lostinthe202

I would suggest getting some cutting oil. It amazing how much better the cut will be and how much longer your tool will last. Get something with sulfur in it. smells kinda nasty, but it offers better heat resistance for harder steels and stainless steels and the like. I don't have much experience with the carbide sets. I've used the cobalt ones before but never really noticed them as being superior. I would imagine the carbide sets to be prohibitively expensive. Also I think carbide is kind of brittle and prone to chipping if not run at the proper speed and feed (at least in a milling cutter). We used high speed steel at the shop (like what most bits are made of) 'cause I can sharpen them on the grinder. Let us know how you make out if you go with one of those.

That's good to know. I deal with UNC/F stuff all day long and I can usually ID them by eye, but I'm not that gifted with the metric stuff, except for the heads of course!

Aw shucks, I wasn't really riding the pity horse, I know it's kind of an obscure thread to be asking about. I would've been pretty surprised if someone was like, "hey I happen to have a bunch of those stand-offs in my right pocket and a metric thread gauge in my left!" But one can always hope! Posting here is generally easier then trying to get remove rusted threads and then identifying the remains. Thanks for the kind words though! Will-

Weeeeelll, By some miracle of miracles, I was able to pull a stud out of the chassis side of the vehicle. For anyone not familiar with these, they are basically a coupling nut about 30mm in length with a stud on the chassis side and a stud on the heat shield side. So the coupler acts as a stand-off for the heat shield to put it where the subaru engineers decided it needed to go. The heat shield is then held on by nuts. All of my nuts were rusted solid as they haven't been used in awhile..... bada boom! (hehe) anyway, I soaked them but they still snapped. Now that I know these are comprised of a piece of all thread and a coupler, I'm not surprised. All-thread is almost always made from soft steel so it's no wonder they just sheared off with hardly a twist. Initially I tried to get one of the couplers off the car and I sheared that off as well leaving the stud inside the chassis. So i was reluctant to try removing any of the others lest I shear them all off and find myself having a jolly old time with the various methods of removing busted bolts. Anyway, I got one of the couplers to come out and identified the thread as M8 x 1.25. I had some 1/2" hex rod kicking around work so I drilled and tapped those and I'm going to pick up some M8 x 1.25 bolts from my local hardware and cut the heads of to use as the studs. I'll get some nuts at the same time, never-seize the poop out of the whole shootin' match, and I'll be ready to go. Sorry to ramble on, but this thread is so lonely, thought I'd keep myself company! Will-

'96 OBW So I've got the trans out for a face lift and I'm FINALLY ready to put it back in, got some sunshine all lined up and I'm ready to rock.... except for one little detail that I forgot all about. During disassembly I broke off every one of the threads that are on those stand-offs that hold on that long heat shield between the exhaust and the drive shafts except for one and I can't find the blasted thing. Can anyone tell me what the thread of those stand-offs are so I can either make some tomorrow or order them in time for this weekend? Thanks! Will-

Go Dave go!!!

I have found that trans chart that is floating around to be missing numbers. My trans number is not on the chart and the one listed for a '96 outback is supposed to be .780 for fifth with a 4.11 final drive. I plugged my rpm at 70 mph into one of those ratio calculators to determine that i have the .871 fifth instead of the .780 that is supposed to be there, but I do have the 4.11 final.

can you see the ring gear through the drain plug on these?

OK, trans update. I split the halves again and cleaned off the bum rtv and replaced with a fresh tube of ultra gray. Checked everything out and squirted gear oil over all the moving parts. I did take the time to dig through the pdf of the FSM I forgot I had and found the proper torque for the bolts as well as a tightening sequence which I did not follow before. I don't know if it matters, but what the hell. I made one refinement to my hose clamp method for the shift fork finger. The first time I tried to slide it on, the finger rotated without my noticing and it push one of the forks in so the next time around I used a rubber band to keep the finger in the fully "counter clockwise" position. Or said another way, kept the finger up against the splined shaft collar. Here's a pic... As far as I can tell, the first sign you have it right is that, after you put the 10mm bolt back in for the reverse/5th spring finger, you'll be able to compress the spring. If you don't have the shift fork finger in the right place or you moved a fork, you won't be able to get the fork finger in the right place to compress the spring. I still can't shift to all positions, but the rotation is smooth, so I'm going to chalk it up to the tight tolerances of the new bearing. So now when all the stars align and things quiet down at work and it stops raining long enough for me to dash out there, I'll put this bad boy back in and hopefully have my car back!!

