WoodsWagon

You don't need to overhaul the transmission or even remove it from the car to replace the center diff. You take out the rear driveshaft, the shift coupler, and unbolt the rear cover of the transmission. Pull that off and the center diff and transfer gears come out with it. It's an evening job if you have a pit or a lift, a weekend job if you're on your back in the driveway.

When you cleaned the throttle body, did you take apart the idle air control valve and clean the pintle and the inside of the port it goes into?

Honestly it's a waste of time. I had a 68 VW type 3 that was fuel injected but still had a points ignition system. There were just as many sensors, switches, and wires on that engine as any other fully electronic one. Either use a carb and disty or go for the full ECU control.

Who's is this?

I'd be more suspicious of worn out shifter bushings than the reverse checker spring being broken. With the shifter in 3rd, can you wiggle it side to side the width of the face of the radio? My dad's legacy had gotten that bad before I put new bushings in the shifter linkage. It was a pain fishing for gears while driving it.

Drill it out or grind the head off, you probably broke the spot welds that hold the captured nut to the bumper so the nut is just spinning.

If that's his quote, then his "maximum boost" book has probably set water/meth back decades. It works, and it works well. Sure it's a crutch, but when you're dumping lots of boost into an engine not designed for it (high compression ratio) it does a great job. Dumping fuel in and retarding timing as you increase the boost is just as bad of a crutch. It also makes your fuel economy go down the drain. It's a heck of a crutch that lets you put 12.5psi into a 9.6:1 comp ratio engine from a severely overspun roots supercharger with no intercooler. Oh, and no tune or larger injectors. A crutch that continues to hold a highly abused engine together after 30k miles like that, including towing heavy loads cross country. Don't knock it until you've used it, water/meth works miracles.

Do the radiator fans come on when you turn the a/c on with it running? Check to make sure both are spinning.

Make sure the 1" diameter hose between the idle air control and the plastic intake pipe is connected. Make sure there aren't any other big leaks between the MAF sensor and the throttle body. If everything is good, try unplugging the MAF and starting it.

There are clutched roots type superchargers. Mercedes and Toyota both used them. Most belt driven superchargers have a bypass valve so under light load they aren't compressing any air. The toyota clutched one had an electric bypass valve. When the supercharger was off, the bypass was open. I have one out of a Previa. Fast, cheap and reliable are possible. The key is water/meth injection. It eliminates the detonation and superheated intake air temps for $2 a gallon. The systems are cheap to set up compared to most engine management solutions. An electric supercharger could be very straightforward. Supercharger turns on, bypass valve shuts, water/meth injection starts. Have it trigger by a throttle switch at WOT.

Do you need the AWD down in Florida? Seems like it would just reduce your gas mileage for no benefit. I'd fix yours rather than picking up another.

If the forester has chains on it's tires or sharp metal chock blocks in front of the front tires it can hold fast on the road while the winch pulls the other car out of the ditch. You need some sort of chock or traction aid to keep the winching car from sliding toward the stuck one. Like this: I pulled a full size pickup truck loaded with dog kennels up an embankment and back onto the trail in deep snow with the winch on my station wagon. It was a 9,000lb pull electric winch and it was struggling. The way I did it was by putting the car in FWD and spinning the front tires so it would bury the front end in the snow. I'd then winch from that point until I was out of cable, then put it in 4wd and pop back out of the holes to move to the next winching point. He kept sinking his truck even when it was back on the trail because he would give it too much gas, so I'd have to do more winching. He was grateful for my help, even if it was embarrassing to have a little station wagon literally running circles around his truck in the snow.

I don't buy that. That may be true for the volume of air being moved to build boost on a big block v8, but not on smaller engines. I'm putting 12.5psi into a 3.4l engine with a 4 rib accessory belt that's also turning the alternator and fan. I don't think 120hp is going through that belt.

You need to press the outer race out of the hub, you'll see what needs to come out when you have the new bearings in hand. If you don't have a bearing splitter and a press for getting the inner race off the hub flange, you can cut most of the way through it at a diagnonal with a cutoff wheel. Then use a cold chisel with a rag around it to keep shrapnel from going into your hand and give it a hard whack in the cut. The bearing race, being hardened steel, is brittle and it will crack. Once it's cracked, it will slide off the hub by hand. The key is careful control of the cutoff wheel. Don't nick the sealing surface or gouge the hub.

