porcupine73

Does the turbo have connections for cooling water? That is one nice looking sandrail! It looks like it belongs in car shows moreso than being beaten on out on the dunes. But it must be fun. I am guessing that is one loud sweet sounding puppy how the exhaust just goes straight out of the turbo like that!

When the thermostat is closed, there is still flow through the heater core and throttle body/idle air control bypasses. There is always flow through these channels. When the thermostat opens, then it also allows flow through the radiator. Yes deadheading the water pump is very bad as it will usually lead to cavitation from the pump operating well outside its curve. Now on a sandrail you probably have no heater core I am guessing, and they may not have the coolant flowing through the throttle body either since you really only need that for cool weather operation. So if it has these bypasses plugged, then you do not want to put in a thermostat.

It's not too messy. I just wear the harbor freight nitrile gloves while I'm doing it and just wipe the bleeder with a rag when I'm done. With the vacuum bleeding then you have only one hose to monkey around with. If pressure bleeding, you still need to put a hose on the bleeder anyway. Or what I did on one of the soobs was put speed bleeders in. On that one I don't have to mess with the silicone grease. I put them in before I built the vacuum bleeder.

Yes depending on your bleeder it may suck a bit of air around the threads. I put silicone grease around the bleeder while bleeding and smoosh it around a bit until the bubbles stop. It is sufficient to keep air from getting in around the threads.

It will go closed loop above around 150F, provided all the required sensors and such were hooked up. I mean the thing may not have the o2 sensors and such wired in anyway. I think the idea in not running a thermostat is that a sandrail is going to be running at high load, possibly quite near full throttle, for extended periods of time in hot weather. And in that case the thermostat is just going to be full open anyway, so you can avoid the restriction of having the thermostat in the system by just eliminating it.

Nice. Isn't it great to have a new member to the family? With soobs it doesn't happen to often because they just keep going and going.

That looks pretty good and an easy to build project. The vacuum bleed might be easier because you don't have to remove the master cylinder cap each time you need to top off the reservoir.

This was my experience

Not sure about the bearings and brushes, but there was a guy selling the diodes/rectifiers on eBay some time back. They looked like this

It might work ok, but you'd have to check a few things. Some of those years had different part # o2 sensors for cali spec vs non cali spec. If it does, then the ECU programming may be slightly different as well to handle the different cat. Stay away from cheap cats, they have less catalyst (which is expensive such as palladium, platinum, rhodium, etc) and that's why they're cheap.

I use a homemade vacuum bleeder and it works great. It makes it quite easy for one person to bleed the brakes. I also used it on one of my motorcycles which specifically said use of a vacuum bleeder was required.

Yes alldatadiy is what I've been using. I find it very convenient as you can search and print what you need. Then you can through out the greasy printouts when you're done. I also bought the hard copy paper genuine manuals off eBay but I hardly ever use them because it takes longer to find things and I feel really bad getting the pricey books all greased up. You can use Haynes/Chilton etc and I have tried those for Subaru, but I find they are much too general. Also there are just downright errors in those books in some places. Sometimes they can be useful for comparison, i.e. they have a neat tip on how to do something without a fancy special tool.

Not sure if anyone posted it already but here's a diagram:

If you want to install one, I would go with the genuine Subaru thermostat. If you're running in hot temps at high loads in the buggy then you might as well leave it out for less restriction as under those conditions it would probably generate enough heat that the thermostat would simply be fully open all the time anyway. In those conditions a person might run just distilled or RO/deionized water with water wetter instead of any glycol as well.

You can also check Joe's http://www.cars101.com site. He has the rotor sizes for most years and models along with just about every other spec.

It's a little more work when swapping tires between winter and summer, but a person could also swap back to the original rotors, calipers, pads, etc., in the summer along with the smaller size wheels. When running larger tires it does reduce the mechanical advantage of the brakes so an upgrade to larger rotors can help. I know on my '96 Legacy brighton with the single pot fronts the brakes are barely adequate with the larger Outback size tires on there. It will stop ok but you are really standing on the pedal if you have to stop quick. I'm planning such a swap on that one.

Found some more pics

10mm is the size. On some models one of the bolts is really close to a cross member and a flex socket or flexible ratcheting wrench can be helpful on that one.

Generally matching rotors, calipers, caliper brackets, and pads are needed to do this kind of swap. Sometimes you can get good deals on the whole deal when someone upgrades their brakes and sells all there old components. Sometimes people do this on WRX's etc so you can sometimes find all those components as a set. Shipping is kind of a killer because of the weight involved.

Yes I eliminated the junction box too because the lines going to it were rusty. I used a cutoff tool like a dremel and cut the lines under the seat. Then I put double flare fittings on them and flared the ends. Then I put couplers in there. Then I did the same thing with my new brake lines and attached them to the couplers, all right under the rear seat. I'm guessing the couplers and such are all readily available at the parts stores (I got all my supplies from the place that sells cunifer). You can use any thread you want for the couplers; the connection to the caplier hoses has to be M10x1.0 though. I have a picture of the completed work under the seat if I can find it. I had enough room to work to flare the fittings and such right under the seat. I was using a double flare tool by KD Tools that I got from MSC Industrial.

Two lines do go under the rear seat, one for the rear left brake and one for the rear right. Then they penetrate the floor into a junction block and then go who knows where in the routing to get to the calipers/cylinders. I hacked them off under the seat and spliced in there and just routed my new lines over the tank or wherever it was convenient and secured them with stainless safety wire. I have some pics I took of the job here: http://www.porcupine73.com/pics/brakes/leak96/

They're probably saying that because the Subaru service procedure does not say to replace any of the pullies. But yes it is prudent to at least check them over. The geared/toothed one and the lower smooth idler seem to be the ones that fail.

That's true. I think that type of oil cooler/warmer is great if the vehicle is being used for a lot of short trips to help the engine oil get up to around 180F faster to avoid condensation build up.

Hi sorry to hear about that. Yes that can make quite the mess! A full fill on those automatics is around 9.8 quarts I believe. So a case of 12 qts should do it. They just use Dexron II/III type ATF, which you won't specifically find anymore since it isn't licensed by GM, but there are alternatives out there. I personally wouldn't use Dexron VI but some people do. Also I'd make sure it has that Subaru ATF filter mod installed and also I'd use a flush kit on the in tank cooler in case there are shreddings partially blocking it at all. I was doing front diff gear oil yesterday and I had put foil over the exhaust below the drain plug to make sure to get none on it so I woudln't have to smell that for a few days while it burns off. So all was going well. Then I was using a hand pump to pump the new gear oil in. And wouldn't you know it, the dang hose popped out of the filler hole and I was pumping the gear oil all over the front cat. Great.