WoodsWagon

Check for rust in the rear strut towers, reach up in the wheel well and feel the vertical flat surface on the outer side of the strut tower. Lots and lots of them are crumbling, and that lets the salt water in to destroy the quarter panels and frame channels back there.

Compressors are cheap, $30 should get a reasonable one. Cut the cigarette lighter plug off and solder on alligator clamps to hook direct to the battery. A can of spray paint works good for reseating the bead of a tire. Don't use ether, it can get out of hand quickly.

What are you towing it with? I'd be leary of towing it with anything lighter than a ranger/tacoma/s10 or similar sized vehicle. The GL10 wagon I towed 2k miles home pushed my tacoma around a lot during braking and turning.

well they're one of 1100 donchaknow. Says so on the Internet. Ya, real rare like. Adds to the value. Closed deck block with oil squirters too, so it's ready to make real power. The hype around them makes people overpay. They're good cars, but like you said, the power won't blow you away. Even at 10psi, they're good, but not great. No intercooler, small turbo, small heads, it all conspires to limit the power. That's all fixable of course, but that takes money and time.

I've also heard of greasing the threads of a bolt, filling the hole with JB and running the bolt in. When it hardens, tighten the bolt.

If the CV joints start to bind, this is exactly what happens. Many replacement axles are junk, I've had better luck grabbing original axles out of the junkyard than I have with ones from the parts store.

EA82 lower control arms?

It's the Northeast, these cars disappeared in a puff of rust 15 years ago. I'm lucky to find parts in the junkyard, let alone get them to come apart. The salt welds everything together. First gen Legacy's are getting hard to find in the yards. What he's hitting is the shoulder of the CV cup. I've done lots of that in hope it would come apart, and cracked a cup doing that before. I was using a 5lb sledge though.

A glasspack in the middle where the resonator was and a flowmaster 40 series on the back with 2 1/4 pipe from the front back sounds great with the stock headers. The cherry bomb glasspack was too loud on it's own, the flowmaster was worse, the two combined are perfect. Nice burble at idle, and sounds great opened up without an annoying drone during cruise.

98 is a solid year to order them for, make sure legacy outback, not outback sport. Rears often have too long of an unthreaded shank where the strut goes through the tophat. The nut will run out of threads before it clamps the strut on the tophat, leading to a clunking noise in the rear. So you take a couple washers and grind them down so they fit in the hole in the top hat under the nut, and zip the nut back on. Front's bolt right in. If you undo the clips that hold the brake hose into the strut, then you can pull the fitting out of the bracket so that just the rubber hose is going through it, then use a pair of side cutters to cut the flat end of the bracket. Fold the two tabs back, and slide the hose out. That way you don't have to open the brake system or do any bleeding. Cut the new struts the same way, put the hose in, bend the tabs back flat, and put the clip back on. If you have rear drum brakes, you're out of luck because it's a solid line that runs through the strut. Just pray that you can get it and the bleeder loose on the wheel cylinder. It's much easier to install them if you take the swaybar link bolts out first, then put the back on once the weight is sitting back on the wheels. Set the camber bolts in the front to shift the knuckles as far in at the top as possible. You'll see what I mean when you spin the camber bolt around. You want the knuckles to look like this / \ when looking from the front, not like \ /, gross exaggeration of the angle of course.

I've taken off the boot clamp, pulled the boot back and popped out the wire ring that keeps the joint together, and then dropped the diff off the axle. Once you have the diff off the car, but still with both CV cups attached to it, you can use a chisel or sharp punch to open up a hole or pop out the steel plug in the bottom of the CV cup. That let's you get to the E-10 torx bolt that holds the axle stub into the diff. Then take the cup and stub over to the vice, pop the roll pin out if you didn't earlier, and set the vice up to support the cup with the stub dangling between the jaws. Heat the CV cup up where it goes around the stub with a oxy-acetylene torch, and use a drift punch on the bolt head in the stub shaft to pop it out. Put some rags underneath to catch the stub when it pops loose. Coat the splines with anti-seize when you put it back together.

