MilesFox

although the BAJA is anewer design of engine, the older subarus requred timing belt service at 60,000 miles. I would say that the issue with the timing belt breaking at such a low mileage is due to age alone, it is 5 years old, and plus the car had sat for 7 months before breaking. Possible causes to consider: 1. age of belt, when sitting for months, conformed to a rigid shape, would be stresses where it makes the tightest bend around its pulleys. 2. The water pump may be die for replacement. If the pulley is starting to drag, if the pump is seizing, it will burn up the belt. 3. Bad, worn, aged idler pulleys. The belt rides along a series of idler pulleys and a tensioner pulley. These pulleys are like skateboard wheels, and over time can get loose or seize up, causing a drag on the belt. When the car broke down, did you smell any burning rubber? this would clue a seized idler pulley. If the car got hot, or if the temp gauge was rising, this would clue a water pump failure I would put my bets on the car being parked for so long with the mileage it has. Honestly the belt should have held out to 80,000 miles or so Your mechanic quoted you so much to replace the engine. Far easier and should cost less for labor, less the cost of a new/used engine. But, a competent mechanic would install a new belt, and do a compression test to determine if a valve is bent. If the compression is good, then all you need is the new belts, idler pulleys, and its a good idea to do the water pump. Good opportunity to have the head gaskets re-torqued since the DOHC 2.5 engine is prone to head gasket failure right about 150,000 miles. If the valves are indeed bent(after doing a compression test with new belt) the head would come off, and the valves can be replaced for the same effort of having the heads rebuilt. This operation will require new head gaskets, and a replacement gasket has been revised with another layer(multi layer steel) as a workaround to the prepature head gasket failures from the factory. If you have all that work done, your motor will be rock solid til 300,000 miles, considering you have the timing belt serviced once again at 150,000 BTW i am doing a head gasket job including timing belt set and water pump for someone who was quoted 2600 bucks to do the same work, i am doing it for a 3rd of the cost, and parts cost me less then 400, including the head gaskets, engine seals, timing belt and pulleys, i already have a water pump anyway. I am just a subaur enthusiast in my garage. you should expect to pay 1500 to 2000 bucks to a competent mechanic. try to find someone with no more than 60 per hour labor rate. good luck, i hope this helps you

it will prabablr be too short, or at least an ea82 would be. at least the ea81 hosing would be more ideal. mount the radiator relative to the fitment of the lower hose

the 85-94 setup (ea82) is very similar, but instead of torsion bars with shocks, you have independent trailing arms and coilover strut to bear the load. the coilover would mount similarly to the shock in the picture you presented. either or, trailing arms would swap between both styles. you can do the 4wd suspension minus the rear diff, the suspensions are virtually the same except for the hubs themselves. Although General Disorder mentions the 4wd bearing is stronger, a 2wd bearing is much simpler to service, standard taper bearing on a spindle, whereas the 4wd has special socket to remove a collar and pressed bearing. if i was you i would consider Tomrhere's parts. I know him, he has the old style parts you will not find. I am from Fort Wayne area and we had all of the old subarus in the land, found all the ones that were left! even if toms parts are the 4wd version, you can still swap on 2wd parts or newer style coils and trailing arm, since any part you find may be subject to rust, and this gives you a broader field to obtain replacement parts to keep your trailer in service. good luck, and i would like to see your project when it is done, i have had this same idea for a trailer, and i think it would work for a Trike project as well:slobber: the '89-94' you are probably referring to is the Loyale, which is the same as the 85-89 gl wagon, coupe, sedan, xt. Unless you are referring to Legacy (89-94 1st gen, 95 and up...) have macpherson struts that you will have to build some sort of strut tower to fix the tophats and have traveling suspension, it would be a more complicated build and defeat the purpose of your original idea

