zyewdall

Head gasket job on my '85 wagon. After about a month of working on it I put it all back together and it runs great! I take it for a short jaunt to town, and pretty soon the alternator stops charging, and the temp starts going up. The main crank pully wasn't tightened down, and had rattled loose. And reamed out the inside of the pully by rattling around. So I got to park it again and drive the beater '84 wagon for a few more days, and buy a new pully for it...

Pretty much. A jack underneath holding it up, him holding one side, and me on the other side holding it with my left hand with my knee sort of wedged under it to hold it up, and quickly tack welding the top edge with my right hand. Then switch over to his side and tack weld it. Once it was hanging from the top edges, we could use jacks and vice grips and a 2x4 to line up the bottom rails perfectly, and tack weld them in place. That's one of the nice things about the wirefeed welder, is you can operate it with one hand, while holding the piece on with the other hand (okay, you do tend to burn the fingers on your welding gloves if you have too small a piece you are trying to weld on this way...)

It's all butt welded (except the parts we had to add the filler plate too). Tricky to weld the sheet metal without burning through, but I did pretty well after a little practice, on the lowest setting on the welder. For alignment we just sawzalled off the front of the donor car then drew a line on his car exactly where we had to cut the other one off to make it match up. A little work with the grinder after cutting the old one off to make the new one butt up properly on the frame tubes, and it went back together pretty well. We were a little amazed it actually lined up too. Took the two of us about 8 hours (including a run to the hardware store in the middle). On the alignment, a front end alighnment is probably in order. But he said that it still stops perfectly straight after the accident -- when it still had the mashed front end on it. Pretty good straight on hit I guess, so it didn't knock anything to the side. On the ladder rack, I'm not sure -- I think it was reused from his old volvo, which could have been from when they still sold them.

From Rueters this morning http://za.today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2006-03-25T102045Z_01_ALL537167_RTRIDST_0_OZABS-AUTOS-SUBARU-DIESEL-20060325.XML

Yesterday, we did a nose transplant on my friends '86 wagon He had hit another car, and mashed in the the front, especially the passenger side. The electric fan was pinched between the radiator and timing belt cover, and the oil filter was dented. Miraculously, it still ran fine, just a small radiator leak. With some more of the accesories removed. Right after the accident it was actually another 2 or 3" farther back, but we pulled it out to keep the fan from chewing through the radiator. We cut off the front of the unibody frame, and found a donor car with a good front end And welded the good one onto his car Welding went pretty well. A little wirefeed welder, a grinder, and a sawzall. We lined up the frame portions pretty good, but had to use some holey metal to gap the sheet metal section in one place. All back together with the new parts. It was amazing how well everything lined up -- hood catch works perfectly, the four fender bolts on top all go in. Gaps between hood and fenders are uniform. Wow. Still missing a good bumper (the donor car didn't have a good one either...)

I don't think anyone still uses resistance for speed control any more? All of the controllers you can buy for DC motors are PWM. On the charging from solar, the battery packs for the AC systems are typically around 300 volts, where the DC systems usually use 96 or 120 volts. Just means more solar panels in series to charge the battery bank for the AC system. But most grid-tied PV systems are running around 300 volts anyway nowadays, so it might be pretty easy to hotwire one of those to the electric car bank.

The charcoal gray/brown. That's what color my '89 GL is. Why make a car the exact color of road grime? (well, I guess it hides the road grime well.... ) That's why mine quickly got a two tone green paint job on top of alot of the brown, and now looks pretty good I think. Sorry for the fuzzy picture.

JB weld the seam down the middle But yeah, check the PCV valve, as it may not be working properly.

What if you solved the power and gearing problem by making it a two engine beast? One drives the front wheels and middle set. One drives the back set via a transmission with the rear output shaft removed. Would require some syncronizing of the transmission linkages and throttles and clutches, but it would have some omph with the two engines, plus a certain amount of redundancy, because it would be able to operate with just one engine in case one failed (if you decoupled the tranny linkages to keep the one for the non-running engine in nuetral).

Better than I'd expect. My dad's F-100 with the 351W only gets 11mpg average. When I first got my volkswagen running, I had the fuel line dipped into a 2 gallon container of biodiesel sitting on the tranny held in with bungy cords. Ran it for about 75 miles that way before I got around to hooking it up to the actual fuel tank. Don't know that I'd try it with gas -- alot more flamable than biodiesel.

Mines been running with one belt since I bought it 17k miles ago. No troubles. I haven't removed the AC compressor or the condensor -- the compressor is apparently dead though, so the previous owner just took the belt off of it. '89 GL wagon

Doesn't sound all that bad to me -- if you never want to run it on the road again, and have access to welding equipment. Just weld some big steel plates on there and bolt the struts back on. You'll likely never get the alignment and camber right again, but might work for an offroad fine. Bigger problem is that the '90 doesn't have the low range tranny.