The axle splines were spinning in the hub, so you need a new axle and a new hub to fix it. The nut kept loosening up because it's not meant to transmit the turning force of the axle to the wheel, it's just meant to keep everything clamped together. When the splines stip, the axle starts spinning in the hub. You tightened the nut until it was binding enough to keep working for a bit but it was doomed to fail.

Yeah, this is incorrect information. You need the EGR valve, Intake manifold, solenoid, hoses, pressure transducer+ bracket and the stainless pipe, then mabey you can drill the head and tap it for the pipe. At that point, you might as well have put head gaskets in the 2.5 you're taking out.

So how well does the OBX work in the mud?

Cable unthreads, there's a washer with a rubber cushion on it that you pull out, and the VSS threads right in. The seal I'm dealing with is buried down in the hole with the shaft sticking up through it. It sucks and if I had to deal with it again I would have just stuffed rags under the dash and told him to change them every once in a while.

We got the plug out finally, so it's got all 4 done and new wires all round. We tried everything to get the seal out, I made all sorts of hooks, barbs, sleeves, nothing worked. So we punched the seal down to the bottom of the bore. That blocks the drain hole, but who knows it may not be a problem. Then we tried putting the new seal in, and I got it backwards in my head as to which direction it's supposed to go in. Well, we figured out I was wrong by looking at the other transmission before pushing it too far in, but then trashed it hooking it back out. Remember that bit about it being a clusterfudge? Yeah. So another seal is on order, we put the VSS back in because it works as a handy plug, and he drove it back out to the seacoast. I've grafted an electric spedometer from a forester into an early legacy dash, and I'm working on getting it wired into the cluster. That way we'll avoid the whole cable issue and use the VSS that's being used as a plug now anyways. The cluster doesn't look half bad actually. When he comes back out this way next weekend, we'll press the new seal in, see if that works, and when it doesn't, put the VSS and converted cluster in.

I replaced a lot of wheel bearings in my car, but most of them were probably due to water/mud getting in to them. Even the sealed bearings with the stock seals as well would get killed off in about a year. Front and rear bearings, about every 6 months I'd be doing one end or the other.

http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=94187 http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=92816 http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=82105 http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=76509 http://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/showthread.php?t=75237 Last one even has a picture of the connectors.

55psi is not the recommended psi, it's the maximum for full load, which for a LT would be around 2k lbs per tire. Your whole car probably weighs around 2,800lbs, so around 700lbs per tire. You should probably be running less pressure than you are to start with. The bigger the tire, the lower the air pressure to get the tread to lie flat on the road with the same weight. 30psi or less would probably work better for street driving, you need to check how the tread contacts by marking the tread and driving it on pavement for a few feet.

Why didn't she pull the handbrake?

The offset on those rims is going to kill your wheel bearings. I'd get some wheel spacers made and flip them around the other direction. I used to run some 6 lug wheels that stuck out that far, they rubbed on the body more when turning than the 6 lug mitsubishi wheels that had the right offset do. The rims off a 80's mitsubishi mighty-max or dodge d-50 (same truck) have the perfect offset. I was running 235/75r15's and they cleared the spring seats just fine but tucked the wheels in as far as you can.

The airbox on the throttle body doesn't always have a filter in it. That was where the speed density fuel injection had it's filter. The MAF fuel injection system had the filter on the fender like normal. I'm pretty sure I've opened up some of them and not found filters in there.

You have to re-center the steering rack by adjusting the tie rods equally on both sides. To do it right, it needs to be on an alignment rack as you do it. How far off is the wheel? Do you think anyone had the wheel off in the past, and didn't put it back on in the right spot?

Spray some penetrating oil on the set of u-joints linking the steering column and the rack. It's above the driver side axle, below the starter motor if looking from the top. When the joints seize up, the steering is stiff, then normal then stiff again as you spin the steering wheel around.

I figured they'd just wear out quick, but they didn't stop worth a damn. I installed them in the "Alternative Brews" parking lot in Buffalo NY while on a cross country trip so I was a bit limited in my choices. The pad material on the original pads separated from the backing plate and spat out coming up to the toll booths there. Didn't give me much time to shop around for new pads.