tension spring is installed as seen above. Check the brake fluid level and replace the lid to the reservoir before you drive away. The new pads will need to be bed-in. There are several techniques to doing this and they are found on the internet. It’ll be several hundred miles before brake performance is maximized. Be careful a give yourself plenty of braking distance while the pads are getting settled.

BAIC wants to create cars based on the SAAB 9-5 and 9-3. It makes me wonder what will happen to the price of parts for these two SAAB models.

My thoughts are that prices for certain 9-5 and 9-3 parts will go lower. The availability of more parts that are compatible with the vehicles will give SAAB owners more choice and this will put pressure on the current part companies to lower their prices. Regardless of if you’d put these new parts on your SAAB, the current part makers will still need to adjust prices to compete, so cheaper Scan-Tech and Elring parts could soon follow.

But what parts will be available and at a lower price? There have been a lot of changes to these cars over the years and BAIC, I can only assume, will be using the more recent designs. The number of parts my 2000 9-5 has in common with a current 9-5 is limited. For example, I wouldn’t expect the price of the neutral safety switch for my car to go lower because it was updated by SAAB years ago and the new part isn’t compatible with my SAAB.

One part I can picture being lowered in price is the Direct Ignition Cassette. These go out fairly regularly, can’t currently be repaired, and are pricey enough that people would look for an alternative. It’s the part I’d produce if I was in the aftermarket business.

The Throttle Body would be another great candidate for a lower priced alternative. They’re expensive to replace and the wiring inside them has a tendency to rot.

How about low priced Saab Information Displays? It seems every 9-5 and 9-3 owner fights missing pixels on the SID. Repairs exist, I’ve even fixed mine own SID, but a cheaper replacement would be nice. Mass airflow sensors, Alarm units, and Crankshaft Position Sensors are some others that I can picture going down in price.

What about the turbo? Will these new designs be turbocharged and which turbo will they use. Personally, I’d use the TD-04 turbo on all of them. I don’t see the TD-04 going down in price because it’s already a commonly used turbo. What if they do use the GT-17 turbo from the light pressure SAAB models? They’re surely not buying the design from Garrett, so they would have to rely on them as a supplier, but the additional vehicles could lower the price of a GT-17 turbo because they would help make this fairly rare model of turbo more in demand.

It will be interesting to see what BAIC does with the 9-5 and 9-3 designs and what happens to the aftermarket parts prices once the new vehicles are up and running.

I fouled the stock converter on my SAAB while trying to recover from a failed turbo. The car ran poorly, with a rough idle, stalling, surging, and there was a lack of power and decrease in fuel mileage. A stock replacement catalytic converter from SAAB was around $1500. A 3 inch downpipe and race cat from GenuineSAAB.com was less than $600. It arrived at my door less than 48 hours after I ordered it.

Removing the old converter was straightforward. I drove the car onto ramps, blocked the rear wheels, set the brake and disconnected the battery. I also disconnected the wiring harnesses for the two O2 sensors. These are located near the firewall, next to the throttle body and brake reservoir.

There is no need to remove the oxygen sensors until the entire downpipe is loose. Remove the heat shield and pipe connecting the diverter valve to the turbo’s cobra.

There are three nuts / threaded studs that connect the turbo to the downpipe. Remove these, but keep the old downpipe supported on the threaded studs that remain. I had two nuts come loose and one threaded stud come loose. It really doesn’t matter.

Under the car there is a metal bracket with a bolt or two that will need to be loosened and there are three nuts that need to be removed where the downpipe meets the resonator in the middle of the car. Once these are loose you can start wiggling the old downpipe and converter  until it is free and can be slid out from under the car.

Once the old pipes are loose you can remove the oxygen sensors. I used liquid wrench and an open adjustable wrench with a rubber mallet to get mine off. This would be a good time to replace the two O2 sensors, if necessary.

The sensors are then installed on the new downpipe and installation under the car is done in reverse. The metal bracket by the oil sump is no longer used with the race cat. The O2 sensors might need to be rerouted differently to reach the wiring harness, but that’s no big deal. Use the threaded studs at the turbo and resonator as extra hands to adjust the pipe into place. Take your time and tighten the bolts completely once in place to close any exhaust leaks.

Here is the inside of the racing cat.

This project gives you an opportunity to check on the health of your turbo. Here is the inside of my turbo, one year after it was installed.

The project was simple and the results were immediate. The car needed a working converter. The upgrade to a 3 inch downpipe brings me closer to the ability to go from my current stage-1 to a stage-3, once I get the correct software from BSR, Aero cobra, and a larger cat back exhaust.