I've read post after post after post after post about vibrations and shakes and other anomalies when both rebuilt and new axles from sources other then the dealer and MWE are used.

You could try contacting the manufacturer, they may still have a book on it that you can get.

+1 for no stop leak, that stuff causes more problems then it fixes.

Photobucket has settings for how big the pics can be. I use the setting for a 15" screen as that seems to be the biggest that just about everyone can enjoy without having to scroll left and right and they still seem pretty decent. If I want the pic to be bigger, I put a link instead of the thread. I hear ya though, I really wish there was a program that would just read my mind and do what I want!!

I work at an engineering school. I"ll ask some of the EE professors if they have a little tutorial they recommend to students.

Yeah, I've had some toyota friends of mine say that after a rebuild a trans can be just about impossible to shift by hand without the leverage of the linkage. But I was able to shift mine to every gear while I had it on the bench before I took it apart. So that combined with the fact that it wasn't just difficult to spin, but rather that as I turned the shaft by hand it would get say 3/4 of a revolution with ease and then seize up and I wouldn't be able to complete the rotation and that seemed wrong to me.

Yes and yes, after several attempts to seat them without being able to see the hole and dowel to line them up, I finally used my noggin and used a sharpie to put a dot where the hole is and they went together. I gave them a couple of taps with a dead blow fully to seat, Right on, glad I could give something back, without your write up I would've been muuuuch more apprehensive about attempting this. Wish I had one for the civic trans I'm going to tackle after this one!!

Nobody seems particularly interested in this thread, but I'll update it anyway in case any other trans overhaul noobs feels like tackling this job. I took it apart again, partly because I wasn't satisfied that I had it together correctly, and second, the tube of RTV I used must've been waaaaaaay past it's expiration date because it never dried!! I hate it when that happens. Anyway, once it there, the only thing I saw amiss was that the clip around the rear main shaft bearing was not fully seated against the trans case. This did ease the rotation problem I was having. The neutral was there again too, but it was there before I popped the halves apart, so that is still kind of a mystery. I've got the halves back together and I'm picking up another gasket for the center diff tomorrow and I'll put it together again and see what it looks like then. Will-

Glad to hear there are still some kids out there that like to read. I was starting to think that was a thing of the past. Nurture that trait. And congrats on getting the EJ swap to pass! Will-

+10,000

http://www.crazedlist.org

Bump for more info, One thing I forgot to mention is that the drag in neutral is really bad, I can't get the main and counter shafts to spin independently by hand. Again, the only synchro sandwich I removed was fifth and that gear had no problem shifting in or out or spinning the shafts. The problems are that first gear is really hard to get into and once I do, it's really tough to spin the shaft and neutral doesn't appear to exist any more. ???? Thanks!

As they say in the movie industry, Location Location Location...

I got my replacement bearings and seals and put the trans back together. Seems pretty straight forward following Gloyale's excellent write up. To tackle the shift fork positioning, I measured the distance to the opening from the trans case, then measured and position the shift fork to be the same distance from the center diff case's mating surface and put a hose clamp around the shift rod to keep it from dropping any lower.... Seemed to work well, got it the first try... or I got lucky! Either way it's back together and shifting, but I am having a problem. Some of the gears don't spin well, that is, once shifted into gear, there is a tight spot in the rotation of the input shaft. Namely, 1st is fine, 2nd is tighter, and the rest of the gears are really difficult to get into and I can hardly spin the shaft by hand at all. So my thought is that the gears are binding. I did pull out both shafts because I wanted to make sure I had all of the exploded bearing race out of the case. But there wasn't much difficulty getting the shafts back in. So my question is, did I mess up an offset or something by pulling the pinion shaft out? Is it possible that my gears/shafts had worn in some way to the trashed bearing and now that the slop from that is gone I'm feeling that wear? Should I go back in, or just run it and see if it works? Thanks to all those that helped!! Will-

HHAHAHAHAHhahahahahahahahahahah

The Good: It's out of the rain/snow The Bad: It's gravel Gonna pave it one of these days, but until then the plywood seems to work well enough as long as I have enough sheets around