WoodsWagon

Use all the spacer blocks and bolts from a 96-99 legacy Outback. You'll also need the lower control arm mounts, the steering coupler between the rack and the column, and some other parts, but that should do most of that. Then make lift blocks the same height as the factory ones for the top of the struts.

First off, you won't get much if any lift putting forester struts on an Outback. They are about the same length as the outback ones are to start with. I know 215/70r16's fit with minor rubbing on the shelf of the rocker panel in the rear wheel wells with outback struts. A couple taps with a hammer gives them the clearance they need. 215/75r15's should be about the same size. With an outback, what you want to do is put lift blocks between the tops of the struts and the body. Measure the factory lift blocks between the crossmembers and the body, and make ones equal length for the struts. This reproduces the suspension angles of having Outback struts on a Legacy, which is known to work well and not cause any long term issues.

Yes, they exist. They thread in to the block on the underside where the coolant drain plugs are. They take a 14mm allen key socket and a lot of force to pop loose. I take a long sturdy punch and a 3lb hand sledge and whack the plug around it's face a few times before trying to loosen it using an extension and a breaker bar. By whacking it it tends to loosen up the corrosion on the threads and crush the aluminum sealing washer a bit. Once the old coolant plug is out, the block heater threads in, and you run the wire where it will be out of the way of hot exhaust and spinning belts and zip-tie it into place.

I've driven cars in much worse shape longer distances. Non of the problems listed in your inspection are a safety concern. Check and top off the fluid levels before you hit the road each morning, and you should be fine.

If you asked for a full inspection, you pretty much asked them to up-sell you as much work as they could find on the car. If you're asking for all the up-sells they can offer, you obviously have a fat wallet to feed them with, at least from their perspective. The oil leaks can be done one at a time. The oil cooler seal you can actually do without draining the oil or the coolant. Take the filter off, use a 24mm (I think) socket to take the hollow stud out of the middle of it, pull the oil cooler down a bit and swap out the O rings. Should be under $50 including parts to do that job. The leaking headgaskets can probably be ignored for a long time. They're often wet with weeping oil, but not like it's dribbling out. How often do you have to add oil to keep the level on the dipstick up? Valve cover gaskets can be done with the engine in car, and are pretty easy to do the the SOHC phase2 EJ's. Use subaru genuine gaskets, I've had terrible luck with the aftermarket ones. Talk to an indepenent shop and see if they're ok with you supplying them with the gaskets. Plug wires and valve cover gaskets are simple jobs that any shop could handle. Do you feel the brake pedal pulsating when you slow down? Does it shake the steering wheel?

How many 89-95 EJ engines have you run across with bad hla's in them? The EA82's were notorious for tapping hla's, but the EJ's work great. I've got 2 95's, one with 175k on it and the other with 300k on it, both run great and quiet.

95 legacy's have vss's instead of a cable. They're actually a great year. Roller rockers with hydraulic lash adjusters in the heads, dual port exhaust, and non-interference. They're also OBD-II compliant so a modern cheap scan tool works with them, but OBD-II exempt from emissions inspection because the monitors reset every time you shut the key off.

Put simply, AWD drivetrain losses. You've got the friction of two ring and pinions, more bearings, more u-joints, and more mass to accelerate. The numbers can also vary wildly on depending on what type of dyno was used. On the dyno that turned out 98hp on the 2.5l, an EA would come in at 50hp.

You could also use an aftermarket cruise control speed sensor pickup to do the same job. They attach to the rear driveshaft. Get the pulses per turn right and the speedo will be accurate again.

No EGR on 89-94 2.2's or on 95-99 manual trans 2.2's. No outbacks before 95 either.

The heated cloth seats are actually really nice. On the high setting they will get toasty enough to be uncomforable if you don't have buns of steel, so they aren't weak. There is no plug for heated seats on legacys. Their wiring is integrated with the full rear wiring harness that plugs in at the passenger kickpanel and spreads out and back from there. Simplest way of doing it is to chop the harness of the donor car on either side of the two seat connectors, leaving the part that goes over the tranny hump and plugs into the switches together. Strip that harness down when you get it home, and isolate it down to the two seat plugs and wires, the switch plugs and wires, a main power, main ground, and the illumination input. I skipped the illumination of the switches. The lights showing that it's on will work, the illumination just lights up the icon at night. I tapped the main power into the cigarette lighter subharness in the dash with a vampire connector and the ground to one of the center console bracket screws. Works great. The main issue with heated seats is people kneeling on them. That will break the heater grid on the seat bottom, so that only the back heater will work, and only on high. The grids are run in series on low, and parallel on high. Check the 3 pin connectors going to the seats with an ohm meter, there should be continuity between all the pins.

It touches it, but there's no load on it. If either of the clips fail, then the throwout bearing starts rattling on the release fork and the snout (quill) of the transmission. The throwout bearing is steel, and the quill is aluminum, so it wears a pretty deep area out of the transmission housing. The clips break first, and they break from fatigue rather than excessive stress. The spring steel work hardens and then shears.

