WoodsWagon

If you are due for emissions and they are thorough, a spacer on the rear 02 sensor won't get past them. It will however work to eliminate the p0420 code. I've seen it work on cars with straight pipes where the cats used to be. p0420 doesn't indicate that the cats are clogged, just that they are failing to adequately burn the exhaust. So there isn't any performance or MPG penalty to a failing cat. If your cats are actually physically clogging and restricting the exhaust, you have bigger problems. Are you dumping in fuel additives to the tank or letting the car sit idling for long periods of time? If the headgaskets are leaking coolant, toss in a bottle of Subaru Coolant Conditioner if it doesn't already have one in the system. If it's leaking oil, how fast? Can you just add a 1/2 quart now and then? Spare oil bottles fit in the handy pocket in the right rear of the cargo area. At 200+k miles, you can justify pouring fluids in to replace leakage rather than fixing the problem. Oh, and subaru dealerships are still installing the single layer headgasket. It's the current spec'd part for those cars, so that's what the parts dept supplies and the tech installs.

EJ22 should do fine moving those tires. Even "old and tired out". I think you probably have an engine fueling or ignition issue if you feel down on power. I used to tear it up with a very used and abused EJ22 and 29" tires. What transmission is in the car? Do you know the final drive ratio? Either auto or manual can get swapped to 4.44 gears which will make up for the bigger tires and give it more torque off the line and slower crawling speed.

No, 2.0l's were available elsewhere in foresters. Non turbo too. I have no idea what was on offer for the African market though.

Two common reasons for that engine to die are the drivers side timing belt breaking or stripping and the screw that holds the rotor to the distributor shaft coming loose and the rotor spinning freely on the shaft. Check the rotor first. See if you can spin it by hand. Then crank the engine and make sure the rotor is turning. Then check the timing belt to see if it's lost a few teeth and the timing has slipped.

2qts of lucas is way to much. 1/2 quart at the most, rest regular oil. You're going to destroy the engine because it will not move enough oil through the bearings at cold start. It's like pumping molasses. It sounds like either piston slap or rod knock. Hard to tell with out revving it up and snapping the throttle shut and listening for the back-rattle of a dying rod bearing. With piston slap you can run normal oil and ignore it and it will run fine for the next 1OOk miles. My mom's 98 came with horrendous piston slap, and ran fine, got good mpg, and was problem free for the next 5 years. It sounded like a diesel in winter, and the piston slap didn't quiet down much when warmed up. Embarrassing, but it ran fine so whatever.

I'd put the delta cams in an EJ22, mod an escort distributor to fit the head and modify the intake for a carb. Then take your spare cash and buy/make an adapter plate and flywheel to bolt it to the EA dual range 4x4 transmission.

The potenza re92's have a pretty poor all season performance. They came stock on a lot of subarus and are known for absolutely sucking in the snow. That may not be a problem in silicon valley, but if you plan on heading up into the mountains it could be. The rubber in tires does have a finite life. High temperature or high ozone can make them deteriorate quicker. The formulation of the rubber also changed sometime in the 9O's and they crack up way sooner than they used to. The cracking isn't a problem per se, but if they go deep enough for contaminates to get into the carcass of the tire the cords can start breaking. That can lead to a sudden blowout. So the gamble is do you keep running them and risk totaling the car after having a blowout and loosing control, or do you spend the $3OO for a set of new tires and not have to worry about it?

Yeah, rev limiter bouncing is not good. Ease off just enough so it's pulling close to redline but not hitting the cut. How dented was the pan? If you crush the pan in enough you can restrict the pickup and the oil pump starves at higher rpms. Loose screws on the back of the pump are easy to check on teardown. Usually they cause low pressure at idle though. One other thing to consider is oil temperature. With it buried in a hole, there's no airflow around the oil pan to help dump heat. You might want to put on an oil cooler from a turbo subaru or a 99 forester. You need the thermostat housing and one of the block drain plugs too for the coolant fittings.

