25th Dec 2010, 10:33
My wife bought our grandmas 1998 Buick last year. The car has 41,000 miles on it. A real old ladies car. I was totally loving the car till it broke down 300 miles from home on Christmas Eve. Lost coolant and died. Didn't like the $875.00 tow bill home. Now my wife wants to get rid of it. I am a mechanic, so I will try to fix it and sell it. I am sure it is the intake problem. Just have to get the parts and fix it.
29th Mar 2011, 10:40
Thanks people for all your wise words and sharing your experiences.
I believe I will keep my money and invest in another type of car.
8th Jun 2019, 02:01
I own a 97 LeSabre and the plastic upper manifold (plenum) developed an antifreeze leak. It is a fairly easy fix for anyone with average intelligence... an improved version of the upper manifold made by a company called ATP is available at rockauto.com for less than 70 bucks. It comes with a narrower EGR pipe which lessons the probability of hot exhaust gaskets melting the manifold, which leads to the dreaded antifreeze leak. All you need are basic hand tools and a torque wrench. YouTube videos for this fix abound. Took about 2 hours start to finish. Changed oil and filter after repair. This was about 10000 miles ago and still running fine. No excuse to pay 800.00 bucks for this relatively simple repair.
26th Aug 2010, 13:19
I also have a 97 Buick LeSabre. It now has 126000 miles on it with a few problems.
Everyone that was saying that the cooling and heat only come out of the floor and the windshield; this is what I had done to fix that problem.
Behind the glove compartment is the control module for the AC/heating system. It has a block that has 7 different colored line coming out of it. These lines are vacuum lines that go to the different actuators that control where the air flow goes mid, floor etc.
If you are very careful, take the block that these lines go to and remove it from the module. There is a 7 mm nut that holds the two pieces together inside this block. There are some flimsy little tits that goes to the different vacuum lines. These tits over time get mushy, and air no longer moves through them. What I found to work is cutting the vacuum lines on both sides of this block, and getting a vacuum line that will fit over the outside of the existing vacuum lines. I did this, and my AC/heat works, and the air flow come out, whichever vent is selected.