WoodsWagon

Digi dash has no problem with the manual swap. The EJ may be more difficult. I remember something about the digi dash not liking the tach signal from the EJ computer, but they worked around it somehow by adding in extra resistors or something. EDIT: found it http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/topic/101240-were-is-the-tach-wire-digi-dash-ej-swap damn I've got good memory. I think the EJ swap may kill the trip computer too.

VSS is in the speedo head. So when the cable broke/gear stripped/whatever went wrong and the speedometer stopped working, the vss stopped sending a signal to the computer, so that's what sets the code. Hopefully just the cable is broken, because if the gear stripped inside the transmission it requires a complete dissasembly to replace.

Take a look at those connecting rods. I drove it for a couple weeks like that after the 4k rpm hydrolock incident. Sure, it was down on power, and yes it made some pretty bad noises with the pistons hitting the bottom of the cylinder bores, but it still ran and drove. I didn't spare it any either because I knew it was done and had an EJ22 to replace it. It would only rev to mid 6's instead of low 8's. That same engine held a lifted wagon on 30" mud tires at 90+ mph for an hour straight. It couldn't quite break 100, but holding it WOT for that whole time didn't blow it. I've put some other EA82's through their paces and I've never had one blow. They all were gutless through. I can't tell you how many times that EA powered out on climbs in the woods that the EJ just ripped up later. The fun to drive factor of the car went up 50% I'd say with the engine swap. I could pass people if I wanted! I could be doing highway speed by the time I hit the end of the onramp! So that's the downside of the EA82's. I wouldn't bother rebuilding one. I saw a rebuilt shortblock in the junkyard recently. It had a metal plate glued to the pan: mains 0 rods 0 cylinders 0, so it didn't take any machine work to "rebuild" it. There's so many used ones out there in perfectly serviceable condition that just need gaskets that it doesn't make sense to pay a shop to go through one that's truly gone bad.

The clutch pressure of a subaru is much higher than a motorcycle. So you will need a long handle to get the leverage needed. That will also require you to frequently adjust the clutch cable because the range of motion will be small at the clutch end. You could avoid the adjustment by going hydraulic. Easiest and most straight forward would be getting the right pedal box. Call around to JDM engine importers. They will often import a "front clip", sell the powertrain and the front fenders/hood/bumper and then scrap the firewall with the pedals still attached. Or you could mod the auto trans to be a sequential paddle shifted setup. It's been done by one of the members here.

It's not so much the sentiment about a stock RX, but that an EJ chassis has a massive aftermarket support for suspension and brakes where an EA does not. Anything for an EA chassis will either be retrofitted from an EJ subaru or cobbled up yourself. So as far as a longer term racing investment, it would make sense to start with the better platform.

How far into prepping the car are you? I ask because it might be better long term to sell the RX to a good home and campaign an EJ car to start with. Haggard 1.8l impreza's are pretty cheap and easy to come by.

Your going to be unhappy with either of those transmissions when road racing. The ft4wd has an open center diff so whichever wheel has the least traction will spin and no power will get redirected to the other wheels. The diff lock just makes it 4x4, which will not be happy on pavement and will wear on the tires. Not good during endurance racing. The other transmission is FWD or 4wd, so basically the same choices. The 1.59 low range probably won't be a usefull gear split on a road course. So the main consideration is whether you are content racing a pretty much FWD car or if the AWD is a requirement. Because if it is, you would do best to put the AWD guts and rear transfer assembly from an EJ transmission into an EA transmission case. But that's a bunch of work, and if you plan a complete EJ engine/trans swap down the road, not worth it imho. Run it as is, bring the xt spare as it is a direct swap just you will be running it in FWD most likely. The trans doesn't need a cooler, it will be fine. Keep a spare clutch on hand. Put all your effort into replacing all the coolant hoses on the engine including the small ones to the turbo and making sure the cooling system is in tip top shape. That is what is going to be the cars main weakness. An intercooler would be a good upgrade with a ridiculous hoodscoop in proper lemons fashion. Better yet, stick the intercooler out of the hood for maximum airflow. If you intend to up the boost, run a water/meth injection system if lemons rules allow. Winter grade -20 windshield washer fluid works great. Otherwise, plan on the engine blowing up. The front brakes will be your other weakness. Buy the best pads you can get.

