zyewdall

That's great. :banana: And you did it without even having low range... I bet you used the new locking center diff though, right? Funny about the jeep not making it up there though. I drove up the same steep snow covered road twice last weekend -- saturday I went up in my 4wd pickup with lots of weight in the back and good mud and snow tires. No real question about whether I'd make it, but it was a little squirrely at times and spun some. sunday I went up again in my friend's '87 GL with 80% worn out snow tires. Went up easier than the truck did.

Hey Nipper and Legacy777. Good insights there. I never thought about the weight of the cars, but you are right. Two guys can almost pick up one end of the old civic... And of course my pickup weighs more but has much bigger tougher tires too (and low range is much slower). About the rocks in the road... well, they did buy a backhoe/loader this fall, so maybe when the snow melts we'll fix up the road a bit... build it up a bit so the stream stays by the side instead of coming on the road. I also always buy very expensive tires (once they were worth 5 times more than the car I put them on) instead of cheapos, and now that I think about it, she's probably getting cheap ones.

Yeah, the defrost will work fine without AC, IF the heater core is good. My '89 GL has a dead compressor, with the belt removed, and defrost still works fine. I pretty much keep the control on the hottest setting available all winter.

I think I took the valve cover off, then there is a contraption with little tubes that squirts oil on the various parts of the cam, which I took out and cleaned. I don't remember taking any more off than that. But it was over a year ago, and I can't remember the details any more.

I did the same thing when I did a head gasket job. Sounded like tick of death, but much louder. Had to pull the valve cover, and some other parts, but not the cam case IIRC, and check them all for stuff stuck in the oil passages, and it cleared right up when I reassembled it the second time.

So, I put the complete exhaust system (headers all the way back) from a loyale on my friends '87 GL a few months back. Apparently, it hangs a little differently, because the pipe coming out of the back of the muffler was pointed up a little too high, and the hot exhaust coming out melted a hole all the way through the plastic bumper. I welded a downturned tip on there yesterday, but I just thought it was funny when she asked me if I knew why the bumper was melting.... thought I'd share it. Sorry, no picture.

I think Syonyk said it all. Except around here there are tons of old gens around too. I love it when the traction to horsepower ratio gets to where my EA82 couldn't handle any more horsepower. Then I can watch the big suv's (and even some of the newer subaru's) spin around on the ice everytime they touch the gas because they've got too much power and break the wheels free. It's fun to be the fastest thing on the road for a change (even it it is only 15mph).

So, I think my friend's subaru ('90 Legacy wagon) is posessed by demons. There was all the usual stuff for a wagon of this age -- new clutch, new exhaust, CV joints. Stuff you expect. But here's the evidence for the demon: Last summer it had unexplained overheating and oil burning problems. New radiator, water pump, thermostat, cooling system flush, etc, had no effect. But it didn't have a blown head gasket (compression great, no mixing of oil or coolant, no coolant loss). A new engine block solved it. However, the demon has now moved to the tires. She's had at least 10 tires in the last year... A good four or five sidewalls blown out, and the rest from studs being pushed through the tires, or attracting screws like crazy. She's got good Happakilita (or however that's spelled) studded snows and just yesterday, another one went flat, and we took it off to find another screw, and a giant bulge in the sidewall about ready to burst. Good we had just replaced the one that blew a sidewall last week so we had the spare available again. On the positive (??) side, the snow tires don't even get worn enough before blowing out a sidewall to have to replace them in sets of four instead of just one of the four.... Although if this keeps up, soon we're going to have to replace all four every two weeks... Now, you can argue that the tire issue (aside from the screws) could be due to the steep rocky snow covered road to her house. You often have to drive like a bat out of h__ to get up this hill in winter, and in the summer, the rocks make it pretty bouncy, and could theoretically push studs back through the tires (never heard of this before though...), and damage sidewalls (She runs studs until July, because it'll still be snowstorms at times, even though it's mostly just rocks) But, I go up the same road once a week at least, with both my GL wagon and my pickup, and have never blown a tire out. And another friend takes his '82 honda civic rustbucket up there regularly in the summertime, and doesn't have problems either. I'm not one to believe in black magic, but sometimes when you've ruled everything else out, what's left?

So why did they move away from those? I've had a few old vehicals with those on them ('43, '53, '61), and figured the paper ones were a new improvement or something. Or maybe they were just cheaper or less dirty to change?

I've found them pretty easy to get in and out. I use a 2x4 on the end of the axle, then hit that with the sledge to get it out. To get it in, I stuff it in as far as it will go, which is usually enough to get an axle nut on there and draw it the rest of the way through. I grease up the stub before trying to install it.

