mnwolftrack

I bought my code reader at walmart. It was like $50. I saw the same one at Checker today for $79. If you get one, make sure you get one that actually erases codes. The cheapest of the cheap code readers only and literally read them. But, I don't think you're going to have any codes because the engine hasn't run yet. The only codes you might have are any old ones. The check engine light is supposed to come on with all the other dash warning lights, but it goes out once the engine is started. This is normal, even if there aren't any codes. If there's an active code, the light will flash. If there's a code but the problem that triggered it has ceased, then the light just stays on. On many vehicles, the light will go out (while engine is running) on it's own if the problem no longer exists and the car has been run for so long or has been through "x" many start up's and shut down's. I don't think going out and buying a code reader is going to help you at this point. If you want a code reader anyway, then fine, but like I said, you might be reading old codes. As far as connectors, your subi should use the standard OBDII connector. You won't need anything special for it. Some vehicles do require special code reader attachments, but not this one. You also mentioned in your other post that you cleaned with TB with cleaner. Can you describe what you did? Did you spray cleaner in there and wipe it out, or did you spray onto a rag and wipe it out? I haven't had any TPS problems with my cars and haven't needed to clean out the TB, but it's always possible that something could have happened. Have you done any testing to the TPS or researched any previous posts regarding TPS's?

Not sure if you already bought tires or not, but I just went through this same series of questions for myself. I ended up buying snow tires off tirerack. I got Bridgestone's newest WS-60 which doesn't even have any reviews yet on their site. I agree, reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, but you really have to sift through the reviews and find someone who drives a vehicle like yours in conditions like yours. It's of little value to read a good/bad review from someone with a 2wd suburban when trying to compare to your subi or other vehicle. I bought these tires because they are supposed to be even better than the WS-50's which have certainly proven themselves as a good snow tire. It's amazing to me how far snows have come in the last 10 years. I used to install tires about 10 years ago and snow tires used to look more like mud tires without any siping. The new snows all have tons of siping on them, great for picking up sand and gravel, getting stuck in the tread, and helping to provide the superior traction. I was amazed that the WS-60's I put on my wife's car (a 2wd and not a subi) are actually quieter than the crappy all-seasons we pulled off the car. Granted, the old tires were well worn and in need of a balance, but the WS-60's are suprisingly quiet. We've put about a thousand miles on them in the passed week, ALL ON DRY PAVEMENT 20F to 50F temps and no problems. They ride and handle just fine. They are no where near as squishy as I would have expected them to be, based on the reviews of other snow tires on the internet. But you have to realize, a lot of these reviews came from people with sporty cars with lower profile tires, with people that drive very aggressively, and they are the ones that seem to be reporting that snow tires are squishy. Oh, FYI, I'm sure any snow tire manufacturer is going to recommend you replace all 4 snow tires. This isn't just a plot to get you to buy more. It's actually for good reason. If you just buy 2 snow tires and put them on the front of a front or awd car, the front tires will have better grip and less tendancy to lock up. Meanwhile, the rear tires will have more tendancy to lock up. Ever have a vehicle with an out of adjustment rear brake positioning valve misadjusted, or have your rear brakes lock up on you? It puts the vehicle into a spin. All vehicles are designed so that the front brakes will lock up first. Why? The tires that lock up will actually go faster than the ones that didn't. If your rear tires lock up first, the back of your vehicle will end up trying to pass the front (putting you in a spin). If your front wheels lock up, then you just slide straight. So the moral is, you will want all 4 tires to grip the same. How long will the WS-60's last? I don't know, but I'd buy them again in a heartbeat. I put them on the car last week during a brief snow storm, only to have the temps rise enough that the snow melted and the roads were merely wet. It's been dry all week, so I haven't even gotten to put these things to the test yet. I will end up getting a second set of tires to use for summer time, so in case these WS-60's wear out fast, I will only have to use them during the intended season. It's not feasible to swap tires back and forth every time the temp goes above or below 32F. These tires will stay on for 6 months, period. People religiously swap for the snow tires come fall. We never know when the snow is going to start. Missing out with snows in one storm can mean an accident, injury, or worse. It's not like a true snow tire is just going to plain fall off the wheel just because it gets warm out. A relative of mine leaves snow tires on all year round. They don't want to swap tires every six months and would rather just leave the snows on and get new tires when needed. For what it's worth, a lot of the WS-50's seem to be on clearance because they are being phased out. I would have gone with them, but I was feeling bold. Plus, a sales manager that I was speaking with at Tirerack said the WS-60's would be going on his car too. New York's average snow fall is similar to ours, about 80 inches per year, though I think your temps are a bit warmer. If you get roughly the same amount of snow we do, I'm sure you'd like the snows. Just because it only snows 3 times a month doesn't mean the roads are only bad 3 times or 3 days a month. Up here, it can take a week or two for roads to recover and get back to bare blacktop. Sometimes they take even longer to recover. It depends on how much salt/sand is spread, how fast it was plowed after or during the snowfall, how often they are driven, and even which way the road faces in relation to the sun.