You don't have to wait for the light to come on. Just fill it up whenever and see how many gallons it takes, and then compute your mileage. Once you have an idea what mileage it's actually getting, you can use the trip odometer as your gas guage and ignore the other one. I've found that most gas guages are quite non-linear, (though not usually as much as yours), so using the trip odometer is a more accurate way of really knowing how far you can still go, when gas stations are far between.

What engine is the fuel injected one, and what is the carb for? I think the intake manifolds for the SPFI EA82, carbed EA82, and carbed EA81 are interchangeable, so you should be able to do it. Shouldn't be too hard to find a junkyard suby with the proper ECU though -- the SPFI EA82's do have a bit more power than the carbed ones, with the same gas mileage. EDIT: oh on the distributor, I think you will have to use the one from a carbed EA82. I'm pretty sure the SPFI had a different distributor as far as sensors and such???

Sounds like the one. If so, it probably can't be fixed too easily. But putting another engine in it is a good option. I've never done the EA81-EA82 swap -- wish I'd known about it a few years ago when I blew the engine in my '85, and had a good '84 parts car. If I'd known about this forum back then, I wouldn't have hesitated to tackle that.

Sounds like the relay for the parking/dash lights is not working. And perhaps a bad ground to the left headlight. I think the parking light switch on the dash operates independently of the normal headlight switch/relays (because it is not tied into the ignition switch). My Chilton's has decent wiring diagrams. I don't have it handy right now, but you might check that out.

Cause it's missing... I just looked, and it pretty much goes straight back from the back of the cat just to the left and below the driveshaft, till it gets about even with the input to the rear diff. Then it zags farther to the left, and over the left rear axle, to the muffler input. Oh, mines not a turbo, so the cat might not be in the same place.

Didn't think about the ability to increase torque at a standstill. For towing I can see it as a definite advantage, but, I'm still confused on why that's necessarily better in snow? I remember my dad used to start in 2nd gear in the snow in his old 2wd pickup sometimes, because 1st with the big v-8 engine would just break the tires loose and spin -- too much torque. Also, when I say snow, I usually think of a foot or so of unplowed stuff on a dirt road -- not an inch of icey slushy stuff on a paved road. I suspect that we're not all talking about the same thing when we say "snow"

Yeah, here in Colorado it's very hard to sell an automatic car, unless you get someone who is from Denver and drives in city traffic all the time. Otherwise, most people I know prefer manuals (and not just for subarus). Too many mountains I think.

Huh? I have never driven the newer subaru's in snow, but this statement conflicts with my experience with other auto vs manuals. In deep snow you sometimes have to intentionally spin the wheels to dig your way through, and the manual transmissions seem to handle this alot better -- more control of exactly what speed the wheels are turning since the gear ratio is rigidly locked. In 4wd trucks at least. Now, my subaru GL does much better than my truck already, so I am open to it being different for the auto too. But it still seems to contradict what I'd expect.

Or if they're studded. Remember to rotate the spare through too, if it's part of a matched set of five. I try to do it every 10k or so.

The new head gaskets are supposed to fix the problem the originals had, and not fail again (unless you overheat it or do the things that normally blow head gaskets of course). I don't consider a subaru with 150k miles to be that high of mileage yet. Especially if the head gaskets and transmission were just replaced. Assuming all the other maintenance records look good. Sounds like what would be a decent going price around here. Only question is why was the transmission replaced?

The biodiesel in europe is quite a bit better quality though. They have a different spec for the iodine number (which is a measure of how fast it oxidizes under storage I think???), and soybean based biodiesel isn't good enough to qualify. They use rapeseed (canola) based biodiesel for the most part. I got one batch of canola biodiesel at the station here, and it did run a little better, but most of what we get is from soybean oil (stronger soybean lobby here perhaps...). Still runs better than petrodiesel. Of course, old indirect injection diesels like mine will also run from heated vegetable oil without problems, which can't be said for some of the new computer controlled diesels. Can you get anything with a solid front axle any more? Most of the pickups seemed to switch to IFS around the mid 80's, and even the full size pickups are IFS now I think. And since SUV's are mostly on pickup platforms, they're all independent front suspension too. I know when I was in africa, the VW (rebadged toyota) diesel pickup we had still had a solid front axle, and it did great off road. Got about 28mpg too. I think it was a '94 model. But of course, it was never available in the US.

The one I did it on was an EA82 -- which I think is a little tighter than an EJ22, but I've never really looked at an EJ25, so I don't know.

I think that for a while, the drive train for a dodge omni was made by Volkswagen. I don't know what years -- I think the early 80's, but perhaps still in '90??? Something to look for perhaps. EDIT: Looks like only the engine was volkswagen, and only from 1978 to 1981 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Omni