WoodsWagon

Not true. The bearing could lock up and put the car into a skid, but even with no bearing in there the wheel can not come off. The CV joint is too big to fit through the hub, and the hub flange is held tight to the axle with the castle nut. Bearings will rumble for quite a while before it gets bad. Make sure it is actually the bearing, and not cupped tire wear due to wheel imbalance and poor alignment. When you're up to the level of "a helicopter type noise" it's time to get it fixed.

Noah, there often isn't an actual engine problem to cause the vibration. The stackup of tolerances in a worn or shoddily rebuilt axle let the power pulses of the engine vibrate the car, and replacing the axles can often make the issue go away. The real problem is that the torque converter stall speed was designed too low, so the hydraulic coupling at idle speeds is too strong. If a higher stall torque converter was used, it's connection at idle speeds would be much "looser" and the power pulses wouldn't be transmitted through. The brakes are not the problem, the mounts are not the problem, and nothing is really "broken". The vibration is a mild annoyance, and clicking it into neutral when sitting stopped will make it go away. You can push the shifter into neutral without depressing the thumb button so there's no risk of going into reverse on accident. My mom's been doing that for years with her Outback. It's a "design feature" of the too-tight converter. Not an actually problem or failure per say. Buicks, Olds, and Cadillacs of the mid 60's had "switch pitch" torque converters, that had a variable stator blade angle. It would switch between a high stall and a low stall torque converter. They switched into high stall when the throttle was closed in the idle postion to uncouple the engine from the drivetrain, to eliminate this exact vibration problem. The converter was then switched to low stall as soon as throttle was applied to keep the engine RPM's low and the fuel economy better. If you planted the throttle wide open, it would switch back to high stall to get the engine up in it's peak torque rpm range.

Corrosion is only an issue if the car is kept moist for an extended period, like in a salvage yard in the hot sun of the South after a flood. The water just keeps percolating inside and wreaks havoc. Or if it went under salt water. A dip in a lake is pretty harmless if you get it dried out, and the electronics are unlikely to be harmed, the actual circuit boards are sealed with a thin resin coat after they're done soldering components to them. Most of the interior will be OK too if you dry it out, the door panels are plastic, so they don't warp like the old paperboard ones. The seats are foam, so they dry out and are fine. The only concern is the insulation under the carpets, but it's easy to pull that out. Time is of the essense though, the longer you let it sit before drying the more chance it has to cause damage. My main concern would be getting any water out of the engine before the cylinders begin to rust. Change the rear diff and transmission oils, the breathers will suck in water as the tranny case cools once it's submerged.

You can't really run lower than the stock wastegate spring pressure, unless you add on a spring pulling the wastegate open. I've done that for pulling the wastegate shut, the amount of preload you put on your axillary spring sets the boost pressure. Poor mans boost controller, but it works well. Just run stock boost and a meth/water injection system. You're trying to get more power by going to the higher comp pistons, right?

Buy it back, quite honestly if you shut it down before it went under, change the fluids and it will probably be fine. Lake water is clean, so it's not like a normal flood car where the water is full of fine silt. I had a friend sink his WRX in a mudhole a month ago, the water was 5" above the floor, so the computer went under and the seats soaked up a lot of water. It stopped running and threw a lot of codes from being submerged, we were trying to get it out and the intake was still above water and it shut down on it's own. After washing the computer off in a brook and drying it out on the dash of my truck, it fired right up. The most important steps after a sinking is to get all the insulation out of the interior. Put the seats and carpet to dry in the house, and tear all of the insulation off the carpet and what's glued to the floors. It will hold moisture and start mold. Then run the car with the heat on high and max a/c. That should suck the moisture out of the interior. Using compressed air to blow out the connectors cant hurt.

Try pinching off that pinky sized hose that goes to the thermostat housing and back. That looks to be a cold engine air bypass. If that valve isn't closing it could lead to the high idle. If there's an air pocket still trapped in the cooling system, that could make the valve not close. This is just from me looking at my EA82t. Don't wongleflute with idle speed adjustment screws, they're throttle plate stop settings, not idle adjustments. Once dicked with, they're a pita to get back to spec.

Just as a warning to others, if you crank too hard on the bolts when pulling the drum off you can split the drum. You may be replacing it anyway, but a word of caution on going too hard on the bolts.

Yeah, tried that a couple weeks ago. Fluid and trans-x haven't had an effect. Forward gears have been working fine and reverse has been gone for a month. Happened suddenly too, he was out in the middle of the woods on a trial and went to turn around when he found reverse was gone.