random thought... does anyone know if all the cam pulleys are the same? I know two go on with the lip towards the inside, and the other two with the lip toward the outside, but the two that have the lip on the same side, do they also have the magnets/triggers for the sensors? And if yes, could the pulleys have been installed on the wrong cams? Sublute--don't go taking apart your belt again to find out. I am just thinking out loud. I didn't pay close enough attention to my cam pulleys when I took them out because I labeled them all well enough that I wasn't concerned about putting them back in the wrong spot.

compression looks good. Even if #4 were low or zero, the engine would still run. Regarding the coil pack, didn't you say at one point in this 11+ page of posts that you thought the coil was getting weak? Or am I remembering things wrong?

Is the battery fully charged? Is the horn trying to sound? It kinda sounds like an OEM alarm trying to flash it's lights and/or sound the horn. If your car came with an OEM alarm, there should be a large obvious tag on the battery cable or right next to the battery that gives the procedure you need to follow for hooking up the battery on a vehicle with a factory alarm. It describes the parking lights will flash, and the horn will sound (if the alarm is also hooked up to the horn) when a battery is installed and there's a quick procecure you have to follow to stop it. It involves pushing a hidden button below the dash and turning the key, if memory serves correctly. I saw this warning tag on both my '98 Outbacks, and I imagine a '98 forester would be quite similar if equipped with an alarm. If you don't see the tag, it may mean that someone ripped the tag off. In which case, your door windows may have stickers indicating an "OEM security system is installed on this vehicle" or something like that. P.S. a rod sticking out of the top of the engine might be a bigger problem

No harm at all. It's standard practice on any vehicle to wedge something against the flywheel to unbolt or re-torque the crank pulley. On many vehicles I've worked on, this is next to impossible though, so I've had to come up with creative solutions to get the crank from spinning while trying to undo the bolt. With regards to the 2.5's, I just stuck a round bar (small crow bar) in the inspection hole and did the same thing you did. It was actually easy to do this on the subaru. You are NOT supposed to use a combination of wrenches on the crank bolt and cam bolts (on any vehicle) to use opposing forces against each other to tighten or loosen things, but you probably already knew that. It places a lot of stress on the timing belt or timing chain depending on the vehicle. Cam's usually have "special service tools" or other easy methods to keep them from spinning, but the crank is usually a bit harder especially if you can't get to the flywheel.

