WoodsWagon

The Impreza Outback Sport is the same ride height as a normal impreza, so it doesn't have factory lift blocks. You will need the blocks and steering coupler from a Legacy Outback or a Forester if you intend on lifting it high. If you just run Legacy Outback struts, there is enough give in the suspension to take the lift. If you plan on running lift springs or strut spacer blocks above the Legacy Outback struts, you will need the subframe blocks. With Legacy Outback struts and the trailing arm mounts you can run 205/75r15's with light rubbing at full lock turns on bumps. 99+ you can swap a SOHC 2.5l in but you need the computer too because they are speed density and the fueling charts are stored in the ECU. 97 and 98 you can put in a DOHC 2.5l. Intakes are different between the DOHC and the phase 1 2.2l, but the bellhousing harness plugs are a match so it's plug and play, just leave the intakes on the engine. If you want power and snappy acceleration with big tires, find an auto with 4.44 final drive and matching rear diff. The OBS may already come with that, but I'm not sure. Legacy Outbacks all did.

Just make sure to cross out the A/C lable under the hood and write R134a next to it in permanent marker. When someone down the road goes to recover the refrigerant and sucks a r134a mix into their r12 tank it will ruin their day.

Low range actually sucks for doing burnouts. You don't get enough wheel speed so the tires are on the edge of hooking up and you get bad wheel hop or it just hooks up and bogs the engine. I grenaded all my transmissions with a n/a ej22. I spent a fair bit of time in RWD because the front axles would break. With the front parking brake and rear LSD, it was a ton of fun. Light them in first, hard shift to second, and modulate the parking brake to keep it from gaining speed. I left some loooooong marks down the roads. With the sharp full lock steering angle on the EA's they do great for donuts on narrow roads. I could spin that wagon around anywhere. However, I went through a lot of transmissions. Some of them blew offroad, some blew on the street. I was slapping them together mixing and matching parts from the blown ones. I even found a d/r 5spd dumped out in the state forest and used gears out of that for one of them. I blew a few open rear diffs before I got the RX lsd as well, and a few stub shafts.

The stock cooling system if you have the a/c belt driven clutch fan is plenty adequate for a non-turbo ea82. I held one at floored for over an hour and averaged 90mph and the only thing that failed was the exhaust header gaskets. Coolant temp was fine.

I had terrible luck with the GCK brand new axles. So bad that the manager of the Autozone warned me that I was pushing my luck with the lifetime replacement warranty and would likely get flagged. Those joints were junk out of the box. I had the needle bearings from the tripod joint poking out through the boot while it was still full of grease, and had 3 of the outer CV cages bust. Loud bang and instant neutral. I'd just chuck it in 4wd and keep going. I'd build axles by swapping the remaining joints around to have one complete one and return the trashed one for the next break. Genuine subaru axles have a distinctive shade of green paint on the CV cups. If you use high temp sillicone boots on the inner joints, they won't fail from being cooked by the catalytic converter. It's always better to re-boot a subaru axle than to play the aftermarket roulette. If you put the axle back on the opposite side of the car from where it came, you double it's wear surface life.

You don't want to use power out to unspool the winch. Under power out the motor is fighting the automatic brake and you will burn the brake up if you use power out to unspool for every pull. Extend the freespool lever to somewhere you can reach it.

I have a manual rack out of an 86 gl 3 door coupe (rx bodystyle) but I think shipping to BC would be rediculous from NH instead of somewhere closer to you. there's got to be more of them out there.

Use the matching AWD transmission and remove the rear transfer section. You can't flip the diff in the a/t because they use hypoid gears with and offset pinion centerline. However, there was someone who used the gears from a 4eat and cut and welded the pinion to a 5mt shaft to use them in a 5mt, so you could potentially do the opposite using the the reversed ring and pinion set offered by http://www.subarugears.com/ for the 5mt and modify them to fit in the 4eat. It would suck to cut up $2k worth of brand new gears and have the experiment fail though. The other option is VW hub reduction boxes. They reverse the direction of the axles and give you extra gear reduction. They were found up to the mid 60's in busses.

You could use outback struts to raise the spring seat, but that gives you a lift which for some reason I think you're not looking for. You could also cut the spring seat down and run coilover adjustable sleeves with narrow diameter springs. Or you could run thin wheel spacers assuming you have enough wheel stud length left for full thread engagement on the wheel studs.

I have used a fat lip bumper beam to flat tow a wagon 2400 miles. I welded 4 angle iron tabs to the beam and ran the pivot pins through them for the tow bar. It worked great. I would recommend bracing the bumper beam to the lower radiator support if you plan on doing serious winching. I had a 9k on my Loyale with a box tube bumper with braces running down to angle iron saddling the front of the lower rad support and it did a lot to help keep the bumper from twisting down since the winch was mounted to the top of the bumper. I used the bolt hole that the hood latch brace attaches to keep the angle iron clamped to the radiator support.

