WoodsWagon

I broke or bent a lot of parts offroading my Loyale, but never had any trouble with the power steering rack. That was with 29" tires on it too.

Make the auto fun. Watch the opposite light at an intersection, when it goes yellow stand on your brakes with your left foot and floor the gas with your right with the trans in D. The engine will hit stall speed on the torque converter and when your light goes green you sidestep off the brake pedal. There weren't many commuter cars that could holeshot as quick as an old outback 2.5 with 4.44 gears when launched like that. Of course after it shifts to 2nd the acceleration's over, but hey being snappy of the line catches people by surprise. Wire in a 4x4 lock switch and it will handle much better when sliding around in dirt or snow. Also makes it easier to hang out sideways. FWD mode is fun too if you want to waste some tires. I've swapped a car to 5spd, but that was only after reverse failed in the auto. It's pretty straight forward. But I don't see much advantage to it.

The reason it stalls is because it's in deceleration fuel cut mode. When you are coasting to a stop under engine braking, it shuts off all fuel. When you push the clutch in, the ECU doesn't have warning to switch back to idle fueling and the engine stalls before it can catch it. On the 90-94 cars there's a clutch switch that tells the ECU the engines getting disengaged from the drivetrain. On the 95+ cars it uses the VSS signal to know it's coming to a stop.

The pic that numchux has of the flare unions is inside the interior of the car under the back seat, that's why there's no rust. So that's the best spot to join your new lines back into the system.

NZ is relatively next door to you and they got carbed EJ16's in the early 90's which came stock with a distributor.

buy bill's adapter bellhousing and run the toyota 5spd/transfer combo. Lots stronger and more compact without the un-used front and center diffs taking up space.

If your car isn't rusty, might as well throw another used engine in it. Miles on the body don't really mean much.

Splice to the lines inside the body under the back seat with flare unions. That way you have clean unrusted brake line to attach too. Cut the old line off just before the nut at the brake hose and use a 6 point socket on the nut, don't even bother with a line wrench it will just round it off. Hold where it threads into with vice grips so you don't tear the bracket off the car trying to loosen it.

A few listed from $150-350 scattered around the country on car-part.com junkyard database. Looked up 05 baja, selected Hood, picked Turbo model, there you go.

95 legacy is OBD2, 100%. Any of the generic scan tools will talk to it, and an Ultragauge works too. Fuel economy goes down in winter, that's normal and to be expected. All the gear oils and greases are thick in the cold, so it takes more power to move the car, and that uses fuel. Add in the longer warm up time of the engine and the change in winter gas formulation to a more volitle but less energy dense mix and loosing 3+ mpg is normal. If you idle the car in the morning to warm it up, that's more fuel wasted. Second thing is the low fuel light. If you're using that as your indicator that it's time to refill, it's hard on the fuel pump. That light really should never come on, you should be refilling when it gets down to an 1/8 of a tank. Going lower serves no purpose, and it greatly increases the chances of overheating the pump or it sucking air. The light is an idiot light, as in "hey dummy, go get gas NOW", not a friendly reminder. That's what the gauge is there for. If you are calculating the mpg based on a fixed amount of gallons in a "tank full" when the empty light comes on, that's innacurate. The better way is to record the gallons it takes to fill the tank from whatever level it was at and divide the miles since the last time it was filled to the top.

The gear reduction in a dual range transmission happens in the input shaft between the clutch and the 5spd gears. It's in the front of the case right above the front differential. The single range trans just has a solid input shaft all the way through, and the case is not machined for the dual range reduction gears. The rear transfer case section is the same between the two of them. So you have to put the ring and pinion from the single range into the dual range case to be able to keep the low gears.

You can download factory service manuals from subaru if you buy a 24 hour membership.

Auto/manual ECU's are usually interchangable, you need to add a ground pin to one of the ECU connectors to tell it that its now running a manual trans setup. The change is made in the wiring and the ECU runs the program to match.

Buy all 4 struts for a 1998 Legacy Outback, re-use your springs and top hats. In the rear you will probably need to put a couple lockwashers under the nut that holds the top hat onto the strut because the threaded portion of the Outback strut rod doesn't go far enough down so the nut jams before it actually clamps the top hat. Other than that it's pretty easy. Instead of un-doing the brake lines and bleeding them after, just cut into the bracket and bend it back so you can slip the hose out. do the same to the new strut, slide the hose in, bend it back flat and put the spring clip back on.

Towed home a 99 forester which still ran but had jumped two teeth on the drivers side cam. The toothed idler pulley had blown out its bearing and was riding on the races. That was more slack than the tensioner could compensate for. Put a new idler on it, set the cam back in time, and it ran great for another couple years before the driveshaft blew a U joint and punched the auto trans shifter through the center console and the owner junked it for heroin money instead of fixing it. Jumped time on a non-interference EJ22 when plowing through a snow plow bank trying to get on to a trail. I was running without T-belt covers and packed enough snow in to slip the belt. I've got an 01 forester ej25 with bent valves on the passenger side. It hit a tree in the drivers side, the fan motor broke the timing belt cover right under the A/C compressor and a broken piece of plastic rode the timing belt over to the pass side and skipped it over that cam pulley.

A single drilled out spark plug anti-fouler is enough of a spacer to fool it, and it only pulls the sensor back enough so the tip is flush with the hole in the pipe. I don't see why you'd want a 3" long spacer? You need some exhaust flow going by or the sensor will just sit in a pocket of air left from when the engine was off and always read lean.

