Those of you lucky enough to own a Saab will know that they have a problem with the SID display. Over time pixels on the display stop working and the display becomes unreadable.

Last week mine got to the point of being irritating enough to do something about it. New SID units are not cheap (approx. £200.00!), and they will eventually fail anyway, so it seemed sensible to try fixing it myself first.

The problem is caused by a ribbon cable in the bowels of the unit that works loose over time. There are a number of sites that show you how to disassemble the SID

• http://www.thesaabsite.com/93/Saab-Sidrepairs.htm
• http://www.saab9-5.com/howto/sidrepair.htm

but most of them recommend pressing down on the ribbon cable to reestablish the connections and inserting some kind of ruber or card to maintain the pressure when you reassemble the unit. Unfortunately this approach doesn't seem to guarantee a fix. I found a reference to the 'iron trick' here and a full description with pictures on the Seattle Saab Club site (seems to be down at the moment) which looked like a better solution.

 So on Saturday morning I got to work (fairly tentatively as I've never touched car electronics before)...

1. Remove the SID unit - 5 minutes
2. Disassemble the unit - 10 minutes
3. Iron the ribbon cable - 10 minutes
4. Reassemble the unit - 3 minutes
5. Put the SID back in the car - 1 minute

and...

 The display is perfect! Woo hoo! I reckon you could do this whole procedure in 15 minutes.

I can't recommend this simple procedure highly enough. If you do your own car maintenence this is a breeze, if you don't - it's still a breeze  The only tricky part is making sure that you don't pull on the ribbon cable when you have disassembled the SID.