We can "know all" about these newer models but it doesn't help when the seller's description of the problem makes no sense. No power and won't go faster than 5mph could be a complely crushed exhaust or it could be a bad fuel pump or it could be a bunch of things. If you're looking for a rally car you need a solid shell to put a cage in. I can't tell too well from the pictures but it doesn't look rusty or banged up. One thing is... it may be just a FWD car. Which may or may not be a good thing for you depending on what class you plan to run in. The ej18 is not going to die on you unless it has been run out of oil or coolant. You can thrash the hell out of those motors and they don't die. So swap it for a 2.2 or 3.3l now if you want power.

I know I had to hook it up on a 93 turbo legacy that I swapped auto to manual and on my loyale when I did the EJ22 swap or they would stall when you pushed the clutch in during engine braking fuel cut. It warns the computer that the engine is no longer coupled to the wheels so it has to maintain idle. I just checked a 96 legacy brighton with no cruise. It doesn't have the upper switch so it must use the lower switch for the ECU input as well as starter interlock.

Go with the hoses that match the body, the engines are identical.

Clutch switch is needed or you will get stalling as you coast up to a stop. I'm not talking about the switch at the bottom of the pedal's travel, that's the starter interlock, it's the switch at the top of the travel that the computer needs. It will set a code if it's not wired in.

That bushing will come with the new rod you need. Here's a picture of the whole linkage for you from subaru's Drive magazine: EIther your stay bushing has come loose or the stay rod has broken. That let it fall onto the driveshaft where it wore through and probably heated up the shifter socket until the ball popped out. Either someone on here can sell you a shifter assembly out of a car they're parting out or call the nearest subaru dealer and find out what they want.

Which idler pulley has been failing? I found the Gates kit off of ebay to be the most reasonably priced and it came with good quality idler pulleys, water pump, and tensioner.

Or you could use the later steel wheel hubcaps from the EA82's. They clip onto the 4 stock lug nuts but would probably work going onto just two with the 6 lug.

How long had the car been sitting and how stinky was the gas in the tank? I have had bad gas do this to multiple engines of varying valvetrain designs. The varnish in the old, dead, gas builds up on the valve stems and glues them into the guides. Some of them bent pushrods, others dropped pushrods, and the ea82t dropped it's cam followers just like yours except I lost 3 at once. It seems to happen most often after you get it running on the sour gas. While it's running it seems to be fine, but after you shut it down and let it cool overnight the valves seize in the guides and all hell breaks loose when you try starting it again. If you still have the residue of the bad gas in the tank you will keep having problems no matter how many times you fix the engine. Sometimes replacing the tank is the only option if you can't find someone to clean it or can't get it clean yourself with fresh gas and sloshing it around and scrubbing until it comes out clean. I have chucked a handful of nuts (the metal kind) in and sloshed a tank around until they broke up all the gick. Just make sure you get the same number of nuts back out that you put in. My solution to getting old cars home is a boat tank. I don't bother with pouring gas in the main tank until I drain it, drop it, and clean it now. With a 6 gal boat tank and an electric fuel pump I can be guaranteed that the engine will run the whole way home on fresh gas and not get damaged. It's kind of sketchy driving with a tank in the passenger compartment but I'm sick of fixing stuck valves.

The shifter base should not be rubbing on the driveshaft. The driveshaft is made from thin wall tubing and it doesn't take much of a gouge in the surface to weaken it. It looks like the linkage has probably broken where it attaches to the big bushing on the side of the transmission and has allowed the shifter base to rotate. It may have rusted through and torn, or the nut may have come off and it's flopping free. You need to get under the car to figure out what has come loose. The ball and socket popping apart is just a secondary issue caused by that rod coming loose. Likely you will need the whole shifter linkage from a car in the junkyard.

http://subarugears.narod.ru/Index.htm There's a better organized one done by a guy who lives near me but I can't for the life of me remember his online website. Found it: http://www.northursalia.com/techdocs/trannychart/trannychart.html

You ground 1 pin on the ECU to switch between auto/manual trans, other than that it doesn't care. 96 legacy will be a cable clutch. Swap the pedal box out and it should bolt right in. You may have to drill the hole in the firewall for the cable to pass through. With the donor car it should go pretty easy. Unbolt from one, bolt onto the other. You will need to jumper the connector going to the auto trans shifter to get it to start. The ECU will also want to see a neutral switch and a clutch switch, so you will have to wire those in.

