WoodsWagon

Trans swap first. You get the lift and tires, you want to take it out and play. You will stall it all over the place and be disappointed. So if you do the trans first, then the lift and tires, you'll be excited at the capability of the car rather than thinking you've crippled it. Which, with big tires and a single range pushbutton 4x4, you would have. I started with a 4" lift and 30" tires on my 92 loyale. Drove it that way for a while, then swapped a dual range transmission in. Way better, but would still power out on big hillclimbs. So then the EJ22 came into play. Then I had too much wheelspin, so I got a RX rear LSD. Oh, and get wheels with the right offset when you do 6 lug. If you get standard chevy steel wagon wheels, they will stick out too far, cause more rubbing on the body, and go through wheel bearings quick. You want a wheel that tucks the tire as close to the strut as possible. I had great luck with the chromed steel wheels off a Mitsubishi Mighty Max/ Dodge Ram D50 pickup from the early 90's. They looked good, stout as hell, flat surface where I redrilled the rims to 4 lug, and perfect offset. You're going for 6 lug on the hubs, so you can use aluminum rims.

I think a good possibility is that the idle air control solenoid is sticky and needs to be cleaned. It starts well, then when it tries to idle down it drops to <500 rpms, chuggs and stalls. Giving it throttle keeps it running, so I would think it's a lack of air issue. There's a 1" diameter black hose that runs from the air intake tube to a thing next to and below the throttle body. That's the IAC, and it's held on with 4 10mm head bolts. Pulling it off and soaking the valve inside with carb cleaner and gently wiggling the valve back and forth with a pokey object until it's clean and moves freely should fix it. Use a fresh gasket if the old one tore, or lightly smear O2 sensor safe RTV on the surface before you bolt it back down. Spark plug wires, if they were red and had 1989 printed on them, are factory ones. Blue NGK's are good, as are OEM ones from a dealer. 2.2l are not nearly as picky about plug wires as the 2.5l, so don't worry about the BWD or whatever wires you put on. O2 sensor code as soon as you start it means the circuit is open so there's no connection. Either you pulled a wire partway out of the back of the plug when you were taking it apart, or you bent a contact pin when you put the plug together, or the wire got broken/chewed through somewhere further up the harness. 99% of the time, replacing the ECU won't fix a problem. They very rarely fail.

Trans swap is a bolt in affair. When pulling the one out of the donor car, pull the speedo cable out through the firewall and keep it with the trans. Get the trans, the shifter assembly, the shift boot, and console insert. Both shift knobs unthread to let you pull the console peice off. It's a great upgrade, and the 1.59:1 low range reduction helps a lot when you have bigger tires.

A spfi ea82 wagon just like yours will top out at 98mph on 30" mudders, and hold that for hours. So freeway speeds shouldn't be a problem on 27" tires. A loyale has a pushbutton 4x4 trans. They suck, you need a dual range 3.9 final drive ratio 4x4 trans out of a 86-89 GL. The low range is required with bigger tires. Mods list should be this: D/R trans swap Lift @ tires Welded rear diff or RX limited slip Rear disk brakes Engine swap In that order. Complete each step and drive it before you take on the next one.

Buy a Scangauge 2, set it to read instant MPG and velcro it to the dash where it's easy to see. Then use that to modify your driving style to maximize your fuel economy. Or, install a vacuum gauge and keep the needle between 10" hg and 20" as much as you can.

To start with, you have 3 threads on transmission issues going at once, condense that to one. No reverse, slipping in other gears, and you know you ran it low on fluid until it stopped.... that trans is junk. Sorry. You're lucky it moves at all. Oh, and the feeling like it's in drive when it's in neutral? That's the result of the squeeling noise you heard. The clutch packs have stacks of friction disks and steel plates. You got those steel plates so hot they warped, so now it's like a stack of wave washers and friction disks, and it can't really disengage any more. The reason it got so hot is because the hydraulic pump was sucking air from the empty sump. The oil foam it was pumping around can't apply enough pressure to keep the clutchpacks locked, so they slip. Slipping makes heat, heat destroys parts. Don't put any money into that trans, it's trash. Go find one with the right final drive ratio out of a junkyard and throw it in, it will fix all your issues at once. And put fluid in it this time!