i have worked on nothing BUT rusty cars. for the exhaust studs, just get new ones upon reassembly. you will get better torque that way and not risk stripping the threads trying to torque up the pipe. usually the threads on most bolts will be clean even if the hex is rusty. the bolys you would really have to worry about are longer ones that go through captive nuts, and the excess threads are exposed and cause the whole thing to jam up when the bolt is turned halfway out. use PB and just go back and forth to clear off the threads. usually with rusty cars its the small fender and body bolts that are most likely to break. I dont have too much of a bad time with the larger suspension bolts underneath on moderately rusty cars. if the exhaust stud nuts are so rusty they want to slip, you can try hammering on a 13mm socket as a last resort. avoid re-using the old ones if you can. i would say the most difficult bolts on a rusty soob will be the pinch bolt for the ball joint. Sometimes the ehad will break off and then you are resorted to drills and taps or sourcing another knuckle. its the sort of thing if the ball joint is not bad, leave it alone! also, with the car being rusty, its a good idea to flush out all the brake lines to keep them from rusting inside out, and remove all the calipers nd lubricate all the slide pins as good measure. the bellhousing hardware should come free easily. usually once you break the torque, they just spin out by hand, unless the threads are dirty with oil and dust its a good idea to use anti-seize on any hardware that comes off again for future maintenance.

check the body ground wire between the framerail and the engine casing

What i mean is using the bolts to draw together, but not force together, but draw evenly and squarely as the pilot shaft lines up. Little turns, tightening up and backing off as necessary to seat the pilot shaft, that's all

i have read that suzuki ATV wheels are 140x4. Maybe i am mistaken and they are 110, but i see where your idea comes from. and the old youtube vid with the hatch on mattrax, those are made for suzuki's so i wonder if that is what he is running? i have had the idea of using ATV wheels, just never had my hands on any to compare if this were the case, i suppose you could make a streey legal quad using subaru wheels(dot rated)

with heater hose you will have to run extra length to get a wide enough radius of a bend to not form a kink. if you can find it, go with the evap rated hose. i have never seen it myself, i have always used heater hose if i couldnt source a used spare.

there havebeen times for me that the motor goes together no problem, such as the first time i ever mated a trans to motor(ea81 3at to 5spd d/r conversion in ea81 turbo wagon)... ...to other times in a fwd ea81 that just would not go back together after 3 or 4 tries. I have used the loose pp through the starter hole trick, mainly when i do not have a clutch alignment tool. Just for the record this trick will not work on an ej fwd 5spd since the pp is too small in diameter to get you socket on the bolt as a last resort you can try to sand down or use emery cloth on the pilot shaft from the trans, try to war off the edge so it doesn't hang up on the pilot bearing for the sake of statistics, i would say that i get fitment issues 1 out of 4 engine matings. just be patient, if you wiggle/draw it on just right, you will 'feel' it go into the pilot hole

i was suspecting re-used gaskets. all of the graphite stuck to the heads and deck and not so much left on the gasket, as if some sealant was used. the car was running ad driving with the heads on backward. they brazed a copper tube to run the egr pip eacross the block, and the AC bracket was loose since there was no hole there for it to bolt down to. otherwise i am thiking they doid the work with motor-in-car and just had a hell of a time and slapped it together what they could. lookoing at the gaskets, in person, you can see all the holde are distorted like the gasket was crushed too much.

place a jack under the trans to raise the whole deal above the engine crossmember, so you are not running into the frame as you are trying to mate the engine. Also, since this is a different motor, make sure you do not have the same dowel pins on the motor and trans side. sometimes this will happen when using a different motor, since the dowels will either stick to the motor or trans either way third, try rotating the crank as you go together. the pilot shaft can be a pain to get right. put the motor on enough that you can thread a nut on the bottom atuds, and use the top bolts to try to dwaw the motor together, going around and watching for a bind raising the trans off the crossmember is key for this procedure. let us know what you have tried already I have made a series of videos to help you and others new to subarus

there is a guy in the Indiana Impreza club that is selling an adapter plate to mate a soob to a gm trans for some 200 bucks, i'm sure he still has it.