Manual trans, so no duty C. If they put a rebuilt center differential in it while they rebuilt the transmission, the new diff could be binding. It sounds exactly like the torque bind issue you get when the center diff fails. Good news is it's a 1 day job to change out the center diff and they don't need to pull the transmission to do it.

That's a viscous coupler lsd rather than the clutch and ramp type in the RX's and XT's, and they are inferior. They came in the early legacy SS's they came in later Outbacks (4.1 and 4.44 ratio), and they came in WRX's(3.54 or 3.9), but the lockup is not very strong and they have to slip a bit before they do anything. The clutch type ones provide grab instantly. This is why people put the clutch type carrier from the 3.7 ratio diffs into a 3.9 ratio diff. Little bit of grinding, check the backlash on the gears, and you have what you need.

If you find a 96-99 Legacy Outback automatic with blown headgaskets you'd get a great donor car for the impreza. The legacy outbacks have 4.44 final gearing in the trans and rear diff and you could use the 2.5l shorblock with 2.2l SOHC heads from a 90-98 legacy or impreza. Just make sure to run the car, blown headgaskets and all, to listen for any knocking noises. Sometimes people overheat them until they stop running and it does a number on the rod bearings. Use the 2.2l torque converter and flexplate on whatever motor or trans you run. It's a smaller converter than the 2.5l one so it should have a higher stall rpm.

Go down to a U-pull it junkyard and grab another head. They're easy to pull off on the phase1 Ej22's, all the headbolts are on the outside so you don't even need to pull the valvecover. Or grab the whole engine, they're cheap and rarely bad. A 2.5l block can have the 2.2l heads bolted to it which makes for more low end grunt. Probably handy for coming out of the corners. Do you have the auto trans locked in 4x4 with a switch or is it still AWD controlled by the computer?

The stalling as you come to a stop could easily be the BOV. It's a MAF fuel injection system, so the computer is watching the air going in through the mass air flow sensor and fueling accordingly. The stock valve was a recirculating type, it dumped the excess pressure back into the turbo inlet and the MAF didn't see any more air getting sucked in. With an atmospheric BOV, the excess pressure is dumped out of the system and the turbos suck more air through the MAF to replace it. What happens is the MAF tells the computer that a bunch of air is going into the engine while actually it's whooshing out the BOV. The computer dumps a bunch of fuel in to match the air that it thinks is going in, and it floods out the engine because that air wasn't there. You can drive to compensate for it, but it will always run filthy rich every time the BOV goes Psht. The BOV can also not close properly during off-boost, which leads to an unmetered air leak into the intake system. That can cause it to run lean and stall. With a MAF based EFI system a recirculating BOV is the the right way to go, but it doesn't make the cool noises as loudly so people don't use them. The other thing to think about is to have a budget saved for repairs on the car in the future. I know it's not something you want to think about when having just bought it, but it has likely been flogged and that often leads to big ticket maintenance items later on.

The fail safe for a bad coolant temp sensor reading is for the ECU to command the fans on fulltime, but it should also set a code at the same time. I would check over the harness in the area that the car was smashed. I fixed a forester that had some really strange electrical issues caused by a twist n' tape repair to the harness in the left front corner. They taped the wires together with duct tape, then used electrical tape to bundle the harness back together so it looked right. Took a bunch of solder and shrink tubing to get it back working right.