That should help keep the mud out of the clutch! Nice work, as always.

I had a front diff let go in my highly abused lifted wagon. It, like the rear diff I smoked before it, gave some pretty loud warning noises before it fully grenaded. Rattly-popping grinding noises that would quiet down under load and get way worse when coasting/engine braking. When the rear diff finally exploded 4 miles from where I initially broke it, the carrier split, the crosspin sheared, and the spiders were annihilated. The front diff, when it let go 20 miles after it started complaining, blew a hole through the transmission case. Chucked it in 4wd and left a gear oil trail of shame back home. Had to rock it back and forth at first to get the spare parts to clear out of the ring and pinion. Check the CV axles before pulling the trans. Slop in the stub axles sticking out of the diff is normal, so don't assume the diff is the culprit if you can wobble the axles around. Check to make sure the inner CV cup turns easily and in synch with the outer CV, there shouldn't be any backlash between the two. If the inner CV is a tripod design, the bearings spit out from inside the 3 rollers or seize and cause all sorts of vibrations.

Yeah, the SVX auto's had them, but you can't use an auto ring and pinion in a manual trans so they're not much use. Unless you're running an auto that is. Could get good gas mileage with a 1.8 running it as a FWD in a stripped imp maybe?

The snout on an auto starter is a different diameter, so it wont fit in a manual transmission.

I ran wheels off a mitusbishi mighty-max/ dodge ram d50 with 235/75r15's on them, and had clearance to the struts on my loyale and the height-adjustable ones off the 86 3-door. Your wheels may be aftermarket ones for that truck, and not the normal dimensions. You need at least a pinky-fingers worth of clearance between the sidewall of the tire and the spring seat or they will rub. I can measure the dimensions on my set if you want. I'm also coming west on I70 soon, so I could potentially bring my set of wheels that are already drilled.

What thickness is the adapter plate? If the plate is too thin, then the flywheel will be too close to the starter. It should be 12-13mm thick. Otherwise, if the starter fits the trans, it should work fine.

The seals are down in a hole deep enough that the valve stem doesn't even stick out of it on the DOHC EJ25's. It's a bucket and shim tappet design, so the springs and seals aren't the most accessible. I'd unhook the whole PCV system and cap each hole in the intake hose and the PCV valve and drive it that way before tearing the engine down. Isolate the intake system from the PCV and see if the oil burning stops. It's much more common for the tube coming vertically out of the block to get clogged with carbon buildup and cause PCV issues than the valve seals to fail.

I think he was being sarcastic. But really, swapping the ring and pinion is not rocket science. There's no custom machine work involved, and you don't have to match ratios on the 1-5 gears because they aren't attached to the pinion shaft like Gloyale had said. Oh, and there's no 3.54 front ring and pinion sets available. The wrx's that had 3.54 rear diffs had 3.9 front diffs, and 1.1:1 rear transfer gear sets, so it was effectively 3.9 all round.

I can't get the photos's to insert, but this one: See the dark shadow right above where the spring is in the picture, towards the left hand side? That hollow where the strut and spring go up into a pocket in the body is where the rust starts. If you were to reach your fingers into that dark shadow and feel the vertical surface of the body there, that's where the crumbling usually is. The brightly lit area above where the spring is in the picture is the arch of the wheel well. The rusted panel is around the corner and up from that surface, into where the strut and spring go.