Next month I will have owned my Peek email device for one year. It was given to me as a gift last Christmas. There are very few items in this world that I feel are worth writing a post about; the iPod Touch, the Canon G10, and maybe the rubber broom we got from the “As Seen On TV” aisle at Target (those brooms truly are awesome).

The Peek deserves a spot with this list.

The Peek, so you don’t have to google it, is a pocket sized device that sends a receives email. That’s all.  It uses the same towers as T-Mobile phone service. You get your email anywhere you can get a mobile phone signal. There is no need for wi-fi hotspots. I’ve found that I even get Peek service where mobile phones are on the edge of a signal.

So why would I want it? I want it because it does mobile email perfectly. I want it because smart phone voice & data plans are expensive. I want it because I hate talking on the phone. I honestly spend around $3.00 a month on pre-paid mobile minutes for my Virgin Mobile phone. I want it because I can bide my time and give one precise response when I send an email, instead of having to immediately deal with someone’s problem back-and-forth over the phone. “But wait”, you say, “text messages can do a lot of these things”. That’s true, and my Peek also does text messages wonderfully.

My Peek has saved the day on several occasions. The best moment so far was when my family and I set out from our hotel in West Memphis towards Graceland and soon realized that none of us knew where it was beyond the general “Elvis Presley Boulevard”. I emailed snapask.com for the Wikipedia page on Graceland. Moments later the article, along with the street address, was in my hand and we were on our way.

My Peek updates my Twitter account and my Facebook status. I get news feeds from my Facebook and Twitter. The Instant weather alerts from NOAA are great to have in the springtime (I live in Tornado Alley). I get maps, movie times, weather forcasts, all with quick emails to various free services.

My Peek is like my first iPod. It does on thing perfectly and I never expected  it would change my life as much as it has.

The customer service from Peek is at a Zappos.com level. I emailed support once and got a quick response with the information I needed. I called once to upgrade to lifetime service and the person on the phone was actually at Peek Inc, instead of some faceless call center. Peek has held several contests for users; during March Madness I predicted who would win the championship and Peek sent me a metal water bottle as a prize.

I purchased an upgrade cable from Peek so I could keep my software up to date and get the latest features. Doing it myself was easy enough, but they offer free upgrade service by mail if you don’t mind giving up your device for a few days. Their customers are very active in the Peek community. People hold upgrade parties and release their own services for the Peek, such as maps and Facebook feeds. I was lucky enough to get a lifetime warranty on my Peek during a special event. I have a feeling the warranty was a one-time thing, but this means I have lifetime service and lifetime warranty on my Peek for less than $300.

The device itself is priced so low that I have an extra one still in the box for the day the battery, case, or charger wears out on my current Peek.

The Peek is not for everyone. Hell, I still keep my plastic mobile phone with mediocre voice, T9 text on squishy buttons, and a battery that needs to be recharged every night with me for emergencies. But the phone sits in my pocket while the Peek, with a sturdy metal shell, full Qwerty keyboard with clicky keys, and a battery that stays strong for days, is constantly being used.

(I am only a satisfied Peek client that loves his Peek. I get no compensation from Peek for this post.)

The dating site OKCupid maintains a blog about the data they collect from their users. OKTrends has some extremely entertaining posts, and they all happen to be about statistics. The site has data from 100 times the number of people polled for nation-wide Gallup poles (300k people v. 3000 people).

Commenters point out that, as opposed Gallup polling random people, OKCupid polls only members. The people who are members of OKCupid could be very different than the people who are not. Still, it’s a lot of data and it’s interesting to see differences between people by state and gender. For example; the length of a introductory message and the chance of a response, how different religions and races interact on the site.

I found the site through a post on BoingBoing. The interesting part of the post was how men and women respond to attractiveness. Men gave a fairly even bell-curve to the female attractiveness on the site. Men replied more often as the attractiveness of the woman increases, until the woman was so attractive that messages dropped off. This is about what I’d expect. Guys like attractive women and many guys would feel they had no chance with the extremely attractive memebers, so they wouldn’t even try.

Woman, however, were different. The women on the site found very few males on the site to be attractive (rating 80% below average in looks) and tended to message the slightly below average men the most.

The discussion on the BoingBoing  post and the original post by OKTrends are both worth reading if you are interested. There is a lot of discussion about why women found so many of the men below average in looks. An important part of that discussion has to do with how OKCupid works. I don’t understand it fully, I’m not a member, but from what I read in the comments there is a system that automatically alerts a person if you rate them at a certain level and above. The commenters suggested that women are intentionally not  selecting higher levels to avoid unwanted contact from the men they are rating. Another commenter complained that they system “baits and switches” when you are rated high by someone, by showing other profiles with the one person that thought you were attractive. The woman said she rates all of those people as” unattractive” in protest of this feature.