Helloo, your 88DL is the economy trim package, mimimum options. Mechanically your car is the same as 1985-1995 dl, gl, and loyale. the only thing different on your car is the tachometerless instrument cluster and the quad headlights. otherwise, the engine will be the same for any other spfi, although there were different connectors on the engine for 86 and 87

thanx. That makes me feel better about the heads. The ones from the failed engine checked out as flat, and the other heads were pull-offs from another engine with a bad piston showing the .005, when these head gaskets were not failed.

pictures

I had a guy bring his loyale to me after he had some steam in the tailpipe. I told him his conditions and he continued to drive the car till it just quit running. This is the car that has the heads installed bacwards(sorry my camera was out of commission and i missed the pic) anyway, i pulled the motor iand removed the heads. The gaskets were all distorted and crushed looking around the bolt holes, and one of the rings was blown out on one side, and on the other head it was distorted near the bolt hole. 2 ctlinders had failed on one side and 1 was beginning to fail on the other side. it looks to me that someone either did not do a proper tightening sequence, or went with full torque on one pass in the sequence. It looks like maybe they did the heads in-car and had a hell of a time putting it all back together, used regular rtv on the cam towers, and one of the cam lobes had a huge nick in it whre the chroming was flaking off. The car did not get terribly hot before it let go, and the heads are not warped according to the machine shop. these look like remanufactured heads anyway. Compared to a set of pull off heads from another motor, the pull offs show .005 on a flat edge between the cylinders taking this engine apart, the bolts came out easily, as if the heads had worked loose from a bad install and with the measurements of the machine shop, i am wondering if there is a slight concavity to the surfave of the heads that gets squeezed out wioth the torque sequence. this raises 2 questions for me to ask: 1. what possible scenarios could have caused this type of failure 2. is there a warpage limit or tolerance that is ok, or should there be a slight concavity between the combustion chambers that is squeezed out when the first 3 bolts are torqued?

i always try to leave the seal alone as long as it is not leaking, for this matter alone. why compromise a good seal? they rarely fail, and in my opinion are only worth the hassle if the orig one is obviously bad. i boogered up a front crank seal once, where the inner lip of the seal was protruding. i was able to stuff the lip back into the seal with a small pick, and to my surprize, she went together without any leaks, when i was almost certain i had ruined it.

Going open belts is fine, good convenience for repairs. I go naked with mine, but if you want a set i have a complete lo-mile pull off in good shape, i can include all the bolts if you need them. these are form an 89 gl, 89,000 mi make offer plus flat rate box

Thanks for the confirm. BTW thateas s'ko who made the comment on the smaller mounting ring

I just opened the FEL-PRO ea82 head gasket set. it had mostly Fel-Pro gaskets, permatorques for the heads, and regular stamped gaskets for everything else. for the cam seals(x2) one of them was NOK made in japan, and the other was National seal made in USA(or mexico) the EJ set in my earlier comments had the fuji head gaskets. Felpro sometimes is a mixed bag. for felpro, the intake and exhaust gaskets could be better. I wish NAPA hadn't dropped Victor Reinz sets since those were always the graphite/metal gaskets for the intake and exhaust. and to make point, for the sake of the topic of the thread, if you order from subaru you get subaru oem parts. If you know how to shop the aftermarket, you get Subaru oem parts for cheaper. Enough parts are subaru specific that you will get oem no matter what(valve cover gaskets and grommets) An oil pan or water pump gasket doesnt really matter either way

you should be confident to know that if you would ever want to 'convert from carb to turbo', a complete turbo ea82 would simply be plug and play, as long as none of the original connections have been chopped away. The MPFI harness from the car side is located under the overflow jug between the coil

new plugs and wires, go from there. otherwise point to the ign amplifier on the coil bracket. do the wires first, since that seems to be your main problem also, make sure the green test plugs are DISCONNECTED, because this will hold the timing static and not let the timing advance if they are plugged in

you should work on getting a replacement starter, so you have one on hand when the original one craps out. you should be able to use an ea82 starter from an automatic, it should fit the same. I kn0w this is true for manual trans, i used a 92 legacy fwd 5spd starter in an 87 gl fwd 5spd.

provided you have access to any part from any donor car, the best apporach would be to use the ea82turbo engine crossmember, and drop in a whole ea82 turbo engine. use the turbo wiring harness. if you are lucky with donor cars, an ea81 turbo harness and electrical system is almost identical to 85-86 ea82 turbo, if you look at a schematic. so in theory, you can run an ea82 turbo engine in an ea81 turbo car's harness(you would have to custom tie the engine harness to the body harness)

sounds like a good idea. with all the ej swaps, it seems like a relatively new idea to use a ej tranny. you'd have to get under a WRX to see if the trans mounting is dufferent. i'm sure something can be mixed and matched. i would hope that the wrx trans with driveshaft would be the right length together without mods.