Last wednesday I went to pick up a few parts for the Saab Sport. I found a bunch of used and NOS parts, and spent a ton of money… The Sport parts are always more expensive than the regular stuff…
But, as anyone who has owned a Sport knows – it’s a completely different car than the regular Saab 96 bullnose. Most people look at a Sport and since it looks like the regular 96 think there’s not a whole lot of differences. But there is a lot – basically only the body is the same.
A few examples:
– the complete interior including seats, panels, dash, metering etc.
– Hubs and brakes
– Gearbox ratios
– The engine is completely different with oil pump, different crankshaft, block, head, carburetors, aircleaner
– Body trim
And if you go more into detail you find more stuff that’s different. That makes parts hunting bit of a challenge, since you need to be ever vigilant not to miss Sport specific parts unintentionally.
A couple of examples:
At the place I got the parts from there were about a dozen two-stroke heads in a single pile. We checked all of them to see if there were Sport heads in there. There were two. Here’s how to spot them:
And here’s also a small but important difference:
The Sport has wider needle bearings on the piston pin than regular 96. So – rebuilding a Sport crankshaft or with a tuned engine you really want to use the wider and stronger needle bearings. But they can be hard to spot if you cannot compare them to the smaller ones.
