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If you've got a rust-free car with a flawless interior, you DEFINITELY want to hang onto it! All this engine stuff is just trivial nuisance material by comparison; I mean, eventually any older engine will need a valve job and even more eventually a bottom-end rebuild, but that's a LOT more routine and less painful than cutting out and patching rust, repainting, redoing interior bits, etc.
I know what you mean about wanting to drive the car, though -- I always get to that point where I'm thinking, "It's time for this to stop being a project and start being a car!" -- so the key question is how much grief you're in for with this low-compression issue.
As Martin said, start by adjusting the valves correctly, and if this is really, really your lucky day, that'll be all it takes to resolve your compression problem. The valve seats do recede (get thinner) over time, causing compression to leak out, and if previous owners have been neglectful of this then yours could conceivably have receded far enough to lose as much as you've lost.
If you still get low compression readings, then your choices are: rings, valves, or head gaskets. An easy way to check the rings is to test the compression, then put a little engine oil down the plug hole and test again; if the reading goes up a lot, the rings are your problem (the oil temporarily improves the seal of the rings.) If the oil doesn't do anything, you're down to valves or gaskets. I don't have much experience with compression leaking out of the heads due to gasket failure; all I can think of is to look at the oil for any signs that coolant might be getting into it, or conversely signs that oil might be getting into the coolant, as these can be tip-offs that the gasket has blown internally and allowed the fluids to mix.
The good (?) news is that if you decide it's the valves, you'll need to replace the head gaskets anyway in the course of getting a valve job, so you'll have the chance to check for both problems at the same time. I'd suggest doing that first except that I just hate pulling heads!! Anyway, if the heads do need to come off, you've got the choice of taking them to a machine shop for a valve job, or swapping them out for rebuilt heads available from some of our fine marque specialists who advertise in the classifieds of this site. Having the machine shop do it is probably going to be less expensive, but will take longer, so if you just want to get this over with so you can get out on the road in your car, exchanging for rebuilt heads will be your quickest way to put this piece of your life behind you.
Good luck and have fun. And NEVER give up on a rust-free SAAB!!!
posted by 68.227.170...
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