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Hi Simon.
There are a lot of people who could answer your question here. They probably are reluctant to give you the bad news. I just had to deal with this on my 83 four door, so I'll spread some cheer.
Your car has the most common type of gear box failure on these cars, a pinion bearing failure.
What is a pinion bearing?http://www.erikssonindustries.com/
The Saab transmission has a long shaft that goes from near the input end of the transmission to the differential assembly. The differential assembly has the ring and pinion gears. The smaller of these, the pinion gear is actually part of and at the end of this shaft. The pinion bearings are two taper roller bearings (like front wheel bearings on old American cars) that support the bearing just in front of this pinion gear.
In support of Saabs (this is a Saab site after all), the transmissions ususlly go 100K to 125K miles before these bearings give out. Saab owners only hear about this failure and deal with it because most of the other parts of the cars tend to go for 200K miles unlike other cars. I junked my Chrysler mini-van before it got to the milage where Saab pinion bearings fail.
What are you up against? Here is the bad news. Pinion bearings are cheap. About $30-40 for the pair. To get to them, however, you have to:
Pull the engine and trans.
Remove the clutch, flywheel and starter.
Remove the chain drive that transferrs power from the engine to the trans.
Remove the front cover of the transmission. Interestingly, you don't have to separate the engine from the transmission to do this.
Pull out all of the gears, synchro rings and shift forks.
then you can remove the aforementioned long shaft and the pinion bearings.
So, labor to do the job is expensive. I just did my own. I found I needed a manual on the car in general and another one on the transmission to do the job.
The other consideration is what you find when you pull all the other parts out.
Because your pinion bearings are bad, the shaft may have been moving up and down and could have worn the ring or the pinion or both. These are big bucks. In these transmissions at the milage you probably have, it's likely third, fourth and the cluster gear are worn. These are $300-500 each (medium bucks). The trans probably needs at least 1st-2nd shift fork and five synchro rings which adds $250 in parts alone.
A second alternative if you want to do this yourself is a rebuilt transmission. Erikkson Industries on the East Coast (web site:http://www.erikssonindustries.com/) sells them. I think around $1500 and based on what I just said, I don't see how they can do it for that price.
Drop the car off at a good shop and you are probably looking at $2500 for the repair.
Unfortunately, if you let it go too long, the pinion gets so far out of alignment with the ring gear (due to bearing slop) that the ring and pinion get destroyed. At that time, you no longer have a rebuildable gear box or a core.
Sorry to have to be the bearer of this bad news, but it's pretty much what I found when I faced the same thing.
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