Hoses. Brake Hoses. not lines. Stainless lines are a pita to get to seal at the flare fittings, as well has hard to flare in the first place. Stainless braided hoses are a different thing entirely and easy to work with.

Have the same problem with a 94 turbo wagon. I'd rather make reverse work again than swap a 5spd in. It works for the first backup of the morning, then nothing for the rest of the day. All forward gears work fine.

Unless I'm missing something, the car is running well right now? So with a little work (hoses, all of them) it could be kept that way, no? I wouldn't be all doom and gloom when it isn't broken yet. You don't need a bigger radiator, you need a better coolant temp gauge. If it's getting hot, back off on the throttle.

The automatic awd tanny is designed to be FWD. The transfer clutch is just tacked on to the end of the front pinion shaft as an add on. If you leave the fuse in all the time, it won't blow the tranny up, however it can cook the duty C solenoid, which is already broken in this case, and it defaults back to 4wd. If you remove the rear driveline, you don't need to put the fuse in because it no longer matters if the clutchpack is locked up or not, it's not connected to anything. If you don't have the time/money to fix a failed duty C solenoid, pulling the rear half of the driveshaft is a viable option and better than driving around with binding 4wd.

That's the most logical choice. The EJ drivetrain in an EA81 body makes for a much better power/weight ratio and the AWD works well. You can run a limited slip rear differential if you switch to EA82 axles in the rear, and by mixing and matching cv's and inner stub axles you can run newer VLSD's from 2000+ winter package legacys and WRX"s.

AWD doesn't weigh 500lbs. Rear diff is probably 80lbs, the axles 30lbs, extra crossmember 20lbs, driveshaft 20lbs, transfer housing and guts 50lbs. So 200lbs for the whole rear drivetrain vs. being FWD only. You could easily pop apart the outer CV's on the rear axles and leave them in the hubs, pull the diff, differential front crossmember, and driveshafts out and make it a FWD subaru. That's what subaru offered until 95 or 96 anyway.

Well then you should have recommended putting an Allison in, It would be just as ridiculous of a suggestion. Going with an EJ AWD 5mt eliminates the need for an adapter plate and redrilled flywheel, so those savings make up for the additional work setting up axles, shifter, crossmembers, and driveshaft. You would need to do that work anyway swapping any transmission into an EA81 body. The full-time 4wd trannys are kind of limited, the traction sucks for hard acceleration while cornering, so you have to lock the center diff, at which point you might as well have used the 2wd/4wd tranny. The VLSD in the center diff of the EJ tranny makes a nice compromise.

Sounds a lot like the ignition switch is overheating and opening the connection. You could chase it down by doing voltage drop tests with the circuit in the crank postion and seeing where the connection is lost. The circuit has to be loaded to show a failure, so voltage drop testing is the only way of definitively tracking it down. Test jumper wires straight to the spade terminal on the starter soleniod, that will let you isolate the high current vs the control circuit (battery cables vs ignition switch/wires). The 6 pin plug between the dash wiring and the ignition switch at the base of the column can burn up sometimes too, so that would be a good place to check.

My personal experience with the 82t has been less than favorable. I've got an 86, and the computer will work for the first couple times you start the car, then glitch into a default mode while running so it holds the injectors on at about a 50% duty cycle. That dumped enough fuel in to fuel wash the cylinders, and the varnish from the massive coat of fuel and the thinned oil caused the lifters to collapse and the valve to hang open so a bunch of rockers fell out. I put them back in with a prybar and sufficiant swearing. If you wait a month with the battery dissconnected, the computer will "heal" and it will start and run again. I checked all the capacitors in the ECU figuring one was shorting and then the insulation was healing when it was discharged, but all seemed ok. So the next logical source of an intermittant but repeatable failure would be the flash rom. They can get unstable over time. I will stay away from them, the EJ's I've swapped into my other cars are a lot more fun. However, don't discount my water/meth injection advise just because I don't like the engine. You cant use injectors because the water/meth mix will corrode the pintle and coil. So no PWM using a spfi throttle body. You don't want to use a boost pressurized tank because there isn't enough pressure for atomization and you will be spraying water droplets into turbine impellers moving at near-sonic speeds, which will erode the impeller. You can use PWM to control a high-pressure pesticide sprayer pump, going through a proper jet on the charge pipe leading to the throttle body, or port jets in the manifold runners. This is how the real kits like Snow performance and Devil's Own do it. With real nozzles in a high pressure system you need to have good filtration to keep them from clogging. You need check valves to keep the lines full and the jets from dribbling. You need failsafes to let you know when the resevoir is low, the pump isn't working, ect. All I have is the stock low washer fluid light on the dash, and that lets me know I have one WOT run to 100 left in the tank. Water/meth injection is easily doable on an affordable budget. Do some research on how to home-build a high pressure system, hit up Grangers for a pump and jets and get testing. It's suprising the difference it can make, and it's way better than cooling the combustion by overfueling and running rich ratios or retarding the timing to avoid detonation. When I'm beating the snot out of my truck, or towing, I use about 1.5 gallons of washer fluid to a 16 gallon tankful. If I'm driving nice, .5 gallons a tankful. At $2 a gallon for washer fluid, it adds $0.15 a gallon average to my price of fuel. We got raped at the pump for that much more just in the last week.