Tore the same spot on my Loyale. Also had the floor poking up under the pedals, so check under the carpet in that area too. It comes from not having the lift blocks on the radius rod plate linked to each other. I ended up welding a tab on from the top of the radius rod plate to the top of the rear lift block to brace it, and welding a flat bar between the two front lift blocks in that spot. That was after hammering the floor back together, welding a patch plate on, and re-welding the fire wall. Also check the body where the rear crossmember bolts on, I had cracks around all those and tore one of the captured nuts through. I built a boxed in pocket brace to attach to the 2 bolt holes in the rear of the floorpan to stiffen that area up. Then rust got to the point that I didn't have much to attach to any more. And the body had been worked over so much at that point that if you parked it with the suspension flexed out the doors would fight you. You could hear creaks and pops from all the broken spot welds in the poor thing. Basically the lift blocks put a ton more leverage on thin sheet metal and beating the piss out of it offroad means it's going to crack and tear at some point.

Those wheels came off a Dodge D50 / Mitsubishi Mighty Max pickup. They were as near to a perfect fit as I found, stout as heck, and had plenty of meat to redrill to 4 lug so I went that direction instead of modding the hubs. That also let me use the subaru GL hubcaps that clip on to the open lug nuts so it covered the spare lug holes from the re-drill.

No, the ring gear (crown wheel) flange on the 4eat front diff is a way different offset than the 5mt or a r160. The pinion runs off to the side of the transmission, not centered, so that's why. Modina, an Aussie company, made torsen style front LSD's for the 4eat, but they were $$$$. https://www.flatironstuning.com/p-2003-modena-front-tbd-for-the-02-07-wrx-4at-automatic.aspx

Oh, and you can use a 4x4 transmission and just cap the rear driveshaft output. The right size spray paint can cap is a snug fit, make sure it's not one of the ones with a small vent hole in it, put a little RTV around the outside and push it in to the end of the trans. Don't push it all the way in until it bottoms on the shaft, as the spinning shaft with eat a hole in the plastic quickly, just most of the way in. It's getting hard to find any of these cars in the junkyards now, so don't hesitate to get a 4wd one if you find it. The 2wd's will be harder to find.

The subaru auto is most often configured as a FWD transmission with a clutchpack to redirect power to the rear wheels, so it's easy to delete that part of the trans for use in your situation. Some of them were equiped with VTD center differentials, usually in VDC equipped cars, which I mention because you're looking at H6's, which that was an option on. On those you would need to swap in the gear from a MPT awd auto to eliminate the center diff in the VTD equipped trans. Also easy to do. The manuals, I would not recommend looking for a FWD version. Subaru sold them up till 1996 or so, but it's not as strong of a transmission. Buy a "subaspool" from these guys to convert an AWD trans to a FWD: http://www.subarugears.com/Pricing/Pricing.html They also sell an endplate for the transmission to shorten it up a bit once you delete the center diff if you have space constraints.

Cleanest way is to pull the dash out of both of them and swap the full harness over. Everything will be plug and play, but it's a fair bit of work. I did an older legacy, and just added the ground pin to the ECU connector that tells the computer it's now a manual car, unplugged the TCU, and spliced the park safety switch together so it would crank. You would need to also run wires to the ECU from the neutral switch on the transmission and reverse lights to the transmission switch. Basically download a copy of the FSM from Subaru and compare the differences in wiring. I would drive the forester with the auto for a bit first though. I know I'm in the minority, but I like the 4eat. It drives decent, cruises at low rpm on the highway, and if you stand on the brakes and load the engine against the torque converter, then pop off the brakes, it will hole-shot most any car from a light.

How are you testing for spark? It's a "waste spark" system, so you have to have all the other sparkplug wires connected and either grounded or attached to the plugs to complete the circuit. I'd take a closer look at the main plugs going to the engine next to the battery. Unplug them and make sure none of the pins have backed out or any of the wires broke right at the connector. When you shockloaded the drive train, the engine is going to torque to the passenger side and upwards in reaction to trying to spin the driveshaft and axles. So stuff on the drivers front is most likely to get yanked. The main other "ran poorly then died" usual suspect is the MAF sensor, easy enough to just unplug it and try cranking to see if it will start. Think you kicked anything under the dash when you were dumping the clutch? The thing to think about when doing a clutch dump on an AWD car is since the power is sent to all wheels it's much harder to break a tire free and burn rubber like a 2wd car would. Instead it's much more likely for the tires to stay hooked and for something else in the drivetrain to break, like the gears in the transmission. If you want to "drift", learn to set the car up for a powerslide by switching the momentum on the tail of the car right as you hit it with power. Look up the "scandinavian flick" for the technique. Just don't put the car sideways into a ditch and roll it while you're learning!

You got loaded calipers with the later brackets meant for the bigger rotors. Just order rotors for an 03 Outback and you'll get the right size ones to match your caliper brackets. I ran into this too on a used 01 outback I bought, but they only used one small rotor, the other side was all matched! The only reason to run the smaller rotors and caliper brackets would be to run 15" wheels. If all you plan to use is 16's, go with the bigger brakes for more stopping power.

Or ignore it for the next 100k miles because it's unlikely to fail, just get noisier over time. Piston slap that quiets once the engine is warm is not worth worrying about.