robm

Has the weather changed? No longer wet or snowy? These things have to be hot to work. I am not sure what they will do if they are not at a high enough temperature, look rich or lean or ? Oh, a quick Google found the answer. Cold sensors look lean, so weather is not an issue.

A little grease or antiseize on that cone will help stop it from getting stuck in the future.

You can use it on dry pavement, as long as you don't go around sharp corners. Not around town, in other words. If you use it in 4WD on tight, icy corners, expect to slide out. I use it on the highway when it is potentially slippery all the time, for miles and miles. Highway corners are not sharp. As mentioned, do not shift into 4WD with wheels slipping, or while turning. It helps if you ease the gas when shifting.

If the connector took enough current to look like that, what do the ignition switch contacts look like? Could be burnt and flaky - pun intended! Try a new switch, or jumper them to bypass the switch, to see if that results in reliable running. Oops, missed the stuff on the module and bushings. Still worth a look. How much slop is there in the bushings? The photo doesn't really show very much.

What is on the other end of those wires? Is it fried, too? Or did something get stuck on, causing lots of current to flow for too long in those wires? And bad pick-up connections will cause the sparks to stop. Completely. Does the pick-up cause the current to flow in the coil, or does it interrupt it? It triggers the amplifier transistor some how, but I am not sure if it turns off or on to make a spark. In the old days, with points, the current was interrupted to make a spark. Is that still the case?

My intuition says you didn't find the culprit. I hope I am wrong. Why did the ignition connector melt? This may be the obvious symptom of what is really wrong with it. Did that connector fall onto a hot manifold, or did it get hit with way too much current? Dos it have an ignition amplifier transistor?

When it comes to snow tires, the wisdom around here says: "put on the tallest, narrowest studded snow tire you can." The studless ones work well too, as long as you go with the "tallest and narrowest" theme. Pity I can't get tall anymore, and even the narrow are disappearing.

I had a set of Hankook 714's in 185/70. They were bald at 25,000 miles. The Kumho's, 165/80, lasted about the same. I have Toyo Eclipses now, they actually have a guarantee. They have only been on a year, so it is too early to tell, yet. Oh, and none of them were cheap. The 'Kooks and Kumhos were about $70 each, but the Toyos were about $90.

165SR -13 was the tire that was original eqpt. on Loyale wagons here in Canada. And just about every other small car of the era. Replaced by the 165/80-13, which is close enough for most practical purposes. Neither are readily available in Canada. Toyo, Kumho, and Pirelli are about the only ones who have anything in this size, and it is not like they offer a lot of choice either.

Yes. He could. (It is about a 3 day drive for me.) But unless he has a good reason to spend a couple of days in the US, bringing the tires home will be smuggling. Declaring them will involve paying duty and taxes. This will save installation, brokerage and shipping costs, although if you count the time spent in the US (hotel,meals, etc.) as the cost of shipping, it might be cheaper to pay UPS...

When cold, it runs open loop, and just idles at a fixed speed, mixture, and ignition setting. When warm, and first starting up again, it is trying to run closed loop, varying all of above, but it takes a bit to figure out what is going on and for everything to stabilize. A new O2 sensor may help this last problem, or may not.

Alternator is a good bet. Cold grease in the bearings, so they make noise. Having to charge the battery to make up for the starting draw might be a factor, as well. Mine does it too. It is a cheap rebuild, so my bet is on the bearings. Are you sure it wasn't engine speed related? Is there any other motor that starts running with the car, and would have cold bearings? Rob.

We are screwed here in Canada. 185/70 and 165/80 (stock on the Loyale wagons) are now almost impossible to find. 175/70 and 155/80 are getting harder to find. The availability is particularly bad in snow tires. Shipping tires over the border is not much of an option, they might be available, but the cost is prohibitive when you add in shipping, duty, brokerage, and installation (at about $20/tire mounted and balanced because you didn't buy the tire from that shop). And taxes on the tires and all of the services except shipping. I have 165/80-13 for my summer tires, as they get the most use, and I run the heaviest loads then. They are Toyos, who still make this size in their premium all-season lines. (they did last year, anyway....) I use 155/80-13 winter tires, but I run them at full pressure for the maximum load (35 PSI or a bit more) and then don't run the car at its maximum load, as the tires won't take it. (Basically, I did a comparison of the load rating of the original stock tire - 165 SR 13 - at recommended tire pressures - 28 PSI normal, 32 PSI for high speed and heavy loads. The 155/80 at 35+PSI can handle as much load as the 165 SR at 28 PSI, but that is the limit. Being winter, I am not too worried about heat, which is what kills an overloaded tire.) The drawback is that 155/80's are quite a bit smaller than 165/80's or 185/70's so your speedometer will be out by a good bit. 175/70's are pretty much the same diameter as the 155/80's. If you can hold on until just after Christmas, Canadian Tire starts to put their snowies on sale. If the model is being phased out, you can get some good deals. But buy them early, as there will be no rainchecks on sizes that are sold out. Good luck. And if you find a source of 165/80-13 snowies, let me know please! Rob.

Mine did that a few times. 7500 RPM freezer cold! (like -15 Celcius.) I found that pumping the throttle a bit before starting the car would free it up. Make sure the throttle is closed all the way before turning the key. It stopped doing it finally. I don't know why. Lubrication can't hurt. Try WD40 or similar water-displacing spritz lube.