Those wimpy springs take the full power of the engine all the time, it's a cush drive to help keep engine crankshaft vibrations out of the transmission. The crankshaft speeds up as each cylinder fires and slows down before the next one. The crank sensor is watching that speed variation and that's how it detects missfires. That constant surging would put more wear on the gears, so the springs in the clutch hub help even it out. They, like anything else, wear out over time. There's two things that would hasten their demise; clutch dumps so they bottom out fully compressed, or lugging the engine so the power pulses are really working the springs back and forth.

It's a springloaded ratcheting mechanism that gets wedged together when under load and locks both axles together. When not under load, it lets one axle ratchet faster than the carrier to go around turns. There are torsen-style LSD's sold for the front diff, like OBX on the cheap end and quaife on the high end.

My lifted EA82 always did that, and it got much worse with the EJ22 in it. Toe didn't change it, it has something to do with the suspension geometry, but I figured it was just because of the lift.

There is no ringing sound in the video. The higher pitched noise is a squeek/chirp from the dry bearing on the crank. Once enough bearing is gone, the oil runs out of the bearing and you get bare metal on metal. I can take pictures of what the bearings in this car probably look like, I saved the worst ones out of a WRX that made the exact same noise. It had light rod knock for months before finally spinning the rod bearings, yes plural the engine was done. He drove it 10 miles after the bearings spun before stopping because it was loosing power.

There are loads of cast iron block, aluminum head engines of all different designs out there and most don't have headgasket or head cracking issues. The gasket is designed to allow the different rates of expansion without leaking. Back to the origional question; if the engine was run with a gutted thermostat for a while, the oil never got up to boiling temp because the whole engine never warmed up. You get condensation inside the engine because one of the byproducts of combustion is water. When the engine did get hot enough, it boiled out the water in the oil leading to the mayo on the inside of the filler cap and the steam vapors coming up. The temp gauge in an RX also reads wrong if used with an EJ temp sender, 1/4 on the gauge is normal temp for the engine, middle of the gauge is overheating. I have buried the temp gauge in the red zone with an EJ sender and EA gauge, the engine was down on power and boiling in the overflow bottle, but had no issues after it cooled down. That was a 200k plus mile engine too that had never been apart.

There's a rubber access plug into the top of the bellhousing kind of under and behind the intake manifold. Pull that out and see if the noise is much louder from inside the bellhousing. I got a free 2.2l once because of a flexplate. I said it was probably the flexplate, owner was sure the engine was done, when the shop pulled it out, the flexplate was cracked. They put the new engine in and I got the old "bad" one. The squeeking/chirping and steady whack whack point more towards a rod bearing being spun though. Sounds exactly like my friends WRX once the rod bearings finally let go.

It could also be a sticky idle air control valve. Does it only stall when you have your foot off the throttle, or does it die when you're still giving it gas? If it only dies when you have your foot off the throttle then the IAC is the most likely issue. It has to let air in to keep the engine running after the throttle has closed and if it's gunked up it can stick and not work.

Use your scan tool to watch the TPS reading with the engine not running. You need to adjust the TPS so that it's zero'd with the throttle closed, and make sure it sweeps consistently up towards 100% as you open the throttle. You may have a broken wire between the TPS and the ECU. If the ECU doesn't see the throttle opening but the idle suddenly runs up, it assumes the IAC is acting up.

My 3at could burn a tire through first and second... against a tree. Here's a video of one of the tires we burned off it: The gas can in the spare tire shelf was the fuel tank, everything had rotted out underneath. There wasn't much salvageable on that car due to rust, but we had some fun with it before junking.

You reverse engineered a patented design. I think that's going to be a bit difficult to claim as your own idea and patent, seeing as how you copied it. You may also draw the attention of the companies that do hold valid patents on the design by trying and they'll nail you for patent infringement. No one is going to copy you, the market for a r160 locker is tiny. If it was a market worth tapping into, the companies that already manufacture the lockers would have. Here's a guy who tried asking them to do just that: http://www.ausubaru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19545

You reverse engineered a patented design. I think that's going to be a bit difficult to claim as your own idea and patent, seeing as how you copied it. You may also draw the attention of the companies that do hold valid patents on the design by trying and they'll nail you for patent infringement. No one is going to copy you, the market for a r160 locker is tiny. If it was a market worth tapping into, the companies that already manufacture the lockers would have. Here's a guy who tried asking them to do just that: http://www.ausubaru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19545 Edit: Here's one patent you violated for the double hole into the pin well design: http://patents.justia.com/1995/05413015.html I found that because it was referenced in a suit between Powertrax and TracTech. Tread carefully.