That's actually the exact solution Honda had in a TSB for some of their early v6's. They had porous block castings and would weep oil out. The fix was to clean the block well and butter it with JB.

A BOV dumps air that already was measured by the mass air flow sensor out into the atmosphere instead of into the engine. The computer will inject fuel for air that isn't there, making it run unbelievably rich every time the BOV opens. BOV's are for speed density fuel injected cars, not MAF based ones like subarus are. Run a recirc valve, which is a BOV that dumps back into the inlet to the turbo. They're easy to find on Saab's and Volvo's in the junkyard. It's a black valve with two 1" hoses hooked to it and a vacuum hose hooked to the top.

SPFI will only set codes for electrical failures, so the EGR code is due to the EGR solenoid burning out. You can use a vacuum solenoid from pretty much any other car and splice it in there. I used one from an 80's cadillac, just because it was handy. The 02 sensor code is because the sensor isn't producing voltage. A new sensor should fix that, and universal one wire ones are dirt cheap new. Both the crank angle codes have to do with the distributor. It's the crank and cam sensor. If it's running really rich, the coolant temp sensor may be going, or the 4" of wiring leading to it may be corroded. That's the 2 wire coolant temp sensor, not the one wire one that runs the gauge. TOD will not do anything as far as the computer is concerned. I had one running with 3 bent rods, and no codes. It was down on power, sure, but it ran fine.

To switch a full time 4x4 transmission to 4.11 or 4.44 gears, you have to loose the center diff lock and switch to an EJ style transfer housing and center diff. Just switching to a part time 4x4 transmission should help a lot because you'll jump from 3.7 to 3.9 final drive. The lower low range would help too. You don't loose much going from full time 4x4 to Fwd in normal driving, and in 4x4 it's just like the full time box with the center diff locked. I believe you can take a EA d/r 4x4 box and swap the output shaft, ring, pinion, and transfer housing from an EJ AWD box into it. That would give you the EA bellhousing and low range, with the EJ AWD and final drive gearing. If you use 4.11 gears with a 1.59 low range you need to clearance the ring gear so they don't interfere. Here's a thread of doing the reverse of that, but it shows the parts will interchange pretty easily: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=97653

I've seen a couple with burned contacts at the fuel pump connector. Is there brown marks on any of the plastic surrounding the pins of the fuel pump connector under the access panel in the back?

Yup, you need that cable, the vacuum actuator, the steel vacuum line that goes across the firewall, and the vacuum pump it attaches to on the other side. You need the clutch switch too if it's a manual.

They've done better actually. The 4EAT TCU has been cracked and you can do anything you want to it including paddle shifters: http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=110222 Here's some other info on the same TCU: http://www.alcyone.org.uk/ssm/tcureverse.html

My mom's 98 outback has them, they have metal clamps that sneak behind the window gaskets and clamp to the pinch weld. Her's is the only subaru that generation I've seen them on, and from my searches I'm assuming someone ordered them in special from Japan. They actually work quite well.

It's probably the lifters bleeding down and then pumping back up after the engine runs for a bit. You can try cleaning them by putting a quart of dex/merc ATF in and a new oil filter on and driving for a week, then doing a full oil change. ATF has a lot of detergents in it, so it will help clean out sticky lifters. If it ticked all the time, it would probably be air in the oil from a leaking oil pump gasket (the "mickey mouse" gasket because of it's shape).

Oh really? What do they have then?

Aluminum shavings in a steel cylinder with iron piston rings are unlikely to scratch anything. Last time I did one I put the compressed air nozzle in the throttle body with a rag around it while I drilled it out. With the crank rotated so that the cylinder your drilling is on the intake stroke, the air will rush out through the spark plug hole. You have to be careful not to get chips in your eye, but it works well. I like time-serts better than heilicoils because the time-sert gets locked into the hole by the knurled portion. I've had helicoils peal out of the threads before.

http://www.gordon-glasgow.org/lsdtech.html You also have to take the axle type into consideration. EA's and first gen legacys have female splines on the CV cups that go onto axle stubs sticking out of the diff. Second gen legacys and newer have male splines on the axle that plug into the side of the diff. You can swap CV cups on to different axles to remedy that, but it's hit and miss on what fits. The VLSD's are not very strong to start with, and it takes heat to warm them up and get them to lock up, so you have to spin a wheel for a bit before it really starts acting like a LSD. The clutch type ones are instant, and the harder you launch, the harder the clutches lock the wheels together.

There's two fuel level gauges, one for each sump of the tank. The average of those two readings is what the dash displays. The fuel returning from the fuel pressure regulator gets run through a nozzle in the passenger side sending unit of the tank before it dumps back into the tank. That nozzle creates a low pressure zone that sucks fuel from the auxiliary sender pickup (the pipe you see coming out of the drivers side) and transfers it into the passenger side, keeping the fuel pump submerged until the drivers side of the tank is empty. With the rust you have going on, you'll need to replace all the pipes on the body while you have the tank out. Do the rear brake lines at the same time too. It will be a ************-show of crumbling rust and breaking bolts.