Damn, 27 broken pistons is quite an accomplishment, if you can call it that lol. At least you aren't splitting cylinder walls like Reddevil was.

When you burn a exhaust valve and loose that cylinder, just pull the injector plug to it and keep cruising. It will burn some oil but keep going fine. I commuted with a 3cyl EJ22 for months. Heads are also pretty easy to swap out in car or just plunk a whole nother engine in there. Easy weekend job.

With most fuel injected engines from the mid 80's on, an engine doing compression braking uses NO fuel, vs the baseline fueling needed to keep it idling. Under engine braking the computer does a full fuel cut until the clutch switch, neutral switch, or vehicle speed sensor warns it to go back to fueling the engine to keep it idling. Compression braking causes no harm to the engine and transmission, and if done right should not cause any more clutch wear than a normal shifting event does. Which is to say, no wear. Almost all the wear on a clutch is from getting the car moving from a standstill. I would not recommend compression braking for panic stops or slippery situations. Use the service brakes to get things back under control, then use compression braking to maintain the lower speed. Trying to row through the gears while controlling wheel slip and skid angle to dodge whatever you are trying not to hit is stupid. It adds confusion, takes a hand off the wheel, and doesn't add any braking force beyond what the service brakes can offer. Plus it's less controllable, if you lock up a wheel it takes longer to sense it and get it to release with the engine doing the braking vs easing up on the brake pedal a bit. Comp braking is great for going down long grades. The engine can slow/hold your speed all the way down with no damage or overheating, while you could get the brakes hot enough to fade if you used them alone. It's great for slow changes in speed like rolling up to the next traffic light. Downshift through a few gears, then use the brakes to finish the stop. It should be a part of normal driving, but not emergency or panic maneuvers.

If you rebuild it, why dump it for a n/a car? You'll be trading a car with an engine you know is fixed right for one of unknown history. Way more N/A engines are in a bad way than the turbo ones because the headgaskets leak and the coolant runs low. They will run low on coolant for a long time before they overheat enough for the driver to notice (if they actually do look at the temp gauge). This causes the tops of the cylinder bores to get hot because they are above the waterline, which leads to scoring on the two drivers side cylinder bores because the major thrust surface is the top side of the cylinder. People chuck headgaskets in them and send it out the door with oil consumption and piston slap issues showing up shortly after. But the headgaskets are a known weak point so "just replaced the headgaskets" is a positive thing for the seller to note, right? WIth the turbo engines, if you take the filter screens out of the turbo oil feed and avcs banjo bolts they will last a long time with no failures.

The shattered pistons may not have been a weak point if you had been running water/meth injection then like you are now. How many pistons did all your race engines go through before you started using meth? There are EA/ER to 4eat bellhousings out there, so you could bolt it to your 4eat with factory parts. Just putting that out as an option, but the longer nose/worse approach angle and poor flowing heads are still downsides in a race buggy.

Cams run directly in the aluminum of the head, no bearings at all. Is it making bad noises yet?

Make sure it's the rod bearings first. A cracked flexplate or failed timing belt tensioner can make similar noises.

A 2003+ 3.0l will have the variable cam timing which helps with both low end torque and peak horsepower, it just takes a bit more to wire up but worth it. Honestly if you want to do the biggest, best subaru swap, use a 3.6l out of a newer tribeca. There's no replacement for displacement as they say when it comes to hauling a heavy vehicle around.

A turbocharged 2.5l will have higher specs than the 3.0l, but a non-turbo most certainly will not. The 3.0 is a nice engine. Later ones have variable cam timing which increases low end torque and top end power, it flattens out the powerband of the engine. They have more complex wiring though. There is also the 92-97 SVX 3.3l engine, but it is pretty bulky. What kind of engine compartment space do you have? Can the corvair transmission be used with the subaru engine? I seem to recall corvair engines spinning counterclockwise while subaru's spin clockwise. I suppose a VW A/T could be used or a subaru 5spd with the conversion ring and pinion.

I used a 98 legacy Outback coupler between the rack and column of my lifted loyale. Spline count is the same.

Your transmission is already a pull type, so the STi clutch should work just fine with it.

I don't think so, the SVX flange is a lot different and bigger. SVX manifolds on the outside, 3.0r manifolds on the inside. Here's some headers I found in a quick google search: http://www.raptorsc.com.au/kits.php?id=70

I wouldn't worry to much about the valve train as far as rpm goes. All the EA82's I've had were pretty consistent about floating the valves at 81-8200 rpms and nothing bad happened when they were held there. The solid lifters are a good idea because you could make your lash predictable rather than depending on the whims of the oil system.

Ha, I've been duped by terryduper into responding to a necro-bumped thread. Oh well.

I would suspect a failing fuel pump, coil pack or ignition module before sticking valves based on your description of the symptoms. Easy to get a spare coil pack and ignitor from a u-pull-it junkyard, the ignitor is mounted dead center on the firewall. Test them out and see if it cures your stumbling issue.