I use the anderson quick disconnect plugs on all my vehicles and trailers. I've got a rear mounted one under my truck with a heavy positive wire running up to the battery. No fuse. The starter wire isn't fused either, so there are heavy un-fused circuits on the car to start with. Just make sure to route the wire so it won't chafe or get cut by anything as it passes through the body/frame. On the ground side of things, don't just assume that if you tie it into the body it's good. The ground wires going between the body and the battery aren't that big because they're only meant to carry the accessory loads. The big wire coming off the battery goes straight to the engine block, and the engine is not grounded to the body with big wires either. So add on a bigger wire between the body and the battery if you use it as the ground path. My truck for instance; the frame is not grounded. The body is on rubber mounts to the frame, and the engine is on rubber mounts too. There is no electrical connection between the two except for the brake lines. Which, as I found out with an inductive ammeter, carry all the current if you have lights/winches/ect "grounded" to the frame. You can always use a snatch block with a smaller winch to move a heavier load. I've hauled my 4500lb truck up out of a stuck spot with my portable 2500lb reciever hitch winch. It's a WARN, and it's a POS because I've since shredded the PLASTIC ring gear out of it pulling dead weight. The harbor freight 3k actually has pretty good ratings and I've been thinking of replacing the Warn with it rather than spending the $30 on another plastic gear and housing.

Put a little rtv on the threads of those cam cap bolts when you put it back in if you're worried about it, but likely it's a non issue. If they were leaking there, coolant would be showing up in the oil, not overheating. Put some new mls headgaskets in it and call it a day. Sounds like it was running good and not badly overheated so the rest of the motor is probably fine.

A distributor and carb are easy to understand for simpler people and it makes them feel more confident about swapping an EJ into their car. The more EJ's in the more EA cars the better. Heck, it also helps get them in more VW's because most of those people are so benighted they won't even use the stock VW EFI (which I have a running example of from 1968). The EFI is for sure better, I used it in my EJ swap. But the market for a simple, wiring free, EJ swap kit is certainly out there.

By finding one in a junkyard, do you mean fixing up the whole car or just swapping the engine into a non-turbo subaru? If you're thinking of swapping, I wouldn't. You'll have to pull the dash and switch out the whole wiring harness from there forward. For the mediocre increase in power and the decrease in reliabilty, it isn't worth the effort. That kind of work is better put towards an EJ swap. On the other hand, if you plan on rescuing the whole car, then its a different thing altogether. One thing to wonder is why it's in the junkyard in the first place. An old, not very robust and most likely neglected turbo engine is not the best gamble to take from a junkyard.

If you're replacing the radiator, I would make sure the new one is a double core one from a turbo model. You can also add the belt driven clutch fan from an a/c equipped car for a big increase in cooling capacity. It bolts to the waterpump. You may need to use longer studs on the waterpump for the fan to go on. That fan and its shroud will move a ton of air through the radiator, much more than the electric fan will. With the 3spd auto, you have no lockup clutch in the torque converer so it is always slipping and making some heat. Towing a trailer and climing a grade is working the transmission hard as well as the engine, and it is cooled through the same radiator. You can add an auxilary transmission cooler in line with the heat exchanger in the radiator and that will take some of the transmission cooling load off of the engine's cooling system. I wouldn't go too far down the headgasket/cracked head/failed anything path on the engine. The overheating could easily be just the cooling capacity of the single electic fan on an old radiator beeing exceeded by the load you were putting on the car. One other thing is to pressure test the radiator cap. If it isn't holding pressure, the boiling point of the coolant is much lower and it will boil over through the reservoir. Changing the transmission fluid would be a good idea. It will look darker and smell like burnt celery (the vegetable) if its been overheated.

