86BRATMAN

Is this a 4eat or 5mt?

It would be worth your while to acquire some new oem intake manifold gaskets and replace those first. The coolant flows through the intake manifold as a crossover between the heads. When the intake gasket blows, or is replaced with garbage aftermarket ones it will give symptoms just like a blown head gasket.

Does the security light in the instrument cluster flash or stay on solid? Not sure if this is an XT model or not, if not it may not have the immobilizer system.

Not all turbo models had power mirrors. I have a set of manual turbo mirrors. The wiring is mostly there, but you'll need the wiring out of the door from a power mirror donor.

I've used them on several dozen engines, Subaru and otherwise. If you have a problem with them you did something wrong.

Put a Mahle gasket in one hand and an oem in the other. The only difference you'll find in them is the numbers printed on the upper corner.

The wrx crank gear is the same. You'll most likely have to fab up a mount for the coil and then see how long the boot needs to be. The 2010-2012 ej25 uses COP, the boots from them may be compatible with the wrx coils.

You'll need to use the 05+ sohc ej25 cam and crank timing gears to get the correct pattern, the 205 intake manifold will bolt to phase 2 sohc heads. You may be better off going with GM LS coil near plug setup and doing custom wires. You'd need to adjust the ignition dwell settings in the 205 ecu to keep from frying coils though.

Your engine has avls, not avcs. The na ej valve timing system has jack to do with performance, only changes to a small cam lobe at idle and extremely low load to reduce emissions. Onto the heads. Yes, they will physically bolt onto the ej20 shortblock, the head gaskets are not the same between the two however. The head gasket is the same for all of the ej25 sohc engines from 00-09, not for all sohc ej's the world over. Itis also a bad idea to do those heads, which have a roughly 99mm wide combustion chamber, on an ej20 block with a 92mm bore. You'll have massive combustion chamber overhang which will be a prime place for hotspots causing pre-ignition, and very little cylinder wall for the head gasket to seal to.

The carrier bearing is indeed different on the forester, the suspension lift is countered by a drivetrain drop or roughly one inch (25mm). Most models they can be changed out with for non lifted version, I can't say for sure on those though.

Correct, the legacy/liberty driveshaft/tailshaft is a minimum of 5"/127mm longer than the impreza due to the difference in wheelbase.

That's why I specifically used the 4eat impreza shaft. It's about 50mm shorter than the manual version.

Company named Febest sell, or use to sell haven't looked in a long time, inner cv joints for the 1st gen legacy axles that will fit some ea shafts. I used them in my old hardtop conversion. They've been going strong for a few years now.

You can use an 93-07 (gc/gm/gf/gd/gg) 4eat driveshaft, they're all virtually the same length. You may have to change the pinion flange to match the driveshaft depending on what rear diff you use.

If he puts ea81t heads on an ea81 carb shortblock it will still have the same compression ratio as the carb longblock.

Not sure what you're on about. I've seen them used several times on later phase 1 heads.

You have plastic exhaust gears. Your intake gears are steel/aluminum avcs gears.

The 99 sohc ej20 @Steptoehas in his brumby has the exact same external dimensions as the sohc Ej25. @Ritchieasked to see a dohc engine in an ea81 bay so I posted it. Just because you can't see it happening doesn't mean it won't fit. The fact that it's been done several times would seem to definitively prove you wrong. Maybe you should get over it.

This is the best I've got at the moment. I have pics of the clearance between the rails and timing covers on a old phone or laptop. Just a matter of finding them.

The clearance problem for the dohc engines isn't at the valve covers, it's the timing covers. There was plenty of room between the back of the valve covers and the frame rails. While I haven't done one, it's also obvious you haven't either, but it has been done numerous times by the Australians. So there is plenty of evidence that it will fit.

I've done dohc ej swaps in ea81 cars without cutting the rails. Any sohc fits fine.

I'd wager that nothing happened with this build. But swapping phase 1 ej awd guts into an ea82 single range 4wd transmission case works. I did one behind the ea81t that was in my old hardtop for a while before I ej swapped it.

^^^ Correct. Only the early fwd non abs impreza uses the tiny brakes. You can use basically any knuckle you want, if you get ahold of an abs knuckle you will have to remove the tone ring from the hub for these rotors to slip on though.

Early non abs fwd impreza caliper brackets and rotors with xt6 calipers on ej knuckles will give you front ebrake. I put more detailed info in the Retrofitting FAQ thread a couple years ago.