On the harmonic balancer issue -- the Ford 351W V8 I helped rebuild a few years ago had a big metal weight, about an inch thick and 6 inches diameter, put on the front of the crankshaft in between the timing chain gear and the crankshaft pully. I've never seen something like this on a subaru. I guess it's small enough it is built into the crank pully instead of being separate. On price, I think I paid $300 for replacing timing belts, water pump, and front cam seals on my EA82. I provided most of the parts, and also shoveled snow for two days for the shop (I had more time than money at that time and his shop had just gotten 6 feet of snow which buried all the cars waiting to be worked on). So figure somewhere around $450 normal price. He did specialize in old japanese cars (his car was the same model subaru as mine), so he was pretty quick at it.

Yipes. One thing I've done is taken an old broken ratchet, and welded the ratchet solid, and I use that when I'm planning to beat on it. Welding the steel bar directly to the socket sounds like a good idea too. I've used a big adjustable wrench for axle nuts too -- sometimes I've used the starter motor in first gear (or reverse) to turn the axle to break it free.

Nah. You just get used to automatically holding the handle whenever you close the door, and still lock the keys in there....

You have to hold the handle on my Subaru GL and my Mitsubishi truck. I thought it was a japanese thing, but I don't think Toyota pickups do. As for the parking light. I saw an ad in the paper today for a '91 legacy wagon with electrical problems, for $900. They said the parking lights wont turn off and keep draining the battery.....

Sounds like both the strut and the swing arm got bent. They are fairly easy to replace as an entire swing arm/rear hub unit if you can find a used one. I did that when I burned out a rear bearing as it was the cheapest fix. You finally got snow down in Spokane huh. I was up north of town last week, and we had about 18" of really soggy slushy snow, and lots of rain on top. (3,400 feet).

Aha. I was used to the old front page to the forums which had them all in one box instead of a separate one for marketplace forums. I scrolled down to the subaru/vanagon conversion forum and never noticed that there was another box below now.

Well, I've used a number of hardware store bolts (mine carries a good selection of metrics too, but I've found many don't) to replace several things on my cars (not brakes though), and haven't had any problems before. You're probably right that you just forgot to torque them. I forgot to torque my crankshaft pulley bolt once. Lost power to the alternator and water pump about 50 miles later...

Were the replacement bolts from the hardware store the proper thread? Most hardware stores don't carry metric, but they may have had a close american thread one. But not close enough to hold tight.

Sounds good. I've seen rusty ones with 150k on the engines sell for $800. Really nice ones $1500 or maybe $1800. With that little on the engine, and no rust, it'll be hard to talk it down lower, unless the crash really did it in.

Where is that? I was going to put in the marketplace forum, but it's gone after the restructuring last week or so.

True enough. Mine is just liability. And all of them are '80's vehicals. The replacement cost on each of my cars is probably twice bluebook so I'd just get screwed anyway even if I had collision (they're all weird ones, and the weird features are not valued by blue book -- for example, blue book doesn't really care that my '89 GL has no rust, dual range and the touring roof which I see as definite advantages but don't differentiate it from a normal old '90 Loyale in insurance's mind) But my point that a new car would cost more still holds, because I'd have to have collision on that (well, unless I could afford to not buy it on credit. hah)

Holy **** I'm glad I don't own a new car. I have three cars insured, one for business use which is more expensive, and I only pay $90/month total. Where did they move the parking brake on the '05? Z

The engineer part of me thinks it cool how they managed to stick so much stuff on those engines and fit it under the hood The practical part of me reminds me that I paid less for my GL wagon than a single turbo on one of those probably cost, and it'll still do just as well, if not better, in the snow.

Don't have dimenions handy. Someone on here has to though. They are awfully small engines as far as height and length, but are pretty wide. Consider that the back of the engine is actually forward of the center of the front wheels on a subaru and you can see how short they are. Of course the H6 is going to be a little longer... On the differential, the front diff on a subaru is in the transmission, so you can't take it out. But you can just put it in 4wd mode and not hook anything up to the front axle stubs. Offroaders do this all the time if they put in a divorced transfer case and nissan front diff. Edit: that is is you have a fwd/4wd tranny from the EA cars (1989 and earlier). The EJ ones are AWD so you can't take the front axles out. But why not have an AWD sports car. Or you could use an EA tranny with an EJ engine with the KEP adaptor.

On the whole lawyer thing, if they know you have a lawyer, they may suddenly start paying attention. Different situation, but an example of the power of lawyers. We lived a mile up a dirt road when I was growing up. A logging operation destroyed part of the road so bad that our landrover couldn't even make it up. And my mom was 8 months pregnant with my brother at the time. Nothing made any difference in trying to make them fix it (we didn't own a bulldozer to do it, they did). Our neighboring landowner who didn't even live there, but happened to be a lawyer, called them. They were out there the next morning on a sunday fixing it.