now that you mention it, I 100% agree with you. I belong to many, many Internet Forums (this is the only subi forum I belong to), and this forum's members are highly considerate and polite to other members, even the newbies (and I'm still a newbie). Back on topic, after 2 pages of some confusion on my part, it sounds like you've got the belt on correctly and are using the proper alignment marks. With that out of the way, you can focus on the big three; spark, fuel, and air. For a while there, I thought you had the crank aligned to the wrong mark. Lots and lots of things can keep the car from firing, but lots of things can also just make it run poorly but still run. Seeing as the car ran beforehand, it's got to be something simple. Regarding spark, do you have another car you can look at and at least hook up a spark plug to a spark plug wire and visually inspect how the spark looks? It doesn't even have to be the same car. The reason I mention this is because I was trying to diagnose a Camry that sputtered out on us while driving home on the freeway, and it refused to start again. I checked all this kind of stuff, the belt, compression, spark, fuel, and nothing indicated a problem. At about the 4th time I looked at the distributor cap and rotor, I realized there was a faint crack under the rotor and even fainter burn mark around it. I put a new cap and rotor on to the tune of $15, and let me tell you, the spark was MUCH brighter than what I thought was good spark before. The old rotor's crack was allowing some of the power of the spark to dissipate within the distributor, and not all of it was reaching the plugs. There was enough spark getting to the plugs that I saw "spark," but it was no where near what it should have been. The car fired right up with the new cap and rotor. One of the downsides of the newer technology on these subi's is.... no $15 cap and rotor. With any luck, your car's issue is going to be something very simple. Trying to find the cause is not always fun, but it at least provides a good learning experience. You'll now be able to look at any 2.5L and be able to do a timing belt with your eyes closed. Heck, having to pull a 2.5L out because I drove the rear main seal in too far gave me a good experience and I widdled my engine pulling time down to 1 hour 50 minutes. I griped and groaned about my mistake, but I at least learned some things from it. Regarding how the car sounds when you try to crank it, have you ever cranked the engine with the spark plugs removed such as when doing a compression test? You may have noticed the engine was turning over much faster and smoother because there was no compression because all the air was leaking out the spark plug holes. If the cams/crank were misaligned, valves bent, pistons had holes, or there were cracks in the cylinder walls, air would be able to get out and compression would not form. The more cylinders affected, the easier this is to notice. Just trying to manually rotate an engine with a wrench on the crank bolt will let your arm feel the difference in ease between turning over an engine with spark plugs installed vs. not installed.

What I was trying to clarify in my previous posts is it doesn't matter how many times you turn the crank 360 degrees or which direction you turn it. The crank will still be right where it was and nothing will have changed. Taking the belt off leaving the cams in place, and rotating the crank 360, and putting the belt on won't make any difference. The pistons will all be where they were and so will the reluctor. The crank doesn't have a clue or care. It's a 1-to-1 ratio with itself. The only way to get the crank shaft off is to not have the reluctor slash at noon. In other words, rotating the crank 360 degrees and putting everything back together will not solve your problem. The engine block and heads themselves do not know or care where in the combustion cycle it is. It's up to the computer to determine which of the 4 strokes it's on, and where the cams are in relation to the crank. The computer determines when to fire the plugs based on the cam/crank indicators and sensors. On older cars, it's the distributor that takes care of this. It IS possible to put a distributor in 180 backwards or 360 degrees off and get backfiring through the intake because the plugs are firing on the wrong stroke, however, this isn't possible on the subi unless the crank and cams are totally misaligned with respect to each other. As long as your timing marks are aligned and you put the belt on, that's it. It's aligned. There's nothing you need to do to figure out which stroke the engine is on. All the sensors, magnets, etc... are fixed and can't be installed incorrectly. I don't even know how you could change when the computer is supposed to fire the plugs at a different stroke on this car, short of butchering the reluctor ring and spinning it into a position not normally possible on the crank,or cam position indicators, or butchering the location of the sensors and moving them somewhere else. As grossgary said, messing with TDC and focusing on the belt won't solve your problem if the belt is aligned properly. I was hoping my last two pages of information was at least somewhat helpful to determine if the belt was at least installed correctly, considering it is an easy mistake. My last two pages of "help" probably aren't very helpful because I'm trying to understand how the belt was aligned and to try and clarify that rotating the crank 360 won't do anything.

you might be interested in the following video animation on youtube: It goes through the complete view of an engine and all it's parts, then shows how everything works. There are a bunch of results on youtube if you search "internal combustion engine." This should be the one I am thinking of, but I am on dialup internet and it would take 2 hours to get through this particular one to verify it's the one I"m thinking of. It starts out with a spinning block, then the crank, pistons, rods, etc... come flying in, then other parts start coming in. Eventually, the engine is completely assembled and it shows the animation of the fuel entry and everything. Unless i'm misunderstanding you, rotating the crank 360 degrees and reinstalling the timing belt isn't going to affect anything. The crank will be exactly where it was before you rotated it. This may also help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_cycle#The_Otto_cycle There are 4 strokes to the 4 stroke engine: suck, squeeze, bang, blow. 1. piston at TDC, intake valve opens, piston travels all the way down and sucks air in. 2. intake valve closes, piston moves all the way back up, squeezes air (compression). 3. piston is back at TDC, spark plug fires, bang, piston moves all the way down in the power stroke with all valves closed. 4. piston moves back up, exhaust valve opens, and blows the now combusted fuel/air mixture out the exhaust.

