Leaderboard

B fit and tacked up a set of lateral links for the billet knuckle swap. I turned up some of the pieces for that and a couple of wheel bearing spacers. Sometime in the next month or so we plan on swapping out his rear diff and doing the billet rear knuckle conversion on his Forester.

Finally made more billet rear knuckles. Spent some time making these a little smoother/nicer than the first pair. One pair with tapped holes in the side for wheel scraper/caliper bracket and no wheel bearing holes for slammo. He is planning on using a different bolt on wheel bearing, I'll machine that when the time comes.

I bought the injector and once I got it I compared it side-by-side with a Loyale injector. They're the exact same. I vacuum sealed the injectors with desiccant packets. Hopefully they'll last until I need them. I've heard it's the moisture that'll corrode the coils and kill them. Are you asking about that weird horseshoe gasket? For installation I use a few dabs of silicone grease to hold the gasket into the throttle body then quickly flip the throttle body onto the intake. There's Walker brand throttle body gasket kits, I'd recommend those. You get every seal you'd need for a throttle body rebuild. I'd recommend a coolant system pressure test after you install a new gasket. I've learned my lesson on that one the hard way. :]

There's been several threads lately about options for front struts, now that they're entirely unavailable in the US. With one of mine getting really wobbly, and my springs so flat that I've been sitting solid on the front bump stops (and ruining tires with the resultant camber) for the last year, I decided it was time to really look into my options for new parts. It turns out that ordering from Australia is a lot easier than I expected! This post will mostly focus on Gen II parts, since that's what I drive, but the info in it applies to all vehicles and anything else you want to order. I've looked in the past, and even emailed several places, both ebay sellers and local businesses, and very close to absolutely no one in Australia will ship to the US. There's one person on ebay with a small selection, charging a very hefty markup, and they have poor feedback. Australia has many parts options available - all of KYB, Monroe, Gabriel, and Sachs struts, both 4wd and 2wd and for every generation, two manufacturers of new springs, King and Lovells, in standard height, heavy duty, 1"/25mm lift, and lowered (are there people this silly?) versions, at least four options for control arm bushings, new copper-brass radiators, caster/camber adjustment kits, complete front caliper rebuild kits, fuel filters with the third nipple on top, brand new tie rod ends,... and no one will ship to the US. So what to do? Freight forwarding! I used AUSFF, https://www.ausff.com.au/ but there's other options. For a small fee, you have sellers ship them packages, then they ship them to you. All the steps I provide will be for AUSFF, but I assume the other options have a similar process. My experience with them was about average, so other options could be better or worse. Here's a little writeup on the whole process. First, you sign up, and pay a fee for the "plan" you want, which starts at AU$5 for one package. I got the AU$20 plan, which will ship up to 10 packages a month, with various extra services. The signup process is fairly typical. They talk about verification documents, but their faq mentions these are for high-risk transactions, and they didn't ask me to provide any of them. I guess no one scams people for old subaru parts. Next, if you're shopping on ebay, go to https://www.ebay.com.au/ , and log in using the same login you use for the US .com site - no need to create a new account or do anything special. Go to your profile, and add a new (additional, not primary) shipping address. Enter the address AUSFF, or your chosen freight forwarder, gives you. This will be an address in Australia that you can ship all your stuff to. AUSFF gives you a unique number you should ship things care of, like "C/O R123456", that you enter as the second line of your shipping address. If you don't do this, they won't know who the package is for, so make sure you enter it. Enter AUSFF's provided phone number and everything else they give you, none of your own address info. You can also order from local businesses. For example, Sparesbox, https://www.sparesbox.com.au/ , also has a good selection and significantly lower prices than ebay sellers (and they sponsor 4WD 24/7, so I'll give them a shout-out), and I would have ordered from them except they were out of stock on the springs I wanted. You should probably stick with sites that use shipping services rather than local store delivery, but you can also get local deliveries if you talk to AUSFF beforehand. Ship everything to your AUSFF address, of course. If you can't enter a second address line, put the c/o number on the end of your name, i.e. "John Doe C/O R123456". Note that AUSFF will not ship food, so no snacks, alas. Now, go shopping! I'll put links to some of the deals I found in a reply to this post, since they're