http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/topic/81677-new-project-lifted-ea82-with-ej22-and-no-computer/ There's been a few done. The phase1 EJ sohc heads have a removable plug on the back of the passenger side head and a slot cut in the cam for a distributor to engage with. Subaru sold them overseas carbed and with a distributor. Since we never got that here, someone found that an early 80's ford Escort distributor fit and just the mounting flange needs to be modified for the clamp bolt to hold it. The factory carbed manifolds combine the water crossover pipe with the manifold so the intake is heated to keep the fuel from condensing. It also drops the intake down lower so the carb can stack on top without hitting the hood. You could import one of these manifolds (good luck), or you could chop into an EFI manifold to add on a carb base flange though that might end up with the air cleaner sticking out of the hood.

No. I had a friend crack one of the plastic WRX pulleys and we checked it against a EJ25d pulley I had spare and they don't fit on the cam.

A diff from the junkyard shouldn't be more than $150 and a stock late model vlsd will work a lot better than the phantom grip. The phantom grips are bad news, they work by wedging the side gears into the case until the oil squishes out and it's grinding metal on metal. That's the limited slip action.

The vlsd rears are pretty common in the junkyards now. Lots of the 2nd gen Legacy Outbacks came with them. 4.11's in the 5spd's, 4.44's in the a/t's. Look for heated mirrors, if it has them it has the winter package which came with the vlsd. If you want to spend big bucks, a 4.44 front ring and pinion plus an obx helical front diff with a vlsd 4.44 out of an auto trans outback would be a pretty good setup. Most of your traction is on the front wheels, so that's where the lsd makes the biggest difference.

You probably just didn't have a good connection with the first fuse. Since the fuse holder sits empty all the time it can get a layer of corrosion on the connectors. If the torque bind goes away with the fuse in, then the duty C is working. It also means you have a good chance of curing it by changing the fluid a few times in a row with short drives in between. How overfilled? Are you checking the right dipsticks? There's two on the transmission, one is straight and stick-like it's for the front diff, the other is flexible and blade like, it's for the trans.

The difference in the cam and crank pulleys are the number of "teeth" that trigger the sensors. You use the pulleys to match the computer. The physical timing marks are all the same. Make sure you get the crank bolt tight enough when you're done.

Get the rear disk brakes from the turbo car at the same time. They are a nice upgrade and bolt right on.

Do you have the heater hooked up to it? Are you using a heater flow shutoff valve that limits circulation through the heater core? The EJ needs full coolant flow through the heater core and back to the water pump housing all the time to correctly operate the thermostat. I used to have my EJ22 in a loyale with an EA82 radiator in water up to top of the wheel wells pretty often and never had any problems other than the automatic seat belts freaking out when they were wet.

Every split boot I have tried sucked. I have heard of people buying a normal boot, cutting it with a razor, then gluing it together and having that work better? I don't know what adhesive they used.

It depends on the VSS. If it's a two wire one it needs to go through the cluster because it produces a sine wave signal that the speedo head converts into a square wave for the computer. The cable speedo cars had a magnet and a reed switch in the head to generate the square wave signal. Later cars had a 3 wire VSS which may have a powered hall effect switch in them that could possibly be connected straight to the ECU.

The Legacy seats seem to hold up better than the impreza seats. I haven't seen any chewed up legacy seats, but every first gen impreza I've seen has exactly the tears you describe.

The dodge d50/mitsubishi mighty max pickup wheels fit perfect. They also have a thick center section to the wheel which lends itself well to redrilling for 4 lug. Here's a side view showing how well they tuck with 235/75r15's on mine: And here's what the wheels look like. You may also find them on 80's Raider's and Montero's.

You can de-snorkus the factory cold air intake by taking off the muffler box inside the fender. You need to pull the wheel well liner to get at it. That will make the intake louder like an aftermarket CAI but it won't improve power any. Make sure to put the wheel liner back in or you will suck a lot of dirt into the filter. The air filter is the same size that subaru used on 300hp engines, so it's not exactly restricting a 90hp one.