Yes, it does sound like the tire and/or wheel. This kind of thing is especially noticable to me because I run 35" mud terrains on my SUV and 33" tires on my pickup. They are HARD to balance and they'll never balance as smoothly as a normal size car tire. I even run dual steering stabilizers, and the shimmy will still come through. These big tires really pronounce and emphasize tire balance and wheel problems. I worked in a tire shop for several years, so I've seen a lot of stuff. We didn't do alignements or anything else besides just tires and batteries, but it gave me a lot of good experience. If a regular car tire is off an once, you can often hear and feel it on the tire balancer. In the same respect, if my 35" mud tire is off an once, it won't matter! Even if my 35" tire "balances" out correctly, it still normally won't make it truely balanced.

I got a wide variety of answers when I had a windshield done in a '98 OBW. Priced ranged on the low end with the companies that gave me a price assuming they reused the windshield trim. They would only comment that they may or may not have to replace the trim, and understandably, they won't know until they try to remove the old stuff if it can be re-used. The higher prices I got were for companies that were going to install new trim regardless. They didn't want to mess with used trim. I've used safelite in the past and never had problems. A lot of it just depends on your local rep. If you have a bad one, then it can certainly give safelite a bad name. They did a nice job for me though.

If you pull the belt off the crank, rotate the crank 360 degrees, and put the belt back on, nothing will have changed. The crank spins twice as fast as the cams (if I have my ratios right). When you install the belt with everything aligned up where it should be, then that's all there is to it. In order to get the cams out of sync with the crank like you are saying, I think you'd have to rotate the crank once, in which case the cam slashes are no longer pointing at the right place. If you rotate the crank one more time, the cam slashes will come back into position. If you take the belt completely off and rotate the crank 360 degrees three times, five times, or any number of times, it's still in the same spot. If you rotate the cams fully once, five times, or any number of times, they are still in the same place along with their respective valves. The syncing that comes into play has to do with the ratio the cams turn with respect to the crank, and when the engine computer tells the plugs to fire. Other random thoughts. I initially hooked up 2 of the 3 fuel lines incorrectly. Luckily, I caught it right away. There are sensors here and there including the cam position sensor on the top front driver head, a sensor or two on the top front of the block, sensors around the throttle body, some small coolant hoses (coolant hoses won't prevent the car from starting), oxygen sensor(s) underneath, the intake AFM/MAF sensor on the intake tubing by the air filter box (my brain is fried and I forget if this car has an AFM, MAF, or MAP sensor there....). Forgetting to plug in at least some of these sensors will keep the car from starting.

If you are concerned about the timing marks on the belt itself, I found a little more information. If you are spinning the engine over after finishing the belt installation and hoping the belt marks will line up again where you installed them, at the same moment the crank and cam marks all line up again, that it actually takes A LONG TIME for this to happen. One of the posts I read on here was like 422 revolutions before things line up again like they did when the belt was installed. I know I rotated 3 times in each direction and the belt marks never got close to lining up again. In fact, after only 3 revolutions of the crank, I don't think the belt even made 1 full trip around. What it comes down to is the marks on the belt are only helpful for the installation of the belt and that's all. I don't know if it's literally 422 revolutions, though someone did comment in a post that there are 211 teeth on the belt, and the # of revolutions is somehow double that. I don't even know if you're concerned about the belt marks, but I figured I'd bring it up just in case. Oh, and BTW, considering this thread is now 10 pages long, you might want to consider starting a new thread. A new reader is going to have to read through 10 pages of stuff to finally get to the point you are at now before they can help. I've been following your post since the beginning, so I'm not playing catchup. I've also just done this a matter of a couple months ago, so it's still very fresh in my mind. Your current situation is pretty specific and beyond the point of a general '96 2.5L OBW head gasket project., so in that regard, you may want to post a new thread with a new title.

