Swedish Car Day was two sundays ago, so I spent a few hours Saturday getting the Sonett’s brakes finished. It turned out the lines West Of Sweden sent me were fine, I just had to remove some adapters the previous owner had installed. The brake system on the Sonett was certainly not designed with maintenance in mind however, and if I even have to replace those lines again, I’m going to re-engineer them.

Anyway, on the way home from the event, the car gradually started back firing pretty badly and I could hear a faint rattling in the engine bay as I pulled away from stop lights. Since I had the next day off, I went out to take a look. It turns out one of the the right side exhaust pipe nuts had fallen off and the other one was dangerously loose. I panicked that the nut was lost forever until I remembered the rattling. Sure enough, a quick survey of the engine floor with a flash light turned up the bolt, and a few minutes of cursing with a socket wrench tightened up the exhaust.

With that minor struggle out of the way I installed some new spark plugs in the car and look a test drive…

What a fantastic change, the car runs so smoothly, with no backfiring and now the car smoothly hanldes those times when you are cruising along a bit to slowly for the gear your in and want to accelerate and you think to yourself “should I down shift?”.

So if you haven’t changed your plugs in a few years, go do it. It takes 30 minutes and you’ll love the results. Make sure you have the special SAAB tool if you’ve got a Sonett though, or the #1 plug will have you cursing!

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This is my 1972 Saab Sonett. It is in much better condition than my orange ’74 Sonett. I’ve taken it autocrossing fairly often, and it does fairly well, considering its 4.5” wide tires.

It has some MSS performance modifications from the 80’s, and has been dyno’d at 80 HP.