WoodsWagon

I'd recommend a toyota transmission and transfer case with the conversion bellhousing over running a divorced nissan or suzuki t-case. It's a lot stronger than relying on the weak subaru rear transfer gears to feed all the power to the transfer case.

I did the same thing with an EJ22 running without covers. I was hammering over a mountain of snow that had been plowed into an unmaintained road entrance by a lazy plow operator. I had a friend tow me down the road a ways so I could put the belt back on in peace because I had a drunken housewife screaming at me about how she was going to call the cops and how her husband was going to kick my rump roast when he got home because I was working on my car on the road in front of their house. My vote is for covers in winter.

No, the flange side is fine, it is the shoulder of the diff case on the end opposite the flange that is running into the gears.

As many others have said, check the 1" dia black rubber hose that goes from under the main intake tube to the side of the throttle body. What you've described are the exact symptoms you get if it's unhooked. Also check all the PCV hoses that hook to the main intake tube. You most probably have a leak between the throttle body and the MAF sensor on the air filter box, you just have to find it. Try unplugging the MAF sensor and see if it stays running.

The radio must be un-intentionally transmitting on the frequency the security module in the car uses to talk to the key fob for the remote locking. If you re-program the security system to the key fob by using the instructions on the yellow sticker by the battery, it should work normally again.

There was a change in the rear struts I think in 91 from conical springs to straight ones. Different strut caps to match, but the struts themselves should be the same.

Nope, the switch is fed vaccum from the pastic cannister on the firewall in the engine bay side which is fed vacuum from the intake manifold of the engine. There is no vaccum pump, except on cruise control models and that's only for the cruise control.

The front VSS feeds directly to the speedometer gauge in the cluster. The speedo gauge then translates that signal and sends it on to the engine's computer and the transmissions computer (ECU and TCU). The problem is in the speedo sensor to instrument cluster part of the system. The AWD isn't working right because the TCU is getting a bad signal from the speedometer gauge in the cluster. The rear VSS has nothing to do with the speedo, it only talks to the TCU and the TCU uses it's data internally to run the AWD. It is not used as a backup sensor to run the speedometer. The TCU compares the signal coming from the speedo gauge to the rear VSS to figure out how much slippage is happening. Loose screws that hold the speedo gauge into the cluster and also form the connection to the printed circuit board on the back are a common problem and easy to check. The speedo's themselves do fail sometimes, but it's much more rare in the 95-98's vs the 99's. The other thing to check would be the speedo sensor drive gear. You take the sensor out and put a flathead screwdriver down in and try to very gently turn the shaft. It's a plastic gear and if it wears out it can start skipping on the drive gear inside the differential housing. If you can turn that shaft without the wheels moving the gear is done. Unfortunately that means pulling the transmission and separating the front diff housing off it to get at it. Hope that this isn't your problem and check the gauge cluster first.

I know a ford 302 fits between the brat's frame rails with stock exhaust manifolds. They had to notch it to fit the headers though.

Thank you for taking good pictures of the strut tower rust I was talking about. Out of all the 95-99 subaru's I have checked in the junkyard, none of them had solid sheetmetal left. Half of them it was totally gone, the other half crumbled when I reached up in and poked it.

Take a look at the bushings where the rear trailing arms mount to the body by the rear doors. The links come forward from the wheel hub and attach to the underside of the body. It's really common for the bushings to go out. That causes the rear toe alignment to wander all over the place and the back of the car steers itself.

The extra hose barb is probably for the EVAP canister, which was mounted by the air filter box on the earlier ones, and under the back of the car on the later ones. If you loop a hose between the two nipples sticking out over there it redirects the vacuum to the third nipple over by the fuel lines just like how it works on the later cars.

If it's the same body style as yours, boxy and crisp edges, then it will be a 5spd. If it's more rounded and smaller like an early 80's one it will have the 4spd. Your other option is to fix the broken timing belt in the brown car if it is just like yours.

The rear doors are already wired for speakers on the Brightons, but you have to cut the door card to install the grille and bolt the speaker in.

If it's older than yours it probably has a 4spd and you don't want it.

I always used needle nose vice grips in between the socket of the link and the sway bar. You can usually grab the stem enough to get the nut off with an impact gun. Be careful with the torch, you don't want to take the temper out of the swaybar's steel or it will break right where the link attaches later.

If that's your opinion you probably shouldn't bother posting in the old gen forum and just stick to new gen. I like the EA82 body cars a lot better than the legacy's. The non-turbo engines aren't powerful, but they're plenty reliable and return decent fuel economy. If the body is in good shape and it has a good running SPFI engine, the appropriate response is to swap a 5mt into it, not to junk the car due to a bad transmission. If you have a donor car with the 5mt it's a straightforward weekend project to convert over. With a spare governor on hand it makes sense to toss it in. When/if it goes out again it doesn't cripple the car, you can still make it home. You could even carry your other spare in the glovebox, they're really easy to swap out on the side of the road. Around here any legacy under $2k is a heap of rusty scrap. Anything pre-2000 is usually too rusty to pass state inspection or the tank/evap lines have rusted out so it throws codes. The 00-04's are rusting out pretty bad too but people still want $4-6k for them.

JB weld does not work on fuel tanks with the new ethanol blend gas. I used to use it on the tanks in my various woods beaters and never had a problem. Now, it works for a month or two and starts leaking again. After that you can peel the patch off with a putty knife leaving bare steel underneath. JB recommends their water-weld for gas tanks rather than the standard stuff you normally use. I don't know if it works any better, but I'm sick of having tanks not stay "fixed".