Yes, the 2.5L is an interference engine, however, many people incorrectly install the timing belt and no one has reported damage from the crank shaft confusion. The main concern with interference, if I understand things correctly, is the cams. If the cams are out of sync with each other, then the valves will hit each other. If your double slashes are lining up, then you have no worries about the cams being out of sync. I do believe valves can hit the pistons, but when you're only off 6 teeth, I don't think that's anywhere near enough. You'd have to be off a lot more, basically 180 degrees, at the crank. Again, I don't understand why you rotated anything 6 teeth. You mentioned lining things up with the arrow on the front of the crank gear, but that's the TDC mark, not the timing belt mark. When the reluctor mark (the flat ring behind crank gear with the tabs on it) is pointing at 12 noon on the oil pump, this is precisely where the crank is supposed to be when the cams are to be rotated into position so that the double slashes on the cam gears line up with each other, which is also when the single slashes will line up with the single slots on the back of the timing cover. There's no rotating anything. The passenger head's camshafts will be loose (meaning turnable by hand) in order to get their double slashes to line up properly. I put the timing belt on here first. Then, I used 3 cheap plastic clamps. I used one clamp to hold the belt in position on the top cam gear, another clamp on the bottom gear, and the third clamp to hold the two gears together. I ended up taking the third clamp off because it wasn't needed and it covered up the double slashes. Then, I started winding the belt through everything except the driver side cam gears. Note that I have not installed my tensioner yet, and I had removed the lower idler pulley on the passenger side, so there's plenty of slack in the belt to manuvuer it around. Next, I had to deal with the driver cams. They would not rotate into position by hand. They got fairly close but had to rotate the remaining APPROXIMATE 30 degrees via wrench on the cam gear bolt head. One of the cams must be rotated counter clockwise, one gets rotated clockwise. I forget which is which, but they get rotated in the direction that is the shortest possible distance to get the double slashes to line up. After quickly playing with the cams, it's easy to tell which is which. If you have a Hayne's manual, it tells you which is which. Anyway, then I slid the belt over one cam gear (while holding the gear in place with a wrench in the other hand), put a clamp on, then put a wrench on the other driver cam gear, rotated it into place, and put the belt and clamp on. Then, I put the lower passenger idler pulley on, and then I installed the tensioner. There's no reason to try to find TDC for cylinder one. You just rotate the crank so the timing marking is pointing at 12 o'clock. That's it. When the crank mark (not the TDC mark) is aligned properly, the pistons are not fully up, and you don't stand the chance of hitting the valves against the pistons. This is probably by design so people don't risk hitting the valves against the pistons if they rotate the cams a full revolution. The crank is a one-to-one ratio, so one turn of the crank and crank gear means the piston comes back to the exact same spot it was the last time, no matter which direction you turned it. It's normally the cams that turn at a different rate, such as 1 full turn of the crank equals 2 full turns of the cams. I don't know what the exact ratio is for the 2.5L, but it really doesn't matter for our discussion purposes. With the correcxt crank mark at the correct position, you line the cam marks up and put the belt on as is. There's no rotating or compensating for 6 teeth. So, I'm either still confused about what you were trying to say, or you may have aligned the wrong mark (again, very very common oops, and no one has reported damage from it). If I understand you correctly, you have aligned the crank gear (arrow mark on front of gear) to TDC and aligned the cam pulleys and installed the belt. When you put the timing cover on, the timing numbers on the cover tell you the piston is still at TDC. Is this what you are saying? If yes, then the crank is off 6 teeth. The crank should not be at TDC to put the belt on. If you are off 6 teeth at the crank, the compression test ought to tell you. It by no means means you have damaged anything, it can certainly mean things aren't aligned right. If your crank is off, then the valves aren't opening/closing when the piston is in the proper position of travel, therefore compression readings will be off.

Other causes for a vibration can include: 1. driveshaft issues (bent, out of balance, u-joint, loose bolts) 2. dirt/mud caked to the backside of the wheel 3. bent wheel 4. flat spot in tire (e.g. skidding to a stop) 5. alignment wear on tire(s) 6. worn axleshafts, CV joints, or bearings that the axles ride on/in in the transmission or hub assembly (likely not your issue) Simply rotating tires to different positions on the same vehicle may not be enough, particularly if they are all the same age and wear. You said you tried swapping a completely different tire and wheel one at a time to each front position. Your results would indicate the right front tire/wheel were the issue. It could be a worn tire, seperated belt (not super common anymore), thrown wheel weight, or a bent wheel (rail road tracks like to do that). I'll further point out that vibrations felt in your fanny but not the steering wheel are typically not in the front end. Vibrations felt in the steering wheel with the steering wheel actually shimmying back and forth on it's own typically mean the front end (and most often a tire or wheel issue). I recently just put tires on my wife's car. It had some pretty lousy and worn tires on it, and I could feel vibrations in the steering wheel just as you described, and I could feel it in my fanny. Not only were the front tires in bad need of repair (front shimmy), one of the rear wheels was bent causing the vibration in the butt. And speaking of tires for my wife's car, I just bought four Blizzak WS-60 snow's off tirerack.com and am very happy with them. I've never bought snows before, but I must say, these things are quieter than the sissy all-seasons we threw away! We still need some snow to test out their snow capabilities, but these things look wicked yet sophisicated and are supposed to be Bridgestone's latest greatest thing.