probably transient, but here's an ebay search for most of the strut options I found. When shopping, you need to keep in mind the naming/model differences, and the currency differences. The latter is easier - at the time I'm writing this, an AUD is about 0.70USD. So, as a rough mental estimate, figure your USD cost is about 2/3rds of the AUD price. An AU$300 part is US$200. etc. The exchange rate will likely be different by the time you read this, so look it up before shopping. And then shipping and tariffs bring it up to about the same number again. Then, there's model names. "Brat", "GL", etc are US names (and one is a trim package that for some reason is used as a name, for reasons I still utterly fail to understand), and won't find any parts anywhere else in the world. The Brat is the Brumby in Australia, while other models were Leone, with Leone II being Gen II vehicles. There's also model codes, for example AU5 is a Gen II Brumby, while AM5 is a Leone II Estate (Gen II Wagon). You'll need to search with these names/models to find parts. Take note that ebay and other sites' fitment information is often **very** random. As an example, the fitment table might only specify a part fits the Sedan version (looking at you, Lovells Springs!), while it's identical on Wagons and Brumbys. Also common, parts will only say they fit Brumby (Aussies love their Utes!), while they'd also fit every other model of the same generation. Or the year range will be wrong (King Springs this time). Or they might be listed as fitting both your Gen II vehicle and a Gen III vehicle, but you know the parts are different. So do very wide searches and mentally filter based on your subaru knowledge rather than trying to search for exact model parts. Also remember some parts are still available in the US - you can get the KYB boot kit locally without paying international shipping and tariffs, for example. Add all the items you want to your cart, and go to check out. First, make sure to switch to your AUSFF (or other forwarder) address. It will then show correct shipping (usually free) and let you pay. When you pay, ebay will ask if you want to pay in AUD or USD. If you pay in USD, they will do the currency conversion for you, at a rate that's slightly worse than the current rate found elsewhere, and bill your payment method (credit card, paypal, etc) in USD. If you pay in AUD, they'll bill your card in AUD, and your bank may charge a foreign transaction fee in addition to using an unknown exchange rate. I used USD and let them handle it. If you pay with paypal in AUD, paypal will ask you the exact same question again, with a similar but slightly different exchange rate - again it's probably easier to let them do it, especially if you're using the pay later options. With non-ebay sites you'll probably pay in AUD and the rate will be up to your card issuer/bank. And now the waiting begins. But not much waiting. Most places ship AusPost or Aramex. Aramex has a rather spoob reputation, but I don't think the actual experience is worse than the budget couriers in the US. Both will get parts to AUSFF pretty quickly. Every time AUSFF gets a package, they email you with the tracking number of it. When AUSFF has all your packages, the next step is consolidation. Log in, select all your packages, and click the button to consolidate them. They'll open up the larger boxes and try to stuff the smaller boxes in too - for example, they stuck my tie rod ends inside my springs. This saves you a lot of postage getting them to the US, by shipping one package instead of several. They'll then wrap everything with plastic and tape it up. You can also ask for pictures of the items you got, scans of printed information, etc. When you get the notice that they've consolidated your parts, log in again, and select to ship your new consolidated package. You'll be given several options for how to ship it. FedEx Express was only a few dollars more than AusPost, and was 3-5 days instead of 3-5 weeks, so that's the one I went with. You'll need to provide the tariff information for your items, which is a short description of each item, a tariff code which you can look up at https://hts.usitc.gov/ (for example, 8708.80.1300 is McPherson Struts for non-agricultural vehicles), the value (price you paid), and country of origin (enter Australia if unknown). You can estimate the tariffs at https://www.simplyduty.com/import-calculator/ and other sites. At the time I write this, the Australia special rate for automotive parts seems to be 10%, but that might change in five minutes. With FedEx, they deliver your parts then bill you for the tariffs - I'm still waiting for my bill, so I don't know how paying them works yet. AUSFF has a box to check if you want insurance; I selected it. And now for more waiting, which is maybe little or lots depending on the service you selected. And then installing! Overall, the process was fairly painless. I spent a lot more time selecting parts than with the actual shipping. And with how much nicer my AM5 is driving now, I regret not doing this long ago!

Now we're talking! Any more pix/build thread/travel #'s?