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but I'm a big believer in water/meth injection. I have a toyota tacoma with the 3.4l v6 that I put a trd roots style supercharger on. It's a 9.6:1 compression ratio engine, and I'm running an undersized pully on the supercharger so it's putting 8.5psi into the engine. That's a really hot 8.5psi from the supercharger going into a high compression engine, with no tuning, no injectors, no pump, nothing. I got an extra windshield washer resevoir from a T100 in the junkyard and mounted that up on the fender. I rewired and plumbed that resevoir to work with the wiper switch, and the stock down-in-the-quarter panel resevoir is now grounded by an adjustable pressure switch. I put a spray nozzle from an 06 Civic (which is a mist rather than a jet) in the intake tube before the throttle body. When the pressure in the manifold goes over the threshold set on the pressure switch, the pump kicks on and starts spraying in intake. That mist gets drawn through and mixed by the supercharger rotors, and is likely vaporized before it gets to the combustion chamber by the heat in the air from the supercharger. The latent heat of evaporation of the water cools the intake charge and the methanol adds to the fuel. I use plain blue winter washer fluid, which is 30% meth 70% water. 2 years of abusive driving, towing trailers, roasting multiple sets of tires off the back and the motor is sitll holiding up fine. There are limitations to my setup, when driving I have to use less than half throttle, or go all the way to WOT. Around 3/4 throttle there's an area that will have enough boost to detonate, but not enough to kick the pump on. If I adjust the pump to come on sooner, it will spray below half throttle and choke the engine. So I just adjust my driving habits to fit it. There are much better meth injection systems out there, and homebuilt versions for around $300. Mine cost me $45, and I'm willing to put up with it. You may see great results from using a high pressure system in the charge pipe after the turbo. Using a low pressure system like mine before the turbo will likely lead to water droplet damage to the turbo impeller blades. Look into a homebuilt system using a pesticide sprayer pump and nozzles. It may be the key to keeping these POS motors together.

Multi-layer steel headgaskets are meant to go on dry, the copper spray may have made the problem worse. I'd pull it back out and do the job right with the Subaru gaskets.

The trailing arms are the same imp/leg/for/outback, it's the mounts that are longer. Easy to swap in, and gives you a little more clearance for tires at the back door.

You don't run a lifted subaru for the sports-car like handling... though if you have a lack of fear you can push them pretty hard. Once the suspension is settled over on the bumpstops they corner pretty well. The transition from full right lean to full left lean can be gut-wrenching for the un-initiated passengers.

The brake lines, fuel lines, and wiring harness all run exposed there when the seat bottom is up. There's a sticky back foam layer slapped over them but that's not protection. If you start chucking heavy objects there you run the risk of bending or kinking or severing one of those lines/wires. That's why that area is "delicate". If you remove the seat bottom and back and put a piece of plywood with spacers there, it would be fine. It's not a structurally delicate area, it's the lines and wires running across and through that make it delicate. You can overload the crap out of these cars and it doesn't hurt anything but the handling. I've had a fully dressed and filled with frozen water chevy 350 in the back of my wagon with 3 passengers and me driving, in the woods. It took all of us to hoist that motor into the back when we were doing some lunchtime trail cleanup.

You don't need to piggy back them, I've seen an 02wrx with no cat running just one on the rear sensor. You could pull the piggy backed one, drill it, and throw it on the other bank.

What year is your car? If it's a 95-99 legacy, there's different cupholders depending on the trim and year, one cupholder comes straight out and then offsets to the right, and has 2 same size holes. the other comes out at a diagonal, has one big hole with a spring loaded tab in it, and a small hole. The cupholders are interchangeable.

The alt is on it's way out, those are the classic symptoms. Replace it before it either dies and leaves you stranded, or starts overcharging and takes the battery with it.