I did a quick search and couldn't find the exact picture I was thinking of, but I did find this which is a few articles on timing belts for SOHC and DOHC 2.2 and 2.5's: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=69365 Note this one in particular: http://www.motor.com/MAGAZINE/Pdf/082001_08.pdf This shows a picture of the crank sprocket. The arrow on the front lip of the crank gear is the piston position. The actual crank position mark is on the back on the reluctor. These appear to be about 6 teeth apart in the pictures. Did you use the correct mark??? I haven't found the exact picture I was thinking of that I ran across a while back. It's a photo an actual member of this forum took of their crank gear. I think it even had photoshop drawings and text on it regarding what mark is what, and where it's supposed to be.

Yes, it probably would be a good idea to sticky. Only trouble with my pictures is I don't know how long photobucket will let me keep them up there. It would probably be better if we could upload them into this site or somewhere more permanent.

somewhere on here, someone took a picture of the crank gear and where it's supposed to be. I didn't take a picture of mine, otherwise I'd share it. I didn't rotate the crank at all once I pulled the old timing belt off during disassembly. I pulled the engine out with the timing belt and covers still in place, so when I rotated the engine to get the converter bolts off, I wasn't concerned about the crank position. When I got the engine out, I rotated the crank until the cam gears were aligned properly. The old belt had it's own white lines on it from the manufacturer, but I rotated a few times and never got them to align (and at the time, i wasn't even sure where they were supposed to align to). Then, I marked the old belt, it's direction, a reference point to each pulley and gear, and so on and so forth and made it fool proof. Then, I taped the old belt to the new one, transferred all my markings, and put the new belt on. The new belt had the same white lines from the manufacturer, and I realized where those went during installation of the new belt, and they lined up with the slashes on the cam gears etc.... I rotated the engine a few times in each direction to see if the marks would re-align, but I quite frankly didn't turn the engine over enough to ever get the lines to line up again. My arms got sore! There's a lot of things to spin, and it appears to take more than just a few spins to get things realigned. The Hayne's manual didn't mention anything about having to rotate the engine a few times either, so I gave up. I've done other vehicles before, and those engines and manuals did mention rotating the engine to verify marks still lined up, but those engines were much simpler and didn't have 4 cams and a fairly long timing belt to deal with. I'm not sure what else to tell you to check at this point, other than to check for spark on all cylinders, then check compression if you have a guage. That would tell you if the belt was off because things wouldn't be opening and closing when they should be. Also, do a search here for pictures of the crank gear. Perhaps try "crank" "crank position" or something similar in your search. I'd provide a link but I don't know which post it was. Did you plug in the 3 big engine harness connectors on the top passenger side front of the transmission? Regarding pulling plugs, are you doing it from above or below? If you aren't doing it from below, I highly suggest it. You don't have to remove anything and you have more working room, albeit upside down. All I need is a piece of cardboard to lay on, and I can crawl under there and gain access without moving anything. The inner fender is still partially in the way, but you do not have to remove the air filter box or anthing else. I'm not sure why people try to do it from above. Even with things removed, it's still a long reach down from above. I'm confused by your previous post. You said you first aligned all the cam gears and the slashes all lined up, but you said the crank gear was off 6 teeth? Did the belt jump? And am I understanding you correctly that you rotated the crank 6 degrees, the cam gears were then off 6 teeth, so you rotated them all 6 teeth back? Are you sure the crank was really off 6 teeth? If you first lined up the cam gears, all the slashes met up, and the old belt didn't jump, then the crank should have been in the right place.

