Had a severe vacuum leak on the Saab that was causing it to die at idle. The carburetor base plate was loose on one side, and since it is held to the carb with screws from the bottom, I had to pull it off the engine to tighten it up.
And when I pulled it out? The base gasket tore. So I had to make one myself. I didn’t have any locktite or I would have used that on the screw to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I will probably do that if I rebuild the carb in the future, or the screws loosen again. What a PITA. The stock carb simply has the base plate sandwiched between the carb and the manifold, and it can easily be tightened down without removing anything since it’s just held in with the same two bolts that hold the carb down.
Good news is the car starts and idles smoothly now, and I did the work before it gets over 100F down here in Texas. It is fitted with a Holley 1940, which is a big single barrel carb meant for something a bit larger than the 1.7L V4 - which it works great at WOT and high speed cruising, getting it the car to idle smoothly has always been a pain, so when it started idling worse a couple months ago I didn’t really think too much about it. But finally overall performance began to decline so I had to dig in and figure out what was going on. Bleh. Old cars.