Best way to rebuild a 9000 5-speed: Contact thesaabsite.com and order a rebuilt unit.  They sell Eriksson's rebuilts at the best price you can find.  All told, it's in the neighborhood of $1500.  Sounds like a lot, I know, but what you get is a sparkling clean, ready to install trans that needs only a slave cylinder and a mount.  It'll look a lot better than anything you can do, and it will be right.  Can you rebuild it yourself?  Maybe.  Probably, if you're diligent, resourceful, careful, determined, experienced, and have the manual.  Personally, I failed - I made every rookie mistake that could be made, probably.  I feel sure that I could succeed next time, but there probably never will be a next time (I would prefer to think that you don't get more than one 9K 5-speed failure in a lifetime!)  If you want to give it a shot, have at it; worst case, you'll throw away $500 or so and a couple of weeks of your life.  Be advised, though, that with another grand you could be up an running with an Eriksson rebuilt before that couple of weeks went by!  I don't regret having tried, because it was fascinating; educational; challenging.  And as I said, having paid the price of making all the mistakes and ultimately failing, I could do it now.  Hell, you could bring me all the parts in a box and I could probably put it together correctly.  The adjustments are tricky though.  And it's pretty easy to screw something up.  It's really worthwhile to buy an Eriksson rebuilt!  Eriksson is one of the finest, most honest, helpful and upstanding outfits I have ever dealt with.

Here's a link to a very good pictorial of a 9K 5-speed partial teardown: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/home01/gearbox/index.html.  Mr Haydon had much, much better tools to work with than I had; my description is more for those of you who don't have much in the way of pullers.  Also, he went in specifically to replace the second gear synchronizer ring, which involves only partial disassembly of the output shaft gear cluster, without removing the input shaft, whereas I tore mine completely down.  He succeeded, by the way; I failed.  I ended up ordering an Eriksson rebuilt.  I think I could rebuild one completely now, but I made too many rookie mistakes the first time around, and they finally caught up with me.  I'll just try to point out the pitfalls and high points that I encountered.  If you need specific help, feel free to e-mail me.  I'll say this:  It takes either a stout or a foolish heart to attempt a 5-speed rebuild if you have no special tools.  That having been said, though, I would not be afraid to attempt it again; having been armed with all that I learned from my failure, I do think I could pull it off now.

I originally thought that I would document the trans rebuild rebuild in its entirety, but I decided against it.  If you don't have the manual, then you shouldn't try it.  I could devote several megabytes to it here, but I don't think it's worth it.  Truth be told, my experiences indicate that even the Saab dealers resort to installing a rebuilt unit, rather than trying to rebuild themselves.

To disassemble and reassemble the 5-speed successfully, you either need some highly specialized tools, or you need to have some really good pullers to start with, or you need to be very inventive and determined.  Since I could find precious little in the way of special pullers, I went the latter route.  Bear in mind that in the absence of special tools, you often have to get a bit crude.

WARNING: Gears are unforgiving!  When you're turning any exposed meshing gears, and particularly when you're tightening nuts or pulling gears down, keep your hands clear of the gears!  DO NOT hold a gear with your hand while tightening or turning.  I made the mistake of holding a gear while pulling a matching gear and bearing onto one of the shafts - the transmission was locked, but one gear slipped and my thumb was instantly pulled into mesh between the two 5th gears.  Fortunately, the wrench slipped off simultaneously and the gears spat my thumb back out the same way it entered.  I was extremely fortunate that my thumbnail escaped, but the side of my thumb was badly mangled.  In a flash.  Two hours at the emergency room, and a few stitches.  Coulda been a lot, lot, whole lot worse ... I shudder to think, because, trust me, it was really ugly as it was.  As I told my buddy Bob Davis, transmissions have soul, because they're complex machines.  But gears, they just have purpose, and God help you if you get in the way of that purpose.  BE CAREFUL!

Disassembly

 

Now that it's apart

 

Reassembly