You should bump the boost up some more. It was capable of 5psi on the previa with a 2.4l, it should be capable of more on a 1.8l. With the hp increase from 5psi, think of what 7.5 would get you. With the water injection you should be able to run that pressure without any reliability decrease. I'm severely overspinning an eaton m62 on a 3.4l engine. The 12.5psi it turns out make it a lot of fun too, and it's on an "unprepared N/A motor" with 9.6:1 compression and no intercooler. Water/methanol injection makes it work, and it's been reliable for 3 years with a lot of abuse. I've got less than $600 in the whole setup, so you can have fast/reliable/cheap all at the same time with water/meth injection. The merc's came with an Eaton M45, which would be a much better size for a 1.8l than an M62 or m90 or m112. The whipples off a millenia suck because the oil seals go out early and often on them. Not much use in a supercharger that injects a mist of engine oil all the time.

I think subaru used the .87 overdrive on the outbacks because they assumed people would think the car was gutless if they had to downshift for hills on the highway. The car was heavier and had bigger tires than before, so that was the compromise they made. Make 5th nearly the same as 4th and people will never have reason to downshift to 4th. I know the older 2.2l's can pull a legacy L along just fine with the 205/70r15 outback tires and a 3.9 final drive with the .78 overdrive. My mom's 98 outback with the auto has a .70 overdrive, which works out to almost the exact same RPM's with the 4.44 final that the L's manual has with the same tires. It's a 3.04 total reduction ratio instead of a 3.06. The 98 outback's best MPG was 29.7, which was fully loaded, 3 adults plus luggage, doing 80mph across nebraska. Tracking the MPG the whole trip across from the east coast, the faster we went, the better the MPG was. It was also better with the front windows down AC off vs up with the AC on. So pretty much the opposite of everything that goes as common knowledge. The aerodynamics on that generation of outback were good enough that they didn't seriously hurt the efficiency as the speed went up. I would hope that the next generation of outback didn't take a big hit in that area. The extra weight of the next gen outback is offset by the higher power and torque of the phase 2 2.5l. So there's no reason it shouldn't be able to move the car along just fine at the same engine RPM's. Which we know it does with the 4eat trans cars because they have the same ratios as the earlier ones. The 5mt's though have a 3.57 total reduction instead of the identical automatic with a 3.06. Same tire size, same weight, same aero, different top gear running speed. The only conclusion is that they knew the auto would downshift as needed and that the manual wouldn't because the drivers are too lazy. I've got a busted WRX transmission in the shed. 2nd gear is smoked, we used the center diff and rear transfer gears on another transmission, so the .74 5th gears are sitting there staring at me. I'm going to swap them into my mom's new 2003 Outback because the engine is screaming on the highway. With those gears, it drops the total gear reduction down to 3.04 just like the legacy L had. Hopefully that will reduce the engine noise on the highway and bump up the MPG's a bit.

I did horrible things to EA82's when I had them, and I can say that high RPM's will not kill them. Even 150k mile plus EA82's will still rev to 8,200 before valve float limits them. They'll only do 7k after bending 3 rods hydrolocking it. There's no point to rev them much over 6k because the cams, heads and intake have run out of breath by then. But going to 6k when accelerating hard is good, especially since it's an underpowered car compared to everything else out on the road today.

Except for the newer Toyota 4x4 owners who enjoy a traction control system designed to actually work offroad instead of just in a snowy parking lot. Go look at some videos of A-TRAC in action and tell me it doesn't work or is a waste of time.

92 was still a cable driven speedo, the VSS mounted in the transmission didn't come out until 95. Pre-95 the vss was a reed switch in the speedometer head that was opened and closed by a spinning magnet in the speedometer. The sensor is part of the instrument cluster. If the speedo doesn't work, but the odometer still does, the cable is still good and the problem is in the speedo head. If neither work, you need to check the cable. It can break, the square ends can round off, and it can be pulled loose from the back of the instrument cluster. That's the first thing to check, especially if you've been digging under the dash recently. If you unthread the the speedo cable from the transmission (front diff housing actually on an auto) you can check that the spade end is still on the cable. Then use a small flathead screwdriver and gently try turning the shaft down in the well the cable threads into. If it turns freely, the plastic gear is stripped. It requires extensive dissasembly to replace. But chances are it's fine and your cable is either unhooked or broken.

Alcohol is the only approved brake system cleaner. "Brake clean" is a degreaser for drums and rotors, and not meant to be inside the braking system.

The 2nd gen legacy's with FWD only came with traction control. It uses a modified ABS unit to actuate the front brakes as well as providing the normal ABS functions to all 4 wheels. The 3rd gen VDC cars use brake force distribution to control handling as well as traction control. That's why the came with open rear diffs while the non-VDC cars came with the viscous limited slip rears. Toyota's A-trac system that you were thinking of provides traction control to all 4 wheels and can do it without reducing engine power. Most traction control systems also incorporate engine power reduction to stop the slippage, to the point that the wheels won't even spin on ice. The assumption is that the driver is clueless and standing on the throttle, so it's better for the car to not move at all than to spin madly and go nowhere. It works great for the majority of the driving public because they are clueless. There are plenty of ABS pumps out there in junkyards capable of doing what you want. Plumbing them in is pretty straightforward too. The problem is the computer and program you need to run the system. Cars/suv's with stability control use the rear brakes independently as cutting brakes to steer the car if the driver does a sudden swerve. It puts drag on the inside wheel to help pull the car back straight. All the safety and restraint systems are designed to work in a frontal collision, so it's better to keep the car going straight than letting it slide sideways into something or roll over. If a car has traction control, it has 2 channel brake force distribution. If it has stability control, that's usually 4 channel brake force distribution. The only difference between that and A-trac is the programming. The two handbrakes works, but it's doing the job manually when the hardware exists to do it automatically.