I had a whole informative post written up, and my laptop bluescreened. It's been doing that a lot lately, "memory parity error, the system has halted, call hardware provider for assistance" So, I'm going to be short and to the point: Noise with clutch; it's the throwout bearing rattling on the snout of the transmission because one of the spring clips holding it to the clutch fork has broken. The fix is to install a TSK-1 sleeve and retrofit throwout bearing kit. This should only be done if the clutch is slipping too, because it's the same amount of work to get in there, and the throwout bearing rattling wont cause problems. I let my dad's car go rattling for years before I fixed it with a clutch job at 180k. So ignore it, it's not hurting anything and no sense spending the money to fix it if the car already has rust issues. Noise in the engine; if it changed with the type of oil, it's probably piston slap. Another non-issue, it be let go to the point where it sounds like a diesel, and other than being embarrassing to drive, it will run fine. My mom's 2.5l was brutally abused before we got it (PO's actually poured gas on the motor and set it on fire to total it instead of doing the headgaskets, we got it from auction) The piston slap has been awful for the last 50k, and it still gets mid 20's mpg. Is the noise worse when you first start it, but then quiets down as it warms up? If yes, probably piston slap. Don't worry about it. Some brands/viscosities of oil muffle it better than others, that's why the noise changed. Synthetic is a waste of money, if you're doing 10k oil changes, maybe it's worth it. It doesn't help the engine any, the oil just lasts longer. I'm headed to WY. Not only am I done with rust, I'm done with people. Loads of nice, dry, open, peace and quiet out there.

On VW transaxles, you can flip the diff to reverse the direction of travel because the pinion is meshed with the ring on the centerline of the axle. The ring and pinion are just bevel gears. On subarus, and most ring and pinion sets, the pinion is meshed offset of the centerline of the axle. You need special hypoid gears to be able to do that, and they only fit one way. There is a guy making reverse cut ring and pinions for subaru AWD transmissions. You use an AWD transmission, use a splined coupler to make it FWD, grind out some casting ribs inside the front diff area of the case, put the reverse ring and pinion in with the diff flipped, use custom axle stubs to go to VAG CV cups, and build mounts for it. It's a lot of work, and spendy. Here's the alternate solution: Use the portal axle gear reduction box's out of an early bus. It would take some fabrication to mate those to the IRS rear control arms and use a CV axle instead of swing arms, but that gets you the reversal of direction, better ground clearance for the subaru oil pan, and gear reduction for bigger tires all in one. For the front diff, use a subaru rear diff, flip it upside down, and install the cover right side up to keep the vent and fill plugs in the right spots. It's not perfect, and you will have to do some figuring on what ratio to run to match the transmission final + the bus portal boxes, and you can use different tire sizes front to rear to make up for small differences. Subaru diffs are available in 3.54, 3.7, 3.9, 4.11 and 4.44. Your 80's GL box is a 3.9 most likely.

Actually the pinion is seperate from any of the 1-5 gears in an AWD trans. In the EA 4x4 trans, the pinion did have gears pressed on it, but not the AWD ones. So it's not that complicated swapping any EJ transmission to any ratio. You have to set up the gear pattern for the ring and pinion, but that's it.

Being its a 2000 phase 2 EJ25, you may want to toss a bottle of subaru "coolant conditioner" in after you finish flushing the cooling system. It seals the headgaskets as they start to leak.

Why not replace the canister purge valve? It's fairly easy to get to under the passenger side rear intake runner. 2 vacuum hoses and one plug.

These can bind, the bearing will stick, so the spring twists as you turn the wheel. That will preload the strut to turn back one way or the other. Usually they'll pop loose every now and then and you'll hear a "bong" type noise from the front. Only other thing is the strut rod bushings, but they usually cause pulling when you accelrate or brake.

215/70r16's will also fit with stock WRX wheels and outback struts.