I don't know what condition your old plugs are in, but at a bare minimum I would hook one of them up laying on top the manifold and watch the spark. The spark should be bright blue. Wet fouled plugs will cause a weak spark because the fuel will allow a different path for the spark to take. You can even lay two plugs up top--one soaked one and one dry one and compare the two side by side. But if you stay the car now tries to fire and stumbles a bit, that's a good sign.

I never disconnected the fuel pump when I did mine. I just disconnected the 3 fuel lines on the driver side of the engine going to the fender area. I also didn't crank the engine over to get oil circulating first. I used plenty of assembly lube which takes the place of oil until it gets circulated there. My engine fired up in about 3 seconds on the first try. I don't understand your question regarding how long the engine would run if the fuel pump were disconnected. I'm also confused by what you mean by "When I disconnected the fuel pump at the beginning of this process, the car would immediatly not start. I'm wondering if the fuel pump is/was marginal." I'm not understanding why you disconnected the fuel pump to begin with, why you tried to start the car with it disconnected, and if you are saying you expected the car to run with the fuel pump disconnected. But, it sounds like you are getting fuel. If you cranked for a whole minute with plugs in, gas squirting in, but the coil was disconnected, I can easily see the plugs being fouled. Drying them out may not be enough. Do you have an old set of plugs or a cheap set of coppers lying around. You wouldn't want to rush out and spend $12 a plug for OEM's if it isn't the problem. If you hook one of your soggy spark plug wires up to a wire, lay it on top the engine, do you see a good spark? An engine needs 3 things to run: spark, fuel, and air. It sounds like you are getting fuel, now check for spark and air. Make sure you remembered to plug in the AFM at the air filter housing. I doubt this is a timing belt alignment issue. Having done it myself, it's not as hard as it sounded and it should be fairly straight forward. If I recall correctly, even people who've installed belts that are a tooth off somewhere will still at least turn over and run (poorly). The only confusing part of the timing belt is the crank gear. It apparently has 2 marks on it, and some people get confused between the two.

I put a grand into a headgasket job using OEM-only parts, and that was just for gaskets, water pump, timing belt, tensioner, and minimal work by a machine shop to check the heads, and ME doing all the labor (with exception of machine shop checking heads). I could easily see $1500 for a basic engine rebuild with OEM parts and doing the work yourself. I also think you'd be better off looking for a used 2.2L (getting hard to find because people use them instead of fixing a 2.5L). Try http://www.car-part.com and take a look around. Also try junkyarddog.com and fill out a request.

There's a safety shift lock switch at the shifter. You don't need the battery hooked up to shift. You have to take the shifter trim off and stick a screw driver or other long skinny object in there and you'll be able to shift.

It routinely gets below -22F here in wintertime, and I don't do anything special other than run slightly thinner oil viscosity during the cold months. I also like to run synthetic in everything (engine, transmission, differentials). If all you are talking about is a few days worth of visiting someone, you have nothing to worry about. If your battery is weak, the cold temps are going to tell you so. But a standard size battery will have no problem turning the engine over. I'm not even sure if a block warmer is available for these cars. They do make battery warmers, but again, it's overkill on today's modern engines. We're not talking about trying to get the battery to crank over a monster 1970's V8 engine. I can't even recall anyone I know who still plugs their car in at night to keep it warm. It's so 1970's! If your coolant is aging or not mixed to the right ratio (varies per brand), then your coolant may freeze. Have this checked or go buy your own $5 tester at the local store. as previously mentioned, cars can make downright WEIRD AND SCARY noises when it's that cold. Try not to get too panicked about it. Things creak, groan, whine, and crack like never before. Some of it goes away once the engine has warmed up. Some of the noises do not. Often, the suspension gets a little stiffer too when it's that cold. Rubber bushings and what-not get a little stiffer, making for a bouncy ride.

not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the oil pan itself might be leaking. If you aren't sure exactly what is leaking and you're already tearing things apart, it can be real difficult to isolate the source. The best bet would be to steam clean the underside and watch it afterwards.

agreed, typically just a band-aid. Our local Subaru dealer doesn't even recommend the Subaru-made additive for the 2.5L problem because it tends to not only "solve" the leak but also clog up the system (e.g. radiator, heater core, and other small passages). The band-aid fixes are reserved for the shady who are trying to unload a vehicle real quick that they know has a problem.