"4 new all season tires I was only going 55 mph on a highway and had less than an inch of snow" Worst possible tires for the worst conditions, although new helps. That stuff was probably turning into a curling rink right under the tires. Drove home in something similar, yesterday, but lots of others had gone before and made the rink. The worst part is not knowing where the edge of the road is, and the snowplows forcing you over as they plow 2 feet over the centreline, coming from the other direction. All seasons aren't too bad once it gets really cold (below 0 F), but they suck until then. I spent a winter on them in Northern Alberta, 0 to -40 deg the whole time, and never had a problem. Sure, they didn't stick well, but they stick reliably poorly - one can adapt. ABS brakes helped on the icy roads downtown. All the highways were pretty bare due to the wind. Come spring breakup, it was funny to watch the local drivers try to adapt to slush. They hadn't a clue! I was the only one in the apartment building that used the (unplowed) parking lot, everyone else was afraid of getting stuck. And this was a FWD Pontiac with OEM all-seasons, not even a Subaru. It all comes down to knowing how much wheelspin is useful, and when. Don't just plant it and burn a hole in the snow down to pavement, then make black smoke trying to get out of the hole, as I saw one fellow doing! And the one corner on the road to the pulp mill was the biggest joke. All the big pickups would blast by me at 70 MPH to my careful 55, then crawl around the one corner at less than 20. That was the only spot on the highway where the snow would build, for some reason, but even so, that corner was an easy one at 35.

Does it lose power, then stop? I think carb icing is a possibility here. It is that time of year. Although Arizona isn't the usual location for such problems. Has it been unusually cool and wet down there? Is it getting hot air off the manifold? All the hot air hoses in place, and any thermostatic devices working properly? Looking is lots cheaper than throwing parts at it.

I have a hard time believing that Haynes schematic. It just doesn't work that way. Bad switch is the most likely problem. The motor must be good, or else it wouldn't work at all. Maybe there is a single bad wire or contact on the switch, one that is common to the normal operating positions, but is duplicated by one that kicks in on wash?

Buy a new axle on the way home. No sense in wasting a trip.

I have noticed this effect: RWD go in the ditch on their own side of the road, often back end first. (Oops! Need a pull please!) FWD go in the ditch on the OPPOSITE side of the road, usually front end first. (Bad news if there is oncoming traffic. Need a tow truck, and maybe an ambulance quick!) 4WD go in the ditch upside down. (Always bad news! Tow truck and ambulance for sure.) I am not sure if there are more FWD and 4WD vehicles in the ditch, but the ones that go there are likely in deeper trouble. There are so few RWD now, it is impossible to get decent sample size. I miss my old RWD Corolla. My 4WD Subaru is the closest thing I can get to it, dynamically. I don't miss working on it, just the handling (summer or winter) and better fuel consumption.

That is the problem with AWD. We CAN drive faster than other cars in the snow. But we SHOULDN'T! Sometimes it is hard to tell when that line is being crossed. Since we don't have the instant feedback of road conditions, the way an old RWD vehicle did (hit the gas and spin tires - hmm, maybe it is kind of slippery out there) I find it best to really drive hard for the first hundred yards of so: Lots of gas, flick the steering wheel, and stomp on the brakes. That gives me an idea how bad it is before I get too far. (Do this on a quiet road with no other traffic, obviously!) The real problem is when the conditions change as you drive, and what was a safe and sensible speed becomes crazy without notice - and you don't find out until you have to do something like stop, or turn or dodge stuff on the road (like moose). Don't drive unless you have to, and then drive later, after the plows and other traffic have had a chance to clean the snow off the road. Let someone else go into the ditch first, and point out the really slippery bits for you. Good luck.

Vacuum leak? It seems to run great on choke, but then quits when the choke comes off, so maybe there is a hose unplugged.

There are different methods of holding the arms on, depending on the arm. The screws hold your current arms on. The new ones may have adapters that take the screws, or clips that press on the arms and snap into place. There should be instructions with the arms, especially if they use some weird system to hold them in place. What did happen to replacement blades (rubber only)? Time was you could buy the rubbers for a couple of bucks, but now, you have to by the whole arm for about 3X as much money. Kind of like sealed beam headlights, they were too cheap, so now the car manufacturers make sure a rock in the headlamp is a $200 disaster, instead of a $10 PITA. Wipers are now minimum $10 each, and there is a good chance they will fling themselves off the car trhe first time they are used because the fancy clip system doesn't work, leaving you blind in the rainstorm with a good scratch on the windshield.

This sounds a lot like it might be a bad fusible link. Check it again, try a new one. If the link is sound, and the conductor is bad, then run the new conductor from the link, not directly from the battery. The link is there for overcurrent protection, it is safer to not bypass it.

"Condenser" is an old-fashioned term for "capacitor". It is there to stop the contacts in the switch from burning out when you break the circuit (turn it off). The name is a holdover from the days when a capacitor, called a condenser, was used across the ignition points to stop them from arcing when they open. At 160 W, that is over 13 A of current, so that has a lot of "momentum," so to speak, when the switch is opened. The capacitor provides a place for it to go, rather than jumping the contacts and burning them. Rob.

I find Subaru bearings go from noisy to floppy really fast. I lost a rear wheel bearing last Christmas, at 280,000 km. It started to make all sorts of bad noises while loaded (3 grown ups, baby, and luggage, but not really full) then quieted down when unloaded. It made another 900 mile trip back home from Vancouver, in snow and subzero temperatures, no symptoms. It finally failed completely a month later, after driving around town without any complaint at all, while on a trip to Prince George at -30 deg. C. Made it to Vanderhoof with the rear wheel trying to do the steering... Used arm/hub $200, labour $200, ready 4 days later (and it takes 2 to get parts here). No complaints, except they left out the bellville washer, which was easily fixed. But the moral is, fix it if it is making noise!