No, unfortunately the body guy knows his subarus. He may not have explained it properly, but it's a really common problem. The outer wall of the strut towers in the rear rusts through, it wasn't painted or undercoated or seamsealed properly or whatever, but it crumbles from rust. That opens up a 5x6" hole into the area between the quarter panel and the strut tower, letting water and salt spray from the wheels into the inner quarter panel area. That then rusts out the rear corners of the wheel well. If you reach your hand into the wheel well with your palm facing upwards, touch the coil spring with your fingers, go up as far as possible, then curl your hand, you should feel a solid vertical surface. This forms one wall of the box that the strut goes up into. Most likely there's nothing there. Now, the strut is still supported on 3 sides, and the 4th side is still connected to the area under the rear side window, so the load is still spread pretty well. Yes, it's a problem, but I'm not sure how structurally compromised it actually is. All the legacys up to 99 in maine, nh, and mass are probably in the same condidtion, and imprezas up to 01 too and probably beyond. Yet you don't hear of too many collapsing, and there's a lot of them driving around here. My solution is to use bituthane roofing underlayment. You take the wheel off, clean off the area around the hole, and stick sheets of that in there to cover it up. Use a heat gun or hair dryer to get the bituthane warm and flexable, and work it into the surface. Then, spray it all with rubberized undercoating. That should keep more water and salt from getting in there, and the rust hole doesn't seem to spread beyond that panel. There is no good way to fix it, the only way to access it is through the wheel well, and welding up in a box over your head where you can't even fit a face mask is hell, so no ones going to patch it properly. The subframe is a different issue, that's what the suspension and rear diff attach to. They rust out sometimes, but most don't. It's getting them out of the car to remove the gas tank that causes problems. The bolts that hold it in go into captured nuts welded into the body. If the bolts break or strip, it's hell to fix. And after 12 years of salt spray, they're likely to break or strip. It can turn into a nightmare job very quickly with your mechanic switching between sobbing the corner and throwing tools in fits of rage. I'm a mechanic, and I'm moving west because I've had enough of dealing with rusty cars from the salt the state uses here. When you have to routinely use an oxy-acetylene torch to take apart 5 year old cars in a dealership, it's bad. And they base all the book times off of cars they take apart in California, so you get screwed on every job that's rusted together.

Honestly, if you make the mistake of not fully seating the TC and pulling the bellhousing together with the bolts, then you probably shouldn't be digging around inside the transmission. Did the TC spin freely from the flexplate when you went to put the 4 bolts in through the access hole in the bellhousing? If it did, then you probably didn't crush the pump. If it was a pain to get lined up to the holes in the flexplate, there's your problem. Now, you also said that you replaced the TC. Did you add the 6qts or so of ATF that the TC holds? It could be that the transmission sucked the sump dry trying to fill the new empty TC and there wasn't any fluid left to run the hydraulics.

Find a different mechanic. Seriously. Pulling the instrument cluster out of one of these is a 15 minute job. You lower the column to it's lowest positon, put the wiper switch arm all the way down, and pull a few phillips screws. The bezel comes off, you unplug the cruise and rear defrost switches, and slide the bezel out towards the center console. Then take out 4 screws from the cluster, flip it down and unplug the wiring from the back, and slide it out the same way. Then, pry apart the clear plastic front off the cluster, take off the black face plate, and remove the 3 screws from the back that hold the temp gauge in. Put your new one in place, screw it in, and clip it all back together. Installation is the reverse of removal... Working slowly, the whole job could take an hour. I'd like to get paid $1000 for an hours work. You could pull the cluster out of a car in a junkyard to get experience taking it apart, buy the cluster (last one I got was $25), carefully take the temp gauge out of it, and tackle yours. Now, I'm not saying it's your gauge at fault, I'm just saying your mechanic is quoting you outrageous prices for easy jobs. 220 F is a bit high for idling. 195-210 is where they usually sit. But if the fans are cycling on and off on their own with the A/C off then the computer is happy with the temp readings it's getting. If the mechanic got the 220 figure from the OBDII scan tool, then that's what the computer is seeing. Checking that against an infrared thermometer pointed at the cooling crossover pipe wouldn't hurt, or just replacing the ECTS.