Hello all! Glad to be part of a community of Saab enthusiasts with a wealth of knowledge.
This is my first post.

The Garrett turbo on my 2003 9-5 Linear 2.3t blew, spewing white smoke as usual. I followed some forums online on what appears to be a very typical upgrade from this stock Garrett to a Mitsubishi TD04HL-15T, pulled from a junkyard 2001 9-5 Aero with 93K miles on it. I even pulled all the lines with correct banjo cables and basically just plug-and-played into my Saab. After performing this job, the white smoke is gone, and I do not see any oil leaks. I resused most of the old washers, and tightened to slightly more than the torques listed in the WIS to ensure "good" sealing (ideally I would have replace them but could not find the right sized copper washers at my local hardware store). One thing I did not do was put a gasket at the return oil nipple with pipe connecting the turbo to the cylinder block (the original gasket was rusted and it broke off completly, and I had so much trouble working with the little room beneath the car and in the engine bay that I unfortunately forgot this gasket...). Do you think that I will have trouble down the line because of this mistake? It was very hard getting this part interconnected between the turbo and the engine block where it connects because again there is so little room and the accordion pipe which connects these parts is not very bendable. I can put a picture of what I mean in the next post; saabworld fails to upload my image here...

I also pulled an ECU from a 2002 (different car at the junkyard) 9-5 Aero. I would prefer not to go the route of trionic tuning...can I use this ECU in my car and have a friend with a Tech 2 just marry it to my car? I highly doubt this ECU was divorced when I removed it from the junkyard car--I just removed it from that car and paid for it at the junkyard. The worry I have about doing this is that technically the Aero engine is a B235R and on the linear it is a B235E. Not sure how different these engines are inside but brief google searches show that they have different spark plugs, but beyond that I have no idea what else is different. A lot of people mention that all you need to do with these kinds of Garrett to TD04 upgrades is just (1) plug and play the Mitsubishi turbo (with correct lines) and (2) swap the ECU: regarding (2), I am not convinced it is an easy swap. Isn't the intercooler on the Aero also different for this model year (2001-2003)? I am just worried that swapping the ECU and having the computer behave like an Aero using Linear parts may accelerate the demise of the engine.

Curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this! Appreciate being able to tap into a wealth